How the Bobcats’ 2004 NBA expansion draft helped the Suns land Steve Nash

Across SB Nation we are celebrating the prospect of an NBA expansion draft that may be in our future. Our team blogs are declaring which players they’d protect, and two writers are drafting the leftovers on behalf of theoretical expansion teams on the horizon. It’s a fun project.

So was the last real NBA expansion draft, held in 2004. It was a delightfully wacky exercise in team-building that birthed the ignominious Charlotte Bobcats.

How did the Bobcats do that summer, between the June 22 expansion draft and the June 24 amateur draft? They have had three winning seasons in the 13 since those fateful days, and it took six years to make the playoffs. That pretty much says it all.

With one exception, what’s most interesting about the 2004 NBA expansion draft isn’t what happened to the Bobcats — though that’s interesting in a way that particularly rancid meat is interesting. What’s truly fascinating is what happened around the expansion draft.

For example:

Before the expansion draft, the mediocre Phoenix Suns worked out a deal with Charlotte. They’d made Jahidi White, a veteran big man, available in the expansion draft. There was not much demand for White in Phoenix, Charlotte, or anywhere, especially give his $6 million salary. (This was enormous for a late-rotation player in those days.)

But the Suns had grand designs in free agency and desperately wanted to free up cap space. They needed Charlotte to select White in the draft. So they agreed to send $3 million and a future first-round pick if Charlotte promised to select White. The Bobcats, needing bodies and salary filler, took the deal.

What did the Suns do with their newfound cap space? They signed a 30-year-old Steve Nash. Nash won the next two NBA MVP awards, the Suns went to the next two Western Conference Finals, and the team changed basketball forever.

The Charlotte Bobcats gave us so little in their decade of infamy, but they gave us the Seven Seconds Or Less Phoenix Suns. Thank you, Bobcats.

(That draft pick Phoenix sacrificed in the deal? It transferred in 2005, and Charlotte used it to select Sean May. Welp.)

Part of the expansion agreement with Charlotte assigned the Bobcats the No. 4 pick in the 2004 NBA Draft. They didn’t participate in the lottery. The league -- and by that I mean the other 29 NBA team owners -- didn’t want Charlotte to show up and immediately land a top-three draft pick.

But the Bobcats found a way around that rule through an expansion draft swap.

Charlotte agreed to take Predrag Drobnjak off the Clippers’ hands via the expansion draft in a deal that would move the Bobcats up to No. 2 in the amateur draft and give L.A. the Nos. 4 and 33 picks. This was considered a top-heavy draft with phenom Dwight Howard destined for No. 1 overall but college star Emeka Okafor slotted as the next best option. Okafor had led UConn to a title and won Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four, Big East Player of the Year, and national Defensive Player of the Year.

He also won NBA Rookie of the Year and had a solid career with the Bobcats before back troubles and Charlotte’s futility wore him down and out. The fact that Charlotte wasn’t supposed to be able to land such a good prospect in their inaugural draft gets lost in the memory.

(L.A. ended up taking Shaun Livingston at No. 4. The Clippers wouldn’t have likely taken Okafor in any case with Elton Brand in place, but ... yeesh.)

When you have an expansion draft in the NBA, hijinks happen. The Cavaliers -- then with LeBron James coming off his rookie year -- found out that the Bobcats were going to take their sharpshooter Jason Kapono in the expansion draft. This left a hole. But there was a player eligible in the expansion draft that Cleveland coveted: Sasha Pavlovic, then coming off of his rookie season in Utah.

There’s no indication that Charlotte was actually interested in Pavlovic, though he did fit their mold as a young player with upside. But the Cavs wanted him badly to replace Kapono. So Cleveland told Charlotte it would trade a future first-round pick to the Bobcats if they took Pavlovic in the expansion draft and rerouted him to the Cavaliers, who had a trade exception under which to absorb him. Charlotte agreed. Poor Utah.

Pavlovic became a cult hero as Cleveland challenged for titles in the ensuing years. Kapono, meanwhile, spent one season in Charlotte before winning a title in Miami (he played two minutes in the playoffs during that run) and becoming an internet star for his shooting prowess in both South Beach and Toronto. (He eventually flamed out spectacularly.)

The pick Charlotte received for Pavlovic finally transferred in 2007, when the Bobcats selected Jared Dudley. He spent 93 games in Charlotte before becoming an integral rotation player for the late-Nash era Suns. The trade that sent Dudley to Phoenix gave the world Charlotte Boris Diaw, as well, something we will never forget.

How were the New York Knicks doing in 2004? They left their two highest-paid players -- Allan Houston ($17 million) and Penny Hardaway ($14 million) unprotected. Charlotte took neither. Go Knicks.

Only two players the Bobcats picked spent more than one season in Charlotte: Primoz Brezec and Gerald Wallace. The second best player Charlotte took was likely Zaza Pachulia, who was immediately traded for the No. 45 pick in the amateur draft, Bernard Robinson. (Robinson was eventually an All-Star MVP ... in the Brazilian league.)

Brezec ended up being a three-year starter for Charlotte before getting traded. He was never a star or even very good, but he ended up as a nice value pick in the draft.

Wallace, though, became a legend.

Sacramento was in a tough spot assigning its eight protected player slots. While other teams had high-priced, underperforming veterans to leave unprotected -- guys like Jerry Stackhouse, Kerry Kittles, Houston, Antonio Davis, and Antoine Walker -- the Kings were competing for championships (or so they thought) and needed all hands on deck.

So instead of leaving Chris Webber (back from injury and mighty expensive) or Doug Christie unprotected, the Kings chose their youngest asset, Wallace. The Alabamian hadn’t been anything special for the Kings, other than as a dunker. His third season -- the one preceding the expansion draft -- was actually quite bad. Wallace spent most of his time in Sacramento on the bench. To lose him in the expansion draft a year before he hit restricted free agency did not seem like a crippling loss.

The Kings traded Webber and Christie for spare parts within months. They eventually moved other protected players Brad Miller and Mike Bibby in salary cap dumps years later after a failed retooling around Ron Artest. The Kings would win three total playoff games in the 13 years (and counting) following that expansion draft.

Wallace, meanwhile, became an All-Star and All-Defense player for the Bobcats. He had a run in the late 2000s where he was considered one of the top five small forwards in the league. He never really developed a jumper and his fall from stardom was exceptionally fast -- remember when the Nets traded an unprotected first that became Damian Lillard for Wallace to get Deron Williams to re-sign? that was fun — but he was the expansion draftee who made it.

Wallace and Okafor were, for better or worse, the faces of Charlotte for the better part of the decade. And the Bobcats essentially got them both in the expansion draft. How magical!