The Butterfly Effect: How the Indiana Pacers Roster Came Together
By Ben Gibson
If the Indiana Pacers didn’t draft Dale Davis in 1991, then there is a chance Roy Hibbert wouldn’t be with the Indiana Pacers today.
Confused? That’s understandable, so let me explain: Davis was drafted in 1991, then traded in 2000 for Jermaine O’Neal. O’Neal, along with Nathan Jawai, were then traded to the Toronto Raptors for a draft pick in 2008.
That pick became Roy Hibbert. It isn’t to say the Pacers couldn’t have come up with other trade packages to arrive at getting Roy Hibbert in 2008, but they still had to have those particular assets in hand to make the trade when they did. That is the series of transactions, or “transaction tree”, that took the Pacers from Davis to Hibbert.
As you can see, a number of roster moves in the past had a butterfly effect on the Pacers for years to come.
Welcome to NBA Chaos Theory.
Inspired by Grantland’s look at some of the oldest transaction trees in MLB, let’s see what led to the current Indiana Pacers roster. A big thank you to Basketball Reference and Real GM for making this task much easier.
While the Davis-O’Neal-Hibbert tree may be the oldest transaction tree on the Pacers, it is far from the most complicated. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, for a player to be considered a direct part of a transaction tree he can be a product of the same linked sequence of trades.
When you are looking at these transaction trees, feel free to click on the trees to expand them for easier viewing. We’ll start off with the simple ones then dive into the twisted web of the older and more complicated trees.
Next: Draft Picks