For Warriors, Andrew Bogut-Monta Ellis trade was a really big deal

OAKLAND - The Warriors swung the trade that would reinvent their franchise on March 13, 2012, and nearly everyone involved was swiftly penalized.

General manager Larry Riley, instrumental in putting together the deal that sent guard Monta Ellis and big men Ekpe Udoh and Kwame Brown to the Milwaukee Bucks in return for center Andrew Bogut and veteran swingman Stephen Jackson, would lose his position six weeks later, reassigned as director of scouting. The team, which had a passable record of 17-21 when the trade was announced, won at Sacramento that night, then finished the strike-shortened season by losing 22 of its final 27 games.

Owner Joe Lacob would get his ration of abuse a week later.

Lacob felt he had delivered a 7-foot gift to Warriors fans, but those fans booed him in full throat at a ceremony to retire Chris Mullin’s jersey on March 20. After a round of catcalls, someone in the crowd at Oracle Arena shouted “We want Monta!” and the arena erupted in cheers.

Lacob slumped visibly and emitted a grunt of weary frustration.

Garry St. Jean, the former Warriors GM and coach, was sitting on the floor that night, right next to long-time coach Don Nelson.

“Nellie couldn’t hear real well, and he said, ‘What are they saying? What the hell’s going on here?’?” St. Jean recalled. “I looked at Nellie and I said, ‘Fans are booing like hell.’ He said, ‘That’s awful. I think I’m gonna stand up and speak.’ Well, Rick Barry beat him to it.”

Indeed, Barry’s feisty, comical lecture to the Oakland fans is what people remember most from that episode. Of course, they remember the trade, too, the Warriors shipping out the electrifying but flawed Ellis and welcoming Bogut, the talented but chronically injured center.

Yet it’s easy to forget, now that Golden State has become arguably the best, the most exciting and most likable team in the NBA, how many aspects of the team’s ascent are tied to the trade. The emergence of Stephen Curry as a league MVP candidate, the development of Klay Thompson into a well-rounded All-Star, the Warriors’ embrace of defense - they’re all dominoes that began toppling March 13, 2012.

A chance meeting

The roots of the trade were planted not in Oakland or Milwaukee, but in Seattle. Riley and assistant GM Bob Myers, who would be promoted to general manager after that season, were scouting a game at the University of Washington. It was late January or early February (Riley can’t pinpoint the game), and they happened to bump into Milwaukee general manager John Hammond and his assistant GM, Jeff Weltman.

The Bucks were rumored to be shopping Bogut, the former No. 1 overall draft pick, and Hammond confirmed that night that the center might be available.

As always, the conversation started with Curry.

“Sure. Everybody wanted Steph Curry,” Riley said by phone from his home in Phoenix. “Almost every phone call I got once Steph emerged on the scene involved Steph Curry. There was no question, that was their starting point. … I was accused of being in a position where I was gonna trade Steph Curry for Amar’e Stoudemire back when we drafted him (in 2009), which wasn’t true. I was never in favor of trading Steph Curry.”

The marksman himself may not be entirely convinced of that.

“I don’t know how true it was, but (then-coach Mark Jackson) actually said if I didn’t get hurt, I might have been in that trade. ‘Oh, OK,’?” Curry said at a recent practice, flashing a wry smile.

Negotiations proceeded slowly after that chance meeting in the Northwest, Riley speaking off and on with Hammond, Myers doing the same with Weltman, and the two Warriors executives sharing notes. Lacob is an active owner, and Riley kept him apprised at every step. The talks accelerated over the three weeks leading up to the March 15 trade deadline, but it all happened incrementally.

Finally, on March 12, with both sides having agreed in principle, the Warriors gathered for a final meeting - Riley, Myers, Joe Lacob, assistant GMs Travis Schlenk and Kirk Lacob, and executive board member Jerry West, the team’s consulting wise man. This was not necessarily an easy decision, especially for Joe Lacob.

“There was debate about it,” West said by phone. “He was a very popular player, Monta, and a very fine player.”

Ellis was the Warriors’ leading scorer and the heart of the team. But he was difficult. He publicly questioned the decision to draft Curry, tore a ligament in his ankle when he crashed his moped (an activity prohibited by his contract) and was sued for sexual harassment by a team employee.

The Warriors pulled the trigger on the swap the next day, two days before the deadline.

The Splash Bros. emerge

The deal immediately brought clarity to Golden State’s backcourt. Ellis and Curry were both dynamic combo guards, each listed at 6-foot-3 but probably a little shorter. Neither could realistically be expected to defend the Kobe Bryants and James Hardens of the NBA.

“You can’t play two 6-1 guards,” West said. “And I love Monta. He competes every darn night, a fierce competitor. That’s the thing we really love about him. But at the end of the day, no team is gonna win with a backcourt that small.”

Curry seemed more confused than joyous when the trade went down. Like any other rational observer, he surmised that the team would regress in the short term. Curry and Bogut were both hurt at the time. In fact, neither would play again that season. With Ellis gone, too, the Warriors’ offense would stagnate.

It wasn’t until that summer, Curry said, that he began to see what the trade could do for the franchise, and for him.

“I think it was important for him for the team to basically put their money where their mouth was: ‘You’re the future point guard. You’re getting a defensive center behind you, and we’re moving the guy out who is maybe playing ahead of you a little bit, or you’re playing with,’?” said current Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who was then an NBA analyst for TNT.

