Three years later, Gerald Wallace 'still pissed' about being traded to Portland

Boston Celtics forward Gerald Wallace knows about the trade deadline all too well.

In 2011, Wallace was traded from the Charlotte Bobcats to the Portland Trail Blazers right at the deadline. And the exact same thing happened in 2012 when he was sent from the Trail Blazers to the New Jersey Nets.

But it's the trade to Portland that really doesn't seem to sit well with Wallace.

According to Basketball Insiders, the Alabama product had heard rumors of a potential trade to the Trail Blazers, but that on the afternoon of the deadline, Bobcats personnel assured him he wouldn't be moved. Wallace then returned home to some surprising news.

“It was actually kind of crazy for me because of the simple fact that you go through it all day, you hear about the trades, you hear about your name being mentioned in trade talks,” Wallace said. “I actually was talking to my agent on the way to practice. I got to the gym, talked to the coaches and the general manager. Everybody assured me, ‘You’re good. You’re not going to be traded and everything was going to be fine.’ Then I went home after practice that day and took a nap. I woke up out of my nap and the trade deadline was 5 p.m. ET. When I woke up, it was like 4:45, 4:50 and my agent was like, ‘You’re traded to Portland.’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was basically right at the deadline.”

At the time, Wallace was one of the Bobcats' leading scorers with 15.6 points per game. Although Charlotte was 25-32 at the trade deadline, he was optimistic about reaching the playoffs and making a postseason run with the team.

“I didn’t want to be traded,” Wallace said. “I liked Charlotte, being there. I was frustrated and pissed because I wasn’t expecting it. The fact that I had just sat in there and they looked me in my eye and they told me the deal wasn’t going to go through, all that. There was a lot more to it. We had just come off our first playoff appearance in franchise history. I had just come from the All-Star team. And all of a sudden, it’s like you’re tearing the team apart and starting all over again. You don’t get an explanation for it in this league so it’s kind of hard to take.

“They never did (tell me what happened). I couldn’t even get an explanation for why the trade went down. They wouldn’t tell me, they wouldn’t talk to me. … I was pissed. Like, I’m still pissed about it.”

Wallace could be moved yet again before this year's trade deadline of Feb. 20. He's set to receive $30.3 million over the next three years, an amount that Grantland's Bill Simmons ranked as the second-worst contract in the NBA. Most franchises won't want to touch a bad deal like that, but the Celtics could always entice teams to take on Wallace's contract by including one of their many draft picks in a trade.