NBA Draft Flashback: Consequences of the Kevin Love/O.J. Mayo swap
There's not a team involved in the top five of this year's draft that hasn't been involved in some sort of trade discussions involving their pick. Moving up, moving back, moving out altogether - the rumor mill has been churning for all of 'em. But despite all the reports, whispers and other fake-trading fun, smart money says that at the end of the day, all five teams end up keeping their pick.
That's because since 2008, there hasn't been a single draft night trade that saw a top-five pick change hands between any two teams. The highest draft pick to be swapped on draft night has been the Pelicans' No. 6 pick last year, sent to Philly in the Jrue Holiday deal. In 2009, the Wizards traded the No. 5 overall pick to Minnesota for Mike Miller and Randy Foye, but that deal occurred a couple days before the draft. Over the last half-decade, if you still had a top-five pick on draft night, you used it, dammit, and you held on to it.
One of the reasons for this top-pick stasis could be that the last time top-five picks were exchanged on draft night, it didn't go so well for one of the teams. That was back in '08, when the Minnesota Timberwolves had the third overall pick, and selected Ovintin J'Anthony "O.J." Mayo, who had received LeBron-sized hype as a high-school player in Ohio and averaged over 20 PPG in his one and only season for USC.
However, despite being projected No. 3, Mayo was not an ideal fit with a Minnesota roster that already had Randy Foye, Corey Brewer, Rashad McCants and a couple other young, athletic wings. In his 2008 mock draft for ESPN, Chad Ford mentioned that then-Minny GM Kevin McHale was far more intrigued with power forward Kevin Love - another one-and-doner - who played with Mayo's crosstown rival UCLA, averaging 17.5 points and 10.6 rebounds as a freshman. Ford suggested that perhaps McHale viewed No. 3 as too high to take Love, but that he might trade down for him if a team like Memphis, selecting No. 5, selected the double-double machine.
As it turns out, that's exactly what happened. The Grizzlies indeed snatched Love at No. 5, and towards the end of the first round, they started to work out a deal with Minnesota to swap the two star prospects. Both sides included threw a couple bad contracts in the deal - Marko Jaric and Antoine Walker for the Timberwolves, Brian Cardinal and Jason Collins for the Grizzlies - and the Grizz also threw in one legitimate (though aging) player in sharpshooter Mike Miller. Early in the second round, the deal was cemented, and Mayo and Love switched draft destinations.
Looking back on this in 2014, it's borderline inconceivable such a deal could have ever transpired. Not only that O.J. Mayo, a 26-year-old guard who struggled to get minutes last year for the league-worst Milwaukee Bucks, could have been traded for Kevin Love - an All-Star starter and Olympic gold medalist with Team U.S.A.- but that the team dealing for Mayo had to throw in additional assets to make it happen? It boggles the mind to think this could've gone down just six years ago.
But at that point, the question of which of the two players would have the better pro career was still one very open for debate. Mayo's lone USC season hadn't gone quite as successfully as hoped - the Trojans had an up-and-down season that ended with a loss to Michael Beasley's Kansas State team in the first round - but O.J. had finished second in the Pac-10 in scoring and made conference All-Team honors. He also just looked the part of an NBA star, with obvious athleticism, a pro-ready body, and the ability to score from just about anywhere on the court.
Kevin Love, despite having an excellent freshman season both individually and with his Bruins team (which went 35-4 and made it to the tournament's Final Four), did not look the part so much. He was a little doughy for a prospect, and though he was hardly a stiff, he didn't have the kind of off-the-charts athleticism that really makes scouts drool, mostly playing below the rim. Love's college numbers seemed like they would project to the pros, but it was a little hard to see how his body would. "Is he just a more skilled version of Tyler Hansbrough?" asked Ford's draft profile of the power forward.
What's more, through each's rookie season, it seemed about even as to which prospect's career was off to the better start. Mayo had exploded out of the gate for Memphis, averaging 23 points a game on 48% shooting for the Grizzlies through 15 November games, looking like a strong Rookie of the Year candidate. He and wing co-star Rudy Gay were the NBA's only duo to both average over 20 a game, and for a while, they seemed like the core of a really promising future for basketball in Memphis. However, Mayo hit the rookie wall a little as the year went on, and his numbers dipped to just 15 points on 43% shooting for the month of March, as the Grizz pulled up for another lottery-bound finish to the season.
Meanwhile, Love started off slowly on the Timberwolves. For the month of November, he averaged just 8.4 points and 6.1 rebounds a game on paltry 38% shooting, and temporarily lost the faith of McHale. Love would only start five of his first 47 games for the T-Wolves, before a bruised rib injury to Craig Smith opened up a spot in the starting five for him in February. Love, then starting to round into double-double-machine form, would hold onto the starting spot for most of the season's remainder.
Still, by season's end, things looked about equal for the two. Love had the edge in advanced stats, posting an 18.3 PER and 5.3 shares to Mayo's 14.2 and 3.4. But Mayo had the conventional numbers - 18.5 PPG to just 11.1 for Love - and the end-of-season recognition, as O.J. finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting (to eventual league MVP Derrick Rose) and made first-team All-Rookie, while Love finished sixth and made just second-team All-Rookie. Both teams were losers, ticketed for high lottery picks again the next season, but Mayo had staked more of a claim to the Grizzlies than Love had for the Wolves, starting all 82 games and playing about 1000 more minutes for the season.
