What It's Like to Be Traded by a NBA Team from Across the World

In late January, Italian League forward Maarty Leunen found out that he'd just been traded for Josh Smith. Leunen was reading ESPN from his home in Italy and saw that Smith had been traded from the Los Angeles Clippers back to the Houston Rockets; the Clippers received cash considerations in return, as well as the draft rights of another player—him.

"I was just kind of in shock because I've never played in the NBA," said Leunen, who played at Oregon before getting picked up by the Rockets in the second round of the 2008 Draft. "Houston only has my draft rights, so it was just funny to see my name come across on ESPN being traded for Josh Smith."

Leunen might have been traded, but otherwise life went on as normal. "That day was nothing more than a handful of jokes from my teammates," he said. "I was dishing out some jokes, saying, 'Alright guys, this is my last day here in Italy, I'm headed to L.A., sorry.' So it was just a day full of jokes. They were asking for tickets." And then they all got back to work. Leunen is in his first season with Sidigas Avellino, in Italy's Serie A. He's still there.

Neither the Rockets nor the Clippers contacted Leunen after the trade. Unlike a player on a NBA roster, he wasn't receiving instant updates from his agent, fielding calls from family and friends, or enduring an awkward conversation with a coach or general manager. "I knew it was nothing too important or concerning if my agent's not going to call me, let me know when it happens before or whenever," Leunen said. "My agent didn't even get a hold of me. I sent my agent a text message, 'Can you believe that they traded me?' Jokingly or whatever."

This is the reality for many players who were drafted by a NBA team but play overseas. Franchises retain a player's draft rights for as long as they want, and those rights can be involved in any deal down the road. In a league in which teams are constantly attempting to maneuver around the luxury tax, the draft rights of players who never play are the perfect tool: a draft-rights swap fulfills the basic tenet that both teams have to receive something in a trade, even if it's just the rights to a name; there is no incoming salary attached, no roster shuffling required. Many trades involve the draft rights of guys who have never played in a NBA game, and most likely never will.

There is no limit on the number of times a draft-and-stash player can be traded. The Josh Smith deal also involved Serhiy Lishchuk, who has seen his rights tossed around the NBA in six different trades since the Memphis Grizzlies selected him in the second round in 2004. He has been traded for Bonzi Wells, Joe Smith, and a future second-round pick that would later be used on none other than Maarty Leunen.

Lishchuk is part of a small community of players whose rights have been traded around the NBA while they themselves spend their entire careers in Europe. Greek player Georgios Printezis has been traded a remarkable seven times since being selected with 58th pick in the 2007 NBA Draft by the San Antonio Spurs. "Usually they dislike being traded so many times," Printezis's agent Georgios Dimitropoulos said in an email. "Once or twice, it's okay. Then it becomes a joke. There should probably be a number of trades after which no more could be made."

After enough of these moves, players like Leunen and Printezis can come to seem less like actual basketball players than abstractions—foreign-seeming names whose only place in the NBA conversation is as a placeholder in a transaction. For Leunen, though, there's more to the story. He was chosen 54th overall in the 2008 NBA Draft and played for the Rockets in the NBA Summer League that year, but the team suggested that he should go overseas to polish his game. That led to multiple years in Turkey, Italy, and Germany. Leunen rejoined the Rockets for Summer League three more times, including as recently as 2014, but all of those stops ended without a guaranteed spot on a roster.

While Leunen had interest in a training camp invite, he didn't want to gamble on the musical chairs-like stress that comes with an unguaranteed spot there. Roster spots on European clubs dry up around August, which conflicts with the start of the NBA's preseason training camps in late September.

"I was never really willing to take that risk," Leunen told VICE Sports. "I always had good opportunities in Europe and I didn't really want to pass on those knowing that I would have to go to camp, play good in camp, and kind of just get lucky in that sense, making one of the two open roster spots on the team."

Despite playing off the NBA radar, Leunen's draft rights have still given him a brief taste of the spotlight.

"It was pretty funny," he said, "because, through Facebook and all of social media I felt really popular again. People I didn't even know were hashtagging me or commenting about me and tagging me in [posts]. There were some comments like 'Who's Maarty Leunen?' It was just funny to see. For one day or that week, I felt pretty popular knowing that I was on ESPN while being removed from American basketball."