Each NBA team’s best trade in franchise history

Brooklyn Nets

Jason Kidd and Chris Dudley for Stephon Marbury, Johnny Newman, and Soumailia Samake to PHX (2001)

For high-volume shooters like Stephon Marbury, the question wasn’t whether a team could win with them on the roster, it was whether one could win with them as the team’s best player. We see this debate pop up while discussing guys like Devin Booker, Zach LaVine, or, to a lesser degree, Kyrie Irving, but as Marbury’s 13-year NBA career has shown, such arguments aren’t new.

Take his run with the then-New Jersey Nets, for instance. When the team acquired him from the Minnesota Timberwolves as part of a three-team trade midway through the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to view Marbury as the star who could take them to the next level based on what he did as Kevin Garnett’s running mate. But could he do it?

It didn’t take long for fans to get their answer: Marbury quickly became the Nets’ best player by most traditional and advanced measures, but his contributions had little impact on the team. In those three seasons, New Jersey won no more than 31 games and never made the playoffs.

To be fair to Marbury, he didn’t have much talent to work with during that span, but his brand of iso-ball scoring combined with the defensive effectiveness of a tumbleweed couldn’t raise the Nets’ flood-stained floor.

This realization forced the team to trade him to the Phoenix Suns (along with Johnny Newman and Somalia Samake) for master conductor Jason Kidd. Like Marbury, Kidd kept a limited Nets offense afloat, but his defensive prowess turned the team into a perennial contender in the Eastern Conference (they led the NBA in defensive rating in 2001-02 and 2002-03 and allowed 5.0 and 5.5 fewer points per 100 possessions than the league average), as the Nets made the NBA Finals in Kidd’s first two seasons there.