Trey Burke Traded - Again
Trey Burke traded from the Houston Rockets to OKC Thunder. OKC will be his eighth NBA team (includes Dallas twice but not Minnesota who drafted & traded him the same day). Some survive the NBA, some don't. Trey gets another chance to stick.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:25 AM ^
He has already stuck in the league for 9 seasons - that is a very impressive accomplishment.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:34 AM ^
Yeah, he has made significant money to last the rest of his days if he is responsible with it. Can't say that for 99% of folks.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:06 AM ^
A decade in the Association. The question of “Is he an NBA player” ended a while ago.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:34 AM ^
Yes, it is. I figured he'd last maybe half that time. Good for him.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:36 AM ^
Wishing him luck.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:01 AM ^
Good luck to him - he's been able to stick around for 9 years now. He's made around $23M in his career so not a bad gig if you can get it.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:50 AM ^
Divide that by half due to taxes then subtract 10% minimum to his managers/agents and that's the closer figure as to what he has actually made.
September 30th, 2022 at 11:05 AM ^
He still made $23MM
September 30th, 2022 at 11:59 AM ^
Equivalent to $23M for a career is an avg of $575k/yr over a 40 year career. These people are in the same tax bracket. The difference is Trey got all that in 10 yrs and can invest it to make even more over the next 30 years.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:23 PM ^
Poor guy still doesn’t qualify for those stimulus checks even after you subtract taxes and management fees.
September 30th, 2022 at 4:37 PM ^
If he was smart with that money and invested it wisely, he’ll be set for the rest of his life.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:10 AM ^
Oklahoma City is a good landing spot for him. We know he can make shots all the way from Kansas.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:46 PM ^
Am I the only one that still rewatches this entire game occasionally? Great post!
October 1st, 2022 at 2:42 AM ^
I still watch that game on occasion. I remember having a few friends over to watch it live and when it looked like Michigan was done and was definitely going home to watch the rest of the tournament like fans my friends had left my apartment and as I was cleaning up the empty beer cans and paper plates with pizza crusts left on them I had the game on of course and I was occasionally glancing at the tv as I was finishing cleaning up my occasional glancing quickly became sitting back on the couch and watching with unbelief as the Wolverines steadily closed the gap and I began to fire text messages at my friends who had departed that Michigan had went on a run and had made it a game again. As I watched I really didn’t believe that they would come all the way back and win the game because I had seen so many games where teams had given their best efforts but had either run out of time or just couldn’t make enough shots and get enough stops against a really good team like Kansas to actually come all the way back and eventually win the game but little did I know that Michigan had a real life Superman himself on the team named Trey Burke who would nail a 3 point shot from about 30 feet with bodies falling all around him to actually tie the game with about 6 seconds left. I could not believe what I had just witnessed with nobody around me to high five or look at with amazement I just sat on my couch with goosebumps and thought I can not believe what I had just seen and we all know what happened from there and the rest is a storybook moment in Michigan basketball and NCAA tournament history. That was one of the greatest games I have ever seen in NCAA tournament history. What a team effort and what an amazing game. I still get chills just thinking about the effort that team gave that night. You can watch basketball for the rest of your life and you still might not see another game like that. What a time to be alive!!
Go Blue!!
September 30th, 2022 at 7:12 AM ^
My college coaches and few teammates who managed to make it to the show would all be mostly excited about trades. They said being traded is a good thing because it means execs at a new organization now need to prove they were the winner in the trade and thus a bit of their ego and career path is now tied to your success. Good for Burke that he’s stuck around this long and happy that another organization wants to prove their smarter by obtaining him.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:52 AM ^
I’m not sure how much that holds in an 8 player NBA trade. It’s probably true for Favors, but some (most) of the other players in the trade may have been simply included to make the salary calculations work.
I haven’t read up much on this trade, but it seems more like the Thunder we’re cutting payroll and will eventually be cutting players. Hopefully Burke was a player they wanted and not just a throw in/salary dump.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:14 AM ^
This post got me wondering about career lengths in the various sports, so I started to search around. I came across one study that shows this distribution by major U.S. sport:
This is up through 2018. This chart does not indicate the average, but I've read elsewhere it's about 4.5 years. So Trey is above average, and about halfway up the right tail of the distribution curve.
What's interesting is how the NBA has such a high first-year dropout rate. I expected that for the NFL (the next highest) because they draft so many. Maybe relative to roster spots in the NBA they draft proportionally as much or more as the NFL?
September 30th, 2022 at 7:28 AM ^
What's most interesting to me is that spike at 11 for the NBA. Seemingly if you can make it past 3 (your first contract renewal for most drafted players) then there's a good chance you can make it to 11 (likely retirement age). None of the other sports seem to have that steep of a spike late in the game.
