Where Are They Now? Part 12

Daniel Ewing is starring for Khimky in Russia.

Olu Famutimi isn't starring for Khimik in the Ukraine.

Desmon Farmer is playing for the Rio Grand Valley Vipers Minge in the D-League. He recently scored 49 points in a game, which is quite a lot of points. And Farmer also recently became the D-League's all time leading scorer. That's an accomplishment, at least.

Peter Fehse is playing for the New Yorker Phantoms of the German league. It's not impossible to make it back to the big dance from such a nowhere, as Awvee Storey recently left the very same team and has spent all season with the Bucks (if that counts as the NBA). But Fehse's problem is that he's awful. A 2002 second round draft pick of the Sonics, Fehse would be the least likely to make the NBA of all the unsigned draft picks whose rights are still owned by an NBA team, were it not for the presence of a man further down this post.

Noel Felix is playing for Hapoel Jerusalem in Israel. Or rather, he's not playing for them. Someone over there with some sway has obviously missed the memo which accurately states that Noel Felix is not shit, but THE shit. It's a shame. Someone liberate him next year.

Rudy Fernandez is playing for Barcelona, but not for much longer. He also recently axed a basset hound. As you do.

Andrei Fetisov is the ultimate "who the hell". A draft choice by the Bucks back in the dark ages of Nineteen Ninety Freakin' Four, Andrei never made it to the NBA. Given that he's now 36 years old and retired, the dream is probably dead. Still, the Bucks do still own his rights, for he hasn't been retired for long enough yet for them to lose them.

This is worth elaborating on, actually. You're probably wondering, why the hell are Milwaukee keeping onto his rights, when they have no intention of signing him at any point? Well, the answer is that they're using him for his trade value. That probably seems like a stupid statement, given that the draft rights who will never join the league have about as much use as a chocolate teapot. But it's not about the value of the rights per se: it's more of a technical issue.

In trades, both teams have to give up something. What that something is, is up to them. A player, pick, or cash are options. But sometimes, they don't want to (or can't) give those things up. So they have to give up at least something, even if only as a token gesture. That's where these scrubs draft rights become useful. They can act as the "something" given up in a trade. A team can give up the draft rights to a player as their outgoing half of a trade, and add in nothing more if they so wish (or are so able).

That may sound like it's farfetched, and would never happen. Yet it does. It's rare, but it does occasionally happen. For example, when Peja Stojakovic left Indiana to sign with New Orleans, Indiana asked New Orleans - with a cash incentive to convince New Orleans to help them - to make the transaction a sign-and-trade, rather than an outright signing. The act of doing this garnered Indiana a mahoosive trade exception, which allowed them to promptly acquire Al Harrington, something that they could not previously have done without the trade exception. However, the trade had Indiana giving New Orleans some cash and Stojakovic, but New Orleans not giving out any players or draft picks back to Indiana. (And why would they add any? They're the ones doing Indiana the favour.) This meant that they had to give up something else in the trade, and the thing that they wound up forfeiting were the draft rights to Andy Betts, a beautiful and fantastic Englishman drafted in 1998 who won't play in the NBA. It's not much, but it's 'something'. And that's all that they needed it to be.

Another recent example, from this past trade deadline, saw the Memphis Grizzlies as the third team in a two team trade between Houston and New Orleans (again). The Rockets traded Mike James and Bonzi Wells to the Hornets for Bobby Jackson, in a move to get Houston under the luxury tax threshold. However, New Orleans welcomed the new players (well, Bonzi, at least), but they needed to give more outgoing salary to make the trade work for them. So they needed to include the minimum salaries of Adam Haluska and Marcus Vinicius. Houston could afford to take back Haluska, but not Vinicius as well, for that would put them back into the tax territory and make the whole move rather pointless for them. In stepped Memphis, who took on the salary cap number of Vinicius to make the trade possible, and who then promptly waived him. However, to take on Vinicius, the rules, as always, said that Memphis had to give up at least something to make the deal work. The 'something' that they chose were the draft rights to Sergei Lishouk, a no-name drafted in 2004 who did not pan out, and who will never join the NBA. Had they not held Lishouk's rights for all of these years, they wouldn't have been able to deal them, and thus they wouldn't be a part of the trade.

