David Lee's Tenure With Warriors Ends With Trade To Celtics

David Lee was traded to the Boston Celtics yesterday for Gerald Wallace. In doing so, Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers — with his mentor Danny Ainge on the other side of the bargaining table yet again (the last time was the Jordan Crawford trade) — managed to kill two birds with one stone.

By sending Lee to the Celtics and acquiring Wallace’s less-expensive contract, Myers reduced the Warriors’ luxury tax hit, while keeping a season-ending promise to Lee and his agent, Mark Bartelstein, to find the power forward a destination where he could have more playing time.

After all, Lee can still contribute, as Warriors fans and observers saw in his Game 3 resurgence in the NBA Finals, and his six-year, $80 million contract that was signed in the Chris Cohan era expires after the upcoming 2015-16 season. Sitting on the bench deep in the Golden State rotation for another year wasn’t going to satisfy either Lee’s innate competitive fire, nor his quest for another contract.

Although often criticized for his not having a well-rounded game, Lee was at the same time widely lauded by local media and those close to the team for his caring personality, professionalism, as well as his humor, which was even self-effacing, at times.

He treated this blog with respect and would acknowledge us every now and then by quipping, “LetsGoWarriors!” in the middle of some regular routine, then return to his regular routine. Nine times out of ten in a media scrum, he would interject some kind of witty remark that would send reporters into a brief fit of laughter. Lee could certainly dish his load of cliches, but he understood the NBA media game well and gave writers the quotes they needed.

My most memorable off-the-cuff reaction of his was when he was derided at the MIT Sloan Conference, a gathering of analytics experts, for having poor defensive shot chart numbers. This after years of general criticism that his 20-and-10 averages belied any truths to his offensive production. Lee’s response?

“There’s a lot of different numbers to support a lot of different things. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say me putting up 20 and 10 doesn’t matter because ‘numbers don’t matter,’ but at the same time, ‘charts at MIT matter.’ You can’t have it both ways.”

Salary Cap Implications On Lee’s Trade

”Trade ‘will have the additional bonus of saving more than $20 million” — Daniel Leroux, The Sporting News

”Warriors were confident…they could move Lee for lesser money w/o having to toss in premium value” — Tim Kawakami, Bay Area News Group

Social Media Reaction By Lee and his Former Teammates

RT @TheNBAHub: Here is David Lee's farewell message to the Warriors. #Class pic.twitter.com/XOfiTavENG

— LetsGoWarriors (@LetsGoWarriors) July 7, 2015

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In honor of my boy @Dlee042 taking the next step in his career, this is how we started our relationship! Love you bro http://t.co/25UqWFtSJj

— Stephen Curry (@StephenCurry30) July 7, 2015

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”Curry, Thompson, Green, Barnes and more share their appreciation for David Lee after trade” — Jim Park, SheridanBlog

Local Media Anecdotes

From Monte Poole at CSN Bay Area:

It was David who generally was available to talk basketball, even as he was being phased out. It was David who cheered loudest for Green, the man who replaced him. It was David, exhilarated by the team’s NBA Finals triumph, who footed the massive bill for group trip to Las Vegas.
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“I thought it was great that the team went to Vegas together,” Kerr told ESPN last month. “David Lee treated the whole team, by the way. He flew them out there. He put them up in hotels. It was an incredibly generous gesture by David.”
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In truth, the Warriors front office saw this day coming long before Kerr and his staff arrived late last spring. Though nobody said it publicly, the folks in the Warriors’ front office took notice of how Green stifled Clippers star Blake Griffin during the first-round series between the teams last spring.
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If they could have moved Lee in the proposed deal for Kevin Love, the Warriors would have.
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Mark Jackson often pondered the Green-for-Lee move but was skittish about how it would play with CEO Joe Lacob, who acquired Lee and treated him in some ways as another son. Kerr’s decision, however, was made by the success of the team. There was no need to persuade Lacob it was time for a change.
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That left the question of what to do with David. He played spot minutes, usually against matchups the coaching staff thought manageable. The must-go moment, if there was one, came on Feb. 6 in Atlanta, where the Warriors took a 124-116 loss.
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In a much-hyped game featuring teams atop their respective conferences, the Warriors were stunned by the outburst of shambling reserve forward Mike Scott, who came off the bench to score 17 points in 17 minutes. He drilled three 3-pointers, each time after somehow out-plodding Lee.

From Tim Kawakami of the Bay Area News Group:

And I must point out that Lee continued to be good-natured about it every time we saw each other, because nobody kept track of his statistics better than David Lee. Couldn’t blame him at all for that.
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“How’s my plus-minus now?” Lee called out to me after more than a few Warriors’ victories over the years, several times with Stephen Curry chuckling beside him.