Detroit Pistons legend and Hall of Famer Joe Dumars joined “The Vertical Podcast with Woj” on Wednesday where he talked about his time as a player and general manager with the franchise.
Detroit Pistons great Joe Dumars appeared on Adrian Wojnarowski’s podcast, “The Vertical Podcast with Woj,” on Wednesday. Dumars and Wojnarowski covered a variety of topics, from his beginnings in Louisiana, to his love of reading, to his teenage years playing AAU ball with Karl Malone. And, of course, they talked plenty of Detroit Pistons.
Dumars, who spent all 14 years of his playing career with Detroit, and Woj discussed his playing days, but more of the podcast was focused on his tenure as the Pistons’ general manager and president of basketball operations, a position he held from 2000 until 2014.
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They run through almost everything, including the formation of the “Goin’ to Work” Pistons, drafting Darko Milicic, the Kobe Bryant trade that almost happened, and the tumultuous last few years. But, for me, the most interesting portion was their discussion of the process of trading for Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 trade deadline.
Dumars said that he engaged Portland in talks for Wallace as early as November of that season. But he said that they could never get a deal done. When Wojnarowski asked why, they shared this exchange:
"Woj: What did Portland want that you weren’t willing to give?JD: For Rasheed? They started off with, it would take Chauncey and Ben Wallace.Woj: That would kinda defeat the purpose of making the trade, right?JD: No thank you. [Both chuckle]. No thank you."
Good thing Dumars waited until Wallace had been traded to Atlanta.
For those who don’t remember, Wallace was traded twice in the span of 10 days during the 2004 trade deadline. On February 9th, Portland traded Wallace and Wesley Person to Atlanta for Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Theo Ratliff, and Dan Dickau. He played one game for the Hawks on February 18th, was traded to Detroit on the 19th, and then played his first game with the Pistons on 20th. Talk about a whirlwind couple of days.
The two go into the specifics of how he went about approaching Atlanta, where Dumars surmises that it may have been the first NBA trade to be negotiated via Blackberry, which was a fun anecdote.
Eventually, that all culminated in the three-team trade that sent Rasheed to the Pistons, and the rest is history. Detroit won the championship that year, making Dumars the first African-American GM to win the NBA Finals, and the team eventually wound up making six-straight Eastern Conference Finals, which topped the Bad Boys run of five straight from 1987-1991.
You could argue that the Rasheed Wallace trade was the most impactful deadline-deal ever made. Of course, pretty much everything that Dumars did after that didn’t turn out so well (Rodney Stuckey, Austin Daye, Allen Iverson, Ben Gordon, Charlie Villanueva, Tracy McGrady, Josh Smith, etc.).
Next: Determining Andre Drummond's role
Yeah, it didn’t end in a picture-perfect way, but Dumars still got the franchise another title in his tenure as GM, which makes it a success, and, still fun to reminisce on even today.