Monta Ellis was one of the biggest names on the Golden State Warriors during the late 2000s and into the early 2010s. Recently, the former Most Improved Player of the Year winner opened up about the 2012 midseason trade that sent him to the Milwaukee Bucks and brought Andrew Bogut to the Dubs.
According to Ellis, this was a turning point in his career:
“Heartbreaking,” Ellis stated, via Wes Goldberg of The Mercury News. “It was the turning point of my career because I felt like I was owed the opportunity to know what was happening. And the killer part was I had just talked to them before I left the hotel and they told me that they weren’t going to trade me. We were a couple games out of the eighth spot and we were going to try to make a run. And so, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m cool with that.’ And then I leave from the hotel and get to the arena and I go in and one of my teammates, Dominic McGuire, he’s says, ‘Bro, you’ve been traded.’ I said ‘No, bro, I haven’t been traded. They told me they weren’t going to trade me. I just got off the phone with them.’ He was like, ‘Bro they just traded you.’ So he grabbed me, he said, ‘Look.’ He turned me around and (on the TV it) said ‘Breaking news, Monta Ellis has been traded.’ I then called my agent who didn’t tell me anything. So it was just messed up how they did it … But that one hurt, that killed me.”
Ellis felt he “deserved better” than this because of everything he had given to the Warriors up to that point. He even brought up how he bounced back after feeling counted out following the ankle injury he suffered in a moped incident, an injury he initially said occurred while playing basketball.
Ellis explained himself when asked about why he first lied about what really happened, only to come clean later:
“I was a young kid, I had just signed the biggest deal of my life,” he narrated. “So that was my biggest thing was to be like, ‘Man, I got to try to make it something basketball-related.’ So, I panicked. I said what I said. But then after I did that, I came back and I told them exactly what happened. I admitted it. I said ‘I’ll give you 2.5 (million dollars) back from the contract that I just signed.’ And so they suspended me for 57 games that they already knew I was going to miss anyway just so they could get another $500,000 so it could be $3 million versus ($2.5 million). And so that’s when our relationship turned.”
Players get traded all the time, but this is one of the most emotional stories we've come across in quite a while. It's clear that Ellis felt completely betrayed by his team, and this is something he carries to this very day and is still hurt by.
Of course, from the Warriors' point of view, they were making a decision between Ellis and Stephen Curry in the backcourt. While Golden State could have handled the Ellis trade better, the franchise made the right call when picking between the two guards.
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