SWPA BEATS
Worst trades in New York sports history
IT’S AN interesting week to ponder how perilous the world of the sports transaction can be. We celebrated — maybe that’s the wrong word — the 40th anniversary of the Tom Seaver deal this week, and Daniel Murphy (yes, I know, that wasn’t a trade) paid a visit to Queens this weekend. The Nets will not be using the No. 1 overall pick they earned across 82 horrid chapters of basketball next year.
One of these weeks, we’ll take a flip side look at the best deals our teams have ever made — but let’s be honest, isn’t bemoaning the awful deals more fun? (Maybe that’s the wrong word.)
METS: We start here because there are so many options. Seaver is the most famous, of course. Joe Foy-for-Amos Otis gets overlooked, because it was done in the wake of the ’69 miracle. And a personal fave of mine is Ken Singleton-for-Rusty Staub (mostly ignored because Rusty was such a popular Met) when you take into account the Mets only got 3½ years of Staub’s prime before exiling him to Detroit (for Mickey Lolich, putting that on the short list, too). Len Dykstra-for-Juan Samuel is up there, too.
Still: it will be hard for the Mets — for anybody — to top Nolan Ryan-for-Jim Fregosi. Maybe Cubs fans will argue Ernie Broglio-forLou Brock. It’s awfully close.
YANKEES: The Yankees get a lifetime pass in a lot of precincts because they pulled off the greatest heist in sports history, making Babe Ruth a Yankee. And “Seinfeld” pretty famously offered up his candidate for this category:
Still, it’s hard to overlook a pair of trades that helped turn most of the ’80s and early ’90s into a Bronx wasteland: Fred McGriff (and two others) to Toronto for Dale Murray and Tom Dodd, and Willie McGee to St. Louis for Bob Sykes. Call it a tie.
KNICKS: It’s been a pretty dreadful decade and a half, and there have been so many awful deals engineered by such a diverse cast of executives that it’s hard to tell them apart. Trading Patrick Ewing at all instead of letting his deal run out started it all. Acquiring Andrea Bargnani ended the most recent (and alltoo-brief) era of prosperity. Along the way came ruinous deals for Antonio McDyess, Eddy Curry. And, sure, if we’re being fair, the Carmelo Anthony deal wasn’t exactly a steal.
Still: I go back almost 31 years: Nov. 13, 1986. The Knicks acquired Gerald Henderson (best days: behind him) from the Sonics and swapped first-round picks in the upcoming draft. The Knicks pick became Mark Jackson (not too shabby). The Sonics picked Scottie Pippen (and then, proving stupidity is contagious, traded him to the Bulls). Henderson played a total of 74 games for the Knicks.
NETS: Amazing, because this is the team that traded Julius Erving for cash. But that still is dwarfed by the deal with the Celtics. And it’s not close.
GIANTS: Let’s face it, in the NFL it’s far more fun to think about the draft mistakes teams make than the trades they make since even terrible trades tend to have shorter-term impacts than trades.
Nevertheless, there are many Giants fans of a certain age who are still bitter about April 10, 1964, the day they traded Sam Huff and rookie George Seals to the Redskins for two forgotten players and a fifth-round pick. Chief among those fans was Huff himself, who held a grudge against Allie Sherman for the rest of Sherman’s life and took great delight in the 72-41 pasting Washington applied on the Giants in 1966.
JETS: Let’s save the draft-day mistakes for another day and just agree that while acquiring Brett Favre didn’t bankrupt the Jets (the Packers did trade the third-round selection to the Patriots in order to move up to take Clay Matthews, and the Pats used the pick itself on Brandon Tate) it did irrevocably alter the team’s history. He wasn’t the New Namath, but the Old Favre. And the march continues.
RANGERS: It still just seems wrong: Phil Esposito for Brad Park and Jean Ratelle. Exchanging heroes for an enemy. But that’s only No. 2. Exchanging Rick Middleton for Ken Hodge (and getting 18 games total out of Hodge) two years later was far worse. Maybe they should’ve just lost the Bruins’ number.
ISLANDERS: Alexei Yashin for three players. We’re still waiting to see the real Yashin.
DEVILS: It’s a tribute to how steady this franchise is that the best we can come up with is Pat Verbeek for Sylvain Turgeon, and that happened 28 years ago.