We’re two weeks from NBA training camp, and Monta Ellis remains unmoored from the league. The Indiana Pacers, who are rebooting after losing Paul George’s heart, decided to waive Ellis in early July and stretch his salary cap hit over five years.
Monta Ellis’ downfall shows how he’s one of the last of a dying NBA breed
Ellis never changed, even while the NBA did. That’s why he’s unsigned. But it’s also too bad.
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The timing ought to have given Monta, just 31 years old, an opportunity to find a new home. More than two months later, this has not happened. Neither has he jumped ship to the Chinese Basketball Association, a proper next step for score-first guards seeking money and fame in the wake of NBA rejection.
Is this the end of Monta Ellis? Shall we never again have too much Monta or enough Monta at all to sate our needs? Will Monta never again have it all?
If this is the end, we should take stock of what the full breadth of the Monta Ellis experience offered.
Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
Ellis entered the league in the infamous 2005 NBA draft, the last of the prep-to-pro era. Monta was one of a record nine high school players taken in that draft and one of six taken in the second round.
Of those six players, five played in the NBA — C.J. Miles, Monta, Lou Williams, Andray Blatche, and Amir Johnson — and had relatively long, lucrative careers. Only Blatche is firmly out of the league. The five players have made a combined $278 million (and counting) in the NBA without playing college ball. This is heady company.
Ellis instantly became a rotation player for a mediocre Warriors team. Stephen Jackson arrived a year later, and Baron Davis stayed healthy. Don Nelson returned to the sidelines making Monta a featured player. This team became the We Believe! Warriors. The Dubs snuck into the playoffs as a No. 8 seed and knocked off the Mavericks, embarrassing their NBA MVP and future Monta hype man, Dirk Nowitzki.
The Warriors were much better the following season. Jackson got MVP buzz and Monta actually won Most Improved Player over Kevin Martin (never forget) after averaging 20 points per game. Yet, the vagaries of the West kept Golden State out of the playoffs despite 48 wins. This constituted the death of We Believe!
In the 2008 offseason, Davis opted out of his contract at the last possible moment to flee to his hometown of Los Angeles and join Elton Brand, except Brand fled the Clippers to join the Sixers (one of the great WTF July 1s in league history).
The Warriors invested in Monta with a six-year, $66 million deal. They’d build around Ellis, Jackson, a cast of other solid players like Corey Maggette and Jamal Crawford, and some draft picks like Summer League Legend Marco Belinelli, Anthony Randolph, and Brandan Wright.
Except Monta crashed his moped after signing the contract, injuring himself badly. The Warriors suspended Ellis without pay for 30 games and Golden State lost a ton of games, as Jackson and Nelson checked out. It became a tank season of sorts; the Warriors ended up in the No. 7 slot, picking one Stephen Curry.
After two years and change that included watching Curry rise alongside a promising Klay Thompson and an ownership change, the Warriors traded Monta to the Bucks for an injured Andrew Bogut in March 2012. This allowed the tank to continue one more year. The Warriors needed to avoid losing their pick, and trading a healthy, still good Monta for a broken Bogut helped Golden State land Harrison Barnes.
Monta was extremely popular with the Warriors faithful, and for good reason. He was the last real vestige of the team’s last awesome team (no shots at Andris Biedrins). He’d been the Warriors’ best, most exciting player for years, though Curry was quickly supplanting him in the pecking order. When new franchise owner Joe Lacob came to center court to honor Chris Mullin at a jersey retirement ceremony, fans booed the hell out of him.
That was the single most glorious representation of what Monta had built simply by being awesome. The man who rescued Warriors fans from the tragic Chris Cohan era got booed off the court for trading Monta. It remains a wonderful monument.
Unfortunately, that was the peak for Monta.
The Warriors were proved correct as Curry, Thompson, and the rest thrived, winning at least two championships as Steph became the first unanimous MVP ever. The remaining monuments built for Monta were largely jokes at his expense.
Stays in Milwaukee, Dallas, and Indiana provided only glimpses of what young Monta had meant to Golden State. It also gave ammunition to his critics. Ellis continued to put up numbers and soak up minutes, but to what end?
Despite the birth of Playoff Monta — a moniker heralded Ellis’ big postseason numbers — in Dallas, our hero never won another playoff series after the spring of We Believe! In the end, Monta became his caricature: an out-of-vogue empty stats, poor shooting two-guard.
This legacy lives on in his heirs. Shabazz Muhammad, a single-minded scorer like early Monta, didn’t get a hefty contract coming off his rookie deal. He had his qualifying offer rescinded by the Wolves, only to find a sparse market awaiting him. On Tuesday, he signed a deal to return to Minnesota for the minimum.
Who would Monta be if he’d debuted in 2015 instead of 2005? How would the league and its fans assess the proto-Dion Waiters, albeit more quiet and country? Is there room for score-first slashers who soak up high volumes without the associated efficiency we now demand?
That Waiters signed for $52 million over four years this summer is a positive sign. Remember that Dion first had to show out for Miami for pocket change in 2016-17, having found no interest in free agency.
How fitting that by crashing his moped, Monta sparked the league’s full transition toward shooting over slashing and its rebirth as a league of Steph Currys.
That incident landed Curry, the best shooter ever, in an environment where the eventual management team would go all in on efficiency and shooting at the expense of any real focus on dribble penetration. That marriage is revolutionizing the NBA as we speak.
Curry would win two MVPs as a high-scoring guard while rarely playing at the rim. Meanwhile, the Montas of the world are just barely hanging on in the NBA, with only the most exceptional versions — DeMar DeRozan, Waiters — thriving. Even Monta, just 31 years old, can’t find a place in this new league.
The era that bred Monta is gone, and now perhaps he is too. Neither Monta nor his aesthetic brethren were perfect. There is so much to love about the style of Curry, Klay, and the new breed of gunners.
But something is lost when the importance of the latter leaves no room for the former. Let’s hope some of what made Monta possible survives in his heirs.