It wasn't really until the 2010-11 season - the players' third in the league - that the disparity between the two really started to become pronounced. That season, Love entered as the starting power forward for the Wolves and held the role all season. Minnesota had finally traded Al Jefferson, Minny's other big man, whom Love had struggled some to play alongside, especially defensively. Now the Wolves' featured post player, Love's numbers exploded, with the power forward averaging over 20 and 15 on the season, including both a 31-point, 31-rebound game - the first 30-30 game posted by anyone in almost 30 years - and a streak of 53 straight doubled-doubles, the longest since the NBA/ABA merger.
Love made his first All-Star team that season, finished as the league leader in rebounds, and was named the year's Most Improved Player. Mayo, meanwhile, had begun to regress - from averages of 18.5 points and 44% shooting as an NBA freshman, he had dropped to 11.3 and 41% as a Junior, struggling to fit into a Grizzlies team that had started to shift away from its young wings identity-wise. Mayo also courted controversy off the court, getting into a mid-air spat with teammate Tony Allen (who would increasingly come to take O.J.'s minutes on the wing) and even facing a ten-game suspension for a positive steroid test.
The trajectory of the two's careers would continue along similar paths, with Love well on his way to superstardom, and Mayo so uncertain a commodity that he signed what was little more than a minimum deal from the Dallas Mavericks after hitting free agency at the end of his rookie contract. And so today, with Mayo an afterthought on the league's most forgotten team and Love easily the hottest name on the trade market, we look back at that 2008 deal and wonder if it wasn't the heist of the century for the Timberwolves.
This is the really interesting thing about the deal, though. Despite the fact that the Timberwolves got the superstar out of it and the Grizzllies got the fringe rotation guy, it's the Grizz who have blossomed since the '08 draft, while the Wolves can't seem to get any forward momentum as a franchise. Memphis was back in the playoffs in Mayo's third season and have been there every year since, Minnesota has still yet to escape the lottery. It's a near complete-inversion from the way you'd think things should have happened since that trade went down.
That's because despite losing out on Love, the Grizz were able to to add another All-Star power forward to their lineup when they picked up veteran stat-stuffer Zach Randolph for virtually nothing in the summer of 2010. Paired in a frontcourt with developing center Marc Gasol, Randolph achieved a new level of focus and potency and helped bring the Grizzlies back to relevance. Meanwhile, the Wolves failed to find proper teammates to develop around Love, whiffing in the draft on subsequent top-six draft picks Jonny Flynn, Wesley Johnson and Derrick Williams, and overpaying veterans like Kevin Martin and J.J. Barea in their stead. Even as Love has turned into a fringe MVP candidate, he's never had the supporting cast needed to make the playoffs.
So what's the lesson from all this? Well, the immediately obvious one is that you should always be wary about dealing in the prospect trade. Mayo seemed for all the world like the more natural NBA prospect in 2008, and it would take a couple seasons for it to become clear that Love's skill, smarts and unconventional style would be far more valuable at the pro level than Mayo's athleticism, shooting and closer-to-ideal body type.
The Grizzlies couldn't have totally known this in '08 - though a Bill Simmons piece on the McDonald's All-American Game from the summer before featuring Simbo decrying Mayo's game while hailing the Kevin Love era does seem rather prescient in retrospect. But this is largely why teams have been scared off draft-night deals since 2008 - because until you actually see your guy playing games at the NBA evel, you just can't know for sure how his abilities are going to translate. It's bad enough to draft the wrong guy, but to draft the right guy and then trade him for the wrong guy...that adds a new level of insult to the injury, and it's understandable that teams have shied away from that possibility.
There's another, perhaps more pressing lesson here, though, and it's this: The draft isn't always as make-or-break as we think it is. We're conditioned to think that every year in the draft there's a Duncan, LeBron or Durant, who one team drafts and sees its fortunes improve exponentially for the better, almost instantaneously. We think either you get that guy, and you're set for the next half-decade, or you whiff on that guy, and it takes years and years for your team to recover.
But it doesn't work like that all the time, not even close. Teams draft franchise players like Kevin Love (or DeMarcus Cousins for the Kings, or Kyrie Irving for the Cavs) and then still struggle to build winners around them. Teams draft disappointments like O.J. Mayo (or Michael Beasley for the Heat, or Otto Porter for the Wizards, or Hasheem Thabeet for the Grizzlies the very next season) and still manage to turn their franchises around in short order. Both scenarios happen a lot more frequently than we think.
So tonight, if your favorite team is picking at the top, it might seem like the entire fate of the franchise is riding on whether they pick Jabari Parker or Dante Exum or Julius Randle or Andrew Wiggins. And maybe it is. But then again, maybe it isn't. Even if you get the best guy, it's still a long way back to respectability, and if your team gets it right now, they'll still have plenty of chances to screw it up again down the line.
And if you get the worst guy, take comfort in knowing not even the biggest bust in history is guaranteed to sink your franchise. Just ask the Detroit Pistons, who passed on Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade for Darko Milicic in 2003, and still won the title the very next season. The draft may be a frustrating, maddening crapshoot, but it's not the only game in town. Recover, move forward, and your team can still find its way to a better tomorrow.
More NBA Draft Flashbacks:
How did so many teams pass on Kobe Bryant?
Did drafting Steve Francis kill the Vancouver Grizzlies?
Jay Williams and Nikoloz Tskitishvili were two different types of draft bust