Gay has long been the whipping boy of basketball nerds and analytic aficionados because of the way he has generally defined inefficiency for most of his career. Rudy Gay became an efficient basketball player. If you're paying a guy nearly $20 million a year to be your star player, that's not exactly a trend that'll instil confidence in your fanbase.īut when the Sacramento Kings brought Rudy in to ride out his contract on their bottom-feeding team, something interesting happened. It was starting to look like the best way to win when Rudy Gay was on your team was to have him miss games or to trade him.
They then turned a terrible 6-12 start to the season around and finished with a franchise-best 48-34 record. Within a year of trading for Gay, the Raptors also decided that they would be fine without him and his pay check, trading him away to the Sacramento Kings for spare parts at the end of 2013.
The Grizzlies have rattled off two 50-win seasons since the trade and haven't looked back. The Grizzlies eventually decided that they would be fine without Gay and his bloated contract, trading him to the Toronto Raptors in the early stages of 2013 for spare parts. After seeing how good Memphis had the potential to be on its own, one couldn't help but wonder if they even needed Gay at all to be competitive, despite the fact that they had just locked him up for five years and $82 million the summer before. During the 2011 NBA Playoffs, the eighth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies took down a 61-win, first-seeded San Antonio Spurs team in six games without the services of Rudy Gay, their second-leading scorer from that season.