Dennis Schroder just got dealt to his 12th team in 14 seasons, and the stat everyone’s dunking on is missing the one sitting right next to it: he’s played 60-plus games in 12 straight seasons, including 70-plus in each of the last three.
The Cavaliers sent Schroder and cash to the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday for Tre Mann, per ESPN’s report on the deal. No draft picks moved in either direction. Point guards nobody actually wants don’t clear at that price, not once, let alone nine times.
This is the level of discourse the trade has generated so far:
https://twitter.com/HaterReport/status/2088361470719381732
Funny, sure. But treat 12 franchises across 14 seasons as an indictment and you’ve got the causation backwards. Teams keep calling Schroder’s agent because he’s a known quantity at a position that’s brutal to fill on short notice, not because he keeps failing auditions.
Last season alone he played 70 games between Sacramento and Cleveland, averaging 10.8 points, 4.9 assists and 2.7 rebounds in just over 24 minutes a night. He’s now suited up for Atlanta, Oklahoma City, the Lakers, Boston, Houston, Toronto, Brooklyn, Golden State, Detroit, Sacramento and Cleveland before landing in Charlotte. Eleven stops and counting, and every single one of them handed him real minutes.
Yardbarker has the number that actually matters: Charlotte is Schroder’s 12th unique franchise, one shy of Ish Smith’s all-time record of 13. He’s also strung together 12 straight seasons averaging double-digit points, which is the part getting buried under the jersey-count joke. Somebody’s going to hand him team No. 13 eventually, and here’s roughly how the reaction will look:
https://twitter.com/TheNBACentel/status/2088413774902415378
I used to write freelance blogs for fifty bucks a piece and I still can’t shake pricing everything out that way. A guy who gives you double-digit scoring, 91 career playoff games, and costs zero draft capital to acquire is criminally underpriced roster filler, not a red flag.
There’s a colder logic underneath this too. The deal clears Cleveland roughly $29.6 million below the first tax apron, with James Harden’s next contract still unsigned and expected to land somewhere around $25-30 million. Cleveland didn’t move on from Schroder because he stopped producing. It moved on because the roster math around him got more valuable than he did.
Charlotte spent the summer trading away LaMelo Ball, its franchise point guard, to Minnesota, and still needed a proven ball-handler in the room — one that Charles Lee and Jeff Peterson, the coach and president who inherited that backcourt hole, already know well from their years with Schroder in Atlanta. Tre Mann heads the other direction after averaging 5.5 points in barely 12 minutes a night behind a back surgery he’s still working through. Nobody’s writing jokes about his career arc.
CBS Sports handed the Cavaliers a B- for this and the Hornets a C, and both grades undersell what’s actually happening.
The joke was never on Schroder. It’s on whoever thought it was.
