For the fans, the NBA trade deadline is an awesomely chaotic time of the season that brings shock and intrigue on a massive scale.
Anything can happen and very few players are truly safe from being put on the trade block by their respective teams.
For many of the players, though, it’s a time that they dread, and not just because of all the rumors that get stirred up by the media. Often, being traded involves more hassle than anything else, especially for a player’s immediate family.
In a chat on the “Road Trippin'” podcast, former NBA Champion Channing Frye shed some light on his experience being traded by the Cavs in 2018.
“Were you more upset than me with a 9-month old pregnant wife? No, I don’t think so. And a broken appendix? No, you were not more upset than me!”
He went on to describe the particular moment it dawned on him he was being shopped, which apparently came after logging an unusual amount of minutes in a game close to the deadline.
“I was wondering why I got so many f*cking minutes. I was like ‘holy shi*t I just got 30 minutes… ohhh no!’ I said ‘damn Channing you played… ohhh no baby pack it up!'”
https://twitter.com/FadeawayWorldHQ/status/1445137571613495297
For those unfamiliar, Frye played as a stretch big for the majority of his career, at one point even shooting as high as 40.9% for an entire season.
Still, he was never a star or some big piece on a contending team. He played for six teams over his 13-year career and never spent more than four seasons at a time with a single one.
Needless to say, by the time he was on the Cavs in 2018, he knew the drill. Getting minutes out of nowhere like that was a clear sign he was going to be traded.
Looking back, he seems to laugh about it now — but it couldn’t have been convenient to always be on the move like that.
