Ben Wallace Never Wanted To Leave Detroit?

August 11th, 2009 by Andrew Wamboldt

Mike McGraw wrote a little blurb in his most recent column about Ben Wallace signing in Detroit. McGraw writes in the column that he believes that Ben Wallace never wanted to leave Detroit.

Ben Wallace agreed to rejoin the Pistons this week, returning three years after signing the $60 million free-agent deal with the Bulls. This would have been Wallace’s final season with that contract, but he agreed to a buyout with Phoenix.

I doubt if Wallace ever wanted to leave Detroit in the first place, but he was encouraged by relatives to take the bigger payday. Once he got here, I think Wallace tried his best, but he was clearly uncomfortable in the spotlight. Then he just couldn’t keep up the pace of being a high-energy, undersized center and his body broke down.

I think that it’s likely that Wallace never really wanted to leave Detroit. He was very close with his teammates, and they had just got done winning 64 games together.

I don’t buy that Wallace was ultimately pressured in going to Chicago because he was encouraged by his relatives. I think it all came down to the money. The Bulls offered Ben $60 million over 4 years and the Pistons only offered him $49.6 million. Not many people in real life would stay somewhere for over $10 million less than what they could be making somewhere else, so we shouldn’t hold athletes up to a different standard. Wallace did the human thing, and took the most money.

In retrospect, signing Ben Wallace was probably the right move, only in theory. The East was wide open for a small window of time. The signing hurt one of the teams at the top of the conference, while making the Bulls into a top three team in the East, as the Bulls featured the league’s best defense in 2006-2007 thanks to the Wallace signing.

The problem with the Wallace signing is the moves the Bulls made after it. When you’re signing a 32 year old to be a member of your core, you know the window with said player is going to be small.

Instead of trying to improve the team after the addition of Wallace, the Bulls instantly made a salary dump move, trading Tyson Chandler for P.J. Brown. At the trade deadline, the Bulls never traded P.J. Brown for a useful front court player. Pau Gasol might not have been available that deadline, but other big men, better than P.J. Brown, were likely available in exchange for Brown’s expiring contract.

So because of the Bulls’ unwillingness to spend, the Ben Wallace signing has become one of the biggest mistakes of the decade, instead of just another bad contract. The effects of the Wallace signing still lingered on into this offseason. The money on the Bulls cap as a result of the Wallace signing have been used as an excuse for a lot of Bulls inactivity in making trades and signing players.

In the 2006 offseason, accompanying the Wallace signing was the salary dump of Tyson Chandler. At the 2008 deadline, the Bulls refused to sign and trade P.J. Brown and some prospects for Pau Gasol, because it would push them into the luxury tax. And finally, this offseason, the Bulls let Ben Gordon walk to the Detroit Pistons, because re-signing Gordon would have pushed them into the luxury tax.

These were all moves or non-moves that resulted from the contract that was handed out by Bulls management to Ben Wallace.

The Ben Wallace signing was a bad signing in retrospect. However, it didn’t have to be one of the biggest blunders of the decade. The only reason why the Ben Wallace signing became one of the biggest mistakes of the decade was because of Jerry Reinsdorf’s cheapness in regards to spending on the Bulls. The NBA does not have a hard cap, and the Bulls have led the league in profits year after year. There was no reason whatsoever that the money on the cap from the Ben Wallace signing should have prevented us from trading for Pau Gasol or re-signing Ben Gordon, but of course, it did. That’s on Jerry Reinsdorf, not Ben Wallace.