(Why Memphis wanted to be in this trade in the first place is a bit baffling, given that they didn't get any cash, players, or a pick for their troubles, and just seem to have taken on someone else's committed salary without getting any incentive to do so. Strange times. But hey, Memphis has made stranger moves this season. See also: the Pau Gasol trade, and the bizarre decision to sign Casey Jacobsen and Andre Brown to completely unnecessary minimum salary deals before signing Juan Carlos Navarro, which left them with only enough caproom to sign Navarro to a near-one year deal, which left J.C. signing for only one year, which means they now run the risk of losing him or having to overpay to keep him. Still, great organisation at heart. Also, note that Memphis actually got back some draft rights, too - since Lishouk was their only player whose unsigned draft rights they held, they asked Houston for one back, and got those of Malick Badiane. Badiane won't ever join the NBA, but the 0.05% possibility of him joining is ever so slightly more attractive to Memphis than the 0% certainty of Venson Hamilton - another scrub whose rights Houston owns - will ever join the NBA, and so that's why they asked for Badiane's instead. This bracket is getting longer and even duller so I'll shut up now.)

Captivating stuff, clearly.

Very rarely, retaining these rights is worth something. For example, this past summer, Washington bagged a first round pick from Memphis for the rights to Juan Carlos Navarro, and San Antonio used the value of Luis Scola's rights to be able to weasel their way under the luxury tax. Sacramento tried to get a first round pick for Dejan Bodiroga back in the early part of this decade, and the Bulls could turn Mario Austin's rights into maybe something of value if they wanted to do so. For the most part, though, these players attatched to these draft rights are utter bobbins, and thus the value of the rights in trades is used only as a technicality.

To retain these draft rights, all the team has to do is extend them a contract offer by a certain date every season. With the exception of unsigned first round draft choices, of which there are only six, (Joel Freeland, Petteri Koponen, Rudy Fernandez, Frederic Weis, Tiago Splitter and Fran Vazquez), these offers can be - and in practice, always are - fully unguaranteed one year minimum salary contracts. (In the case of the first rounders, the minimum is 80% of the rookie scale contract for their draft slot that season, with the usual guarantees of any rookie scale contract. Don't try too hard to figure out what the hell I just said, because you'll achieve nothing but boredom.) The players can in theory sign these contracts if they want, but in practice they don't. There's no point. In the case of the truly scrubby players, the NBA franchise will just waive the player before their plane even arrives. As such, these players rights continue to be held by the NBA teams for as long as the player keeps playing in professional leagues other than the NBA. (The teams lose the rights to the players exactly one year to the day after the expiration of the player's most recent professional contract. So if they keep playing, and the team keeps extending the offers, then the player's rights continue to be held.)

It has happened before where such offers are accepted when they aren't supposed to be. It rarely ends well. After the 2006 draft, the Lakers heavily advised their second round draft pick J.R. Pinnock to to go Europe, for there was no way he was going to make the roster that year. They extended the minimum offer of the one year unguaranteed minimum salary contract, but told J.R. not to bother signing it, for it was futile. Pinnock didn't listen, signed the contract, went to camp to battle for his place, lost, got waived, and now his rights - and his ticket back to the NBA one day - are gone forever. The same situation happened this summer with Demetris Nichols, who went to the Knicks despite them asking him not to, just to get waived. (His story has a happier ending - he was subsequently claimed off waivers, twice, once by Cleveland and once by Chicago, and ended up seeing out the season.) However, sometimes, it's been productive - Chris Duhon signed with the Bulls against their wishes, went to training camp, won his roster spot fair and square, beating out the two rival point guards with guaranteed contracts in Jermaine Jackson and Mike Wilks, and Duhon wound up starting most of the year for them and earning himself a $9 million conract. Carl Landry of Houston is also staring down a very nice payday after taking the same risk and succeeding. But generally, it's a stupid idea for stupid people, and so it is not common practice to accept these offers.

ShamSports.com - where genuinely useful information and childish use of the word "minge" in the same blog post happens.

Kimani Ffriend is playing for Paris Levallois in France.

D'Or Fischer is playing for Bree in Belgium. Yes, I know brie is a cheese.

Gerald Fitch is playing for Tissetanta Cantu in Italy, alongside Denham Brown.

Marcus Fizer - the great Marcus Fizer, one of my favourite players of all time for no explicable reason whatsoever - is playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel. He was the subject of a specialised workout this summer, attended by represntatives of many NBA teams, in which he apparently shone. Yet he still didn't get. What's a guy got to do? (Apart from, you know.....correct his slightly huge flaw of having no basketball IQ whatsoever. And get back to the correct side of 29.)

Luis Flores plays for Indesit Fabriano in Italia Lega Two-ah. How good a team can be when sponsored by a third rate washing machine manufacturer, we'll wait and see.