September 30th, 2022 at 8:33 AM ^
I wonder also: that chart is as of 2018, so if we subtract 11 from 2018 we get 2007. Was that a particularly good year for NBA players coming out of college? Maybe that 11th year spike represents a group of above-average players who came out at the same time and are working their way through a longer-than-average NBA career.
September 30th, 2022 at 9:21 AM ^
Conley, Gasol, Durant and Joakim Noah are the only all-stars, the 2007 draft looks pretty weak overall but I don't really follow the NBA. Greg Oden went #1.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:36 AM ^
Cool chart.
Need to squint here but the median (50th percentile) looks to be at the 5 year mark. The data is ‘right skewed’ so the mean will be greater than the median, giving us an average > 5 years.
All this still supports the conclusion that Burke is well past the ‘did he make it in the NBA question.’
September 30th, 2022 at 9:29 AM ^
NFL teams are drafting 7 players for 53 roster spots (13%) not including practice squad which is 16 more players.
NBA teams are drafting 2 players for 15 roster spots (15%), NBA teams can carry 20 in the off season and also have the option of sending them to G-league
September 30th, 2022 at 9:43 AM ^
Maybe a better way is starters. NFL 7 players for 22 starting positions 30%, NBA 2 players for 5 starting positions 40%
September 30th, 2022 at 9:43 AM ^
Any guesses at who the guy at 26 years is? I can't think of who the old guys were back in 2018... but today's 20+ guys like Brady, Zdeno Chara, and Albert Pujols aren't there yet.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:12 AM ^
Udonis Haslem
September 30th, 2022 at 10:22 AM ^
I think that must be a mistake. Vince Carter recently retired as the NBA player with the longest career, and he played 22 seasons.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:38 AM ^
Maybe they're including ABA seasons or guys who retired and came back. I think Kevin Willis' career spanned 23 seasons, but he sat out one of them.
September 30th, 2022 at 5:11 PM ^
Gordie Howe homie. The man was indestructible.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:34 PM ^
That has to be an error, the longest nba career is 22 years by Vince Carter.
September 30th, 2022 at 10:57 AM ^
Another factor is that a lot of the one year careers may be guys who get their cup of coffee later in their careers, not from the draft. They may be undrafted, play a few years in the G League or Europe and then get their shot in their mid 20s or later. You do have a little bit of this with practice squads in the NFL, but maybe less than NBA.
September 30th, 2022 at 11:27 AM ^
Neat chart made by someone who should never make another chart ever again. Whose idea was it to use barely different shades of grey? It's not 50 but it's just as dumb. Colors exist, people. This is the internet. It doesn't cost you more to use colors.
Anyway, the one thing that continues to astound me is how long NHL players can play. It is not equal with the NFL in terms of violence, but is far and away more violent than the other two. How do their players consistently last so much longer? The 15+ years are dominated by the NHL. That's insane to me.
September 30th, 2022 at 1:01 PM ^
Agreed, but at the very least, thank god it's no pie chart...
To your second point, my thought there is that NHL's athlete's bodies' are in much "healthier" shape than a football which is a sport that by and large emphasizes otherwise excessive playing weights, all the more so for lineman. All that weight on top of the hits can't be good for the joints long-term. Might be able to examine my hypothesis better if one were able to break out length of NFL career by position
September 30th, 2022 at 5:10 PM ^
Someone that ran out of color ink in their home printer, or knows how expensive that crap is.
September 30th, 2022 at 6:55 PM ^
My uneducated guess is that NHL careers are longer than NBA careers because skating is easier on the body than running on a hard floor. As for MLB, most players' ability to hit a fastball declines significantly after age 29. I'd suspect that the average career of pitchers is much longer than that of position players for that reason. You see more pitchers at the top of their game in the late 30s/early 40s, like Verlander and Scherzer.
September 30th, 2022 at 12:40 PM ^
What's really impressive to me is where Juwan Howard fall on that chart.
September 30th, 2022 at 3:01 PM ^
Arguably, MLB has a similar spike around year 8 and NHL has a similar spike around year 9. They look less pronounced.
September 30th, 2022 at 11:06 AM ^
I think this trade was mostly guys who are going to be cut, and the teams swapped before cutting to create trade exceptions and maneuver the luxury tax. Good chance he's let go, but he'll probably land somewhere.
September 30th, 2022 at 12:30 PM ^
Treyd'd
September 30th, 2022 at 1:24 PM ^
He's made $22m in eight years. Not bad for a journeyman.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:19 PM ^
What do you mean, some survive...some don't?
He's clearly not only survived, he's flourished.
I'm so confused by that comment.
September 30th, 2022 at 7:24 PM ^
I haven't been paying attention: I thought he was still with Dallas. LOL. May he stick around in the NBA as long as he can.
September 30th, 2022 at 8:25 PM ^
Your friendly reminder that Peyton Siva lasted one season (24 games played) in the NBA.