Moving Ellis also opened up a starting position for Klay Thompson, who at 6-foot-7 has the length to match up against taller guards. The Warriors always knew Thompson could shoot. Over the past couple years, he has become a more versatile scorer and taken huge leaps as a defender.

Thompson was an All-Star this year. He has clearly exceeded his organization’s expectations.

“I wish I could tell you in all fairness that I knew he was going to become an outstanding defender and I knew he was gonna put it on the floor, and that he would attack the basket better,” Riley said. “I couldn’t be sure of that.”

The trade benefited the Warriors in less direct ways, too.

Two days after acquiring Stephen Jackson, they shipped him to San Antonio for a package that included a second-round draft choice; that pick turned into Festus Ezeli, a 6-11 center who is starting to log some playing time after recovering from knee surgery. And the team did so poorly without Ellis over the remainder of the 2011-12 season that it was able to retain its first-round draft choice for 2013; that slot yielded starting forward Harrison Barnes.

Ultimately, the move was good for Ellis, too. He played poorly and was chronically unhappy for a season and a half in Milwaukee. But he took less money to sign with the Mavericks in 2013.

Ellis has started every game this season, and is the leading scorer for a team battling for the No. 5 seed in the Western Conference.

High risk, tall reward

And of course there is Bogut himself. The Warriors had been after a center for a long. They had dumped contracts to make a run at DeAndre Jordan at one point, and were linked by rumor to Dwight Howard, among others. They were intrigued by Bogut from the outset.

“I rank him as one of the best centers in the league, and in all honesty he was the best center that had been available to us,” Riley said. “… You pull the trigger right then, or you bite the bullet and wait, knowing that there not might be another one coming along.”

The Warriors pulled the trigger, but they were taking a huge risk. After averaging 75 games a season over his first three years in Milwaukee, Bogut averaged 45½ over the next four, beset by a rash of injuries worthy of a professional bull rider: injured lower back … bone bruise in the left knee … lower leg contusion … mid-back strain … dislocated right elbow and broken right hand … fractured left ankle.

Considering Curry was hobbled by recurring right ankle injuries at the time of the trade, it didn’t make sense to some that the Warriors would put so much stock in another sidelined player. But they received Bogut’s full medical file from the Bucks, and became convinced that his injuries were of a random nature.

Bogut hasn’t exactly been an ironman in Oakland. He was inactive 42 times in 2012-13 due to a variety of issues. He has played in 116 of 145 games since then, but has averaged less than 24 minutes this season. He is a resource the Warriors manage carefully. They save him for key games and rest him when he’s sore.

An inner toughness

No one in the organization has any regrets about getting Bogut, though. The theme of the Warriors’ renaissance under Lacob and co-owner Peter Guber has been a commitment to playing defense, practically a foreign concept in the preceding 40 years of Golden State basketball. When the team ranked 10th in points per game and tied for eighth in points allowed under Mark Jackson last season, it marked the first time in the 21st Century that the Warriors recorded a higher defensive ranking than offensive ranking.

Even the most memorable Warriors teams of the past - the Run-TMC years of 1989-1991, the World B. Free-Bernard King squads of the early 1980s, the 1975 NBA championship team led by Rick Barry - were offensive-minded. It all changed under Jackson, and the Bogut trade was a pivot point.

“He has an inner toughness that was really important to us,” Riley said. “Because I didn’t feel like our team had that at that time.”

Bogut, when healthy, has always been considered one of the league’s top defensive centers. Three times he has finished top-5 in the NBA in defensive rating (among all positions), including second last year.

“He knows where to be, he recognizes what’s happening in front of him. So he anticipates plays,” Kerr said. “And he’s a guy who not only blocks shots but he alters them. His presence in there makes you think twice.”

Bogut is not a premier scorer. He has averaged about 11.1 points per game over his career. But he is not one-dimensional. St. Jean talks about Bogut’s ability to work dribble handoffs in the halfcourt set. West notes that he’s adept at setting screens.

“Our offense takes a different kind of form when he’s out there,” Curry said of Bogut, “because he likes to roam at the top of the key and have the ball swing through him, and he can survey the court and make good passes and keep the ball moving. We run different sets when he’s out there to accentuate that.”

If anything, Curry would like to see his towering teammate take more shots. Curry all but challenged Bogut to do so.

“He’ll show from time to time that he can put his back to the basket and get us some points, catch lobs, put points on the board,” he said. “We need that confidence from him, so no matter if he misses or makes it, just his willingness to be a low-post presence on the offensive end is huge for us. We’re gonna need that down the stretch this season and definitely in the playoffs.”

Measuring the trade

Kerr has done a masterful job mixing and matching his players this year, and he has, on occasion, gone with a small lineup that features 6-10 Marreese Speights or even 6-9 David Lee at center. The Warriors have won games with that lineup. In the postseason, though, they almost certainly will face an imposing big man like the Clippers’ DeAndre Jordan or the Grizzlies’ Marc Gasol.

Those games will demand Bogut’s presence, and will ultimately help define the precise value of the 2012 trade.

“Was it a great trade when you go down through the history of trades and look at things? You have to look at it and say yes,” Riley said. “It was a great trade. It really was. But what does that get you? Well, it only gets you as far as you go in the season and the playoffs. So we’re about to find out how important it really was.”

Riley went on to praise Lacob and Guber for building a team that looks poised to compete for the NBA title for at least several years.

“And if you get a championship,” Riley added, “Oh, yeah, it was a great trade.”

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @Skinny_Post.