The Best Player in the Trade Wasn't the One Who Mattered

On August 3, 2000, the Detroit Pistons traded away the best player in franchise history not named Isiah Thomas. In return, they got a defensive-minded big man nobody wanted and a backup point guard. Four years later, Detroit was celebrating a championship. The player they traded had appeared in 47 games over that same stretch.
Grant Hill was drafted third overall in 1994, out of Duke, and by his third season he was already being talked about the way people talk about the best player alive. He made seven All-Star teams, was named first-team All-NBA in 1997, and picked up five All-NBA selections total, finishing third in MVP voting that year and in the top ten four times. In 1999-2000, his last healthy season in Detroit, he averaged 25.8 points, 6.6 rebounds, and 5.2 assists a game, a stat line that, in any era, belongs to a top-five player in the league.
Then that summer, he signed a max contract with Orlando in a sign-and-trade, teaming up with a young Tracy McGrady to build what was supposed to be the next great duo. Detroit's return for its franchise player: Ben Wallace and Chucky Atkins. At the time, nobody in Orlando was worried about that end of the deal. Hill was the story. Wallace was the guy who came back.
He never got the chance to prove it wrong. At the end of that same 1999-2000 season, Hill's left ankle broke down, and what should have been a routine recovery turned into one of the worst medical sagas in NBA history. He had a first surgery in May 2000, a second in January 2001 when it didn't heal right, and a third not long after that. A fourth followed in 2003, during which he contracted a MRSA staph infection that put more than his career at risk, and a fifth surgery came before he ever got back on an NBA floor at full strength. By his own account, years later, the rehab itself was botched from the start: "I feel like a lot of it could have been avoided. The medical community didn't do me right."
Add it up and the injury cost him roughly four prime seasons, the ages 27 through 31, where a top-five talent turns into a Hall of Fame résumé instead of a cautionary tale. He didn't play a full season again until 2004-05, when he returned for 67 games and 19.7 points a night, still good, no longer the guy who finished third in an MVP race.
Meanwhile, the man Detroit got instead of him became one of the most impactful role players the league has seen. Ben Wallace wasn't a scorer (he barely tried to be one) but he made four All-Star teams and won four Defensive Player of the Year awards, anchoring a defense that carried Detroit to four straight conference finals and back-to-back Finals appearances. In 2004, that team beat the superteam Lakers in five games. Grant Hill watched from Orlando, four ankle surgeries into a career that had stalled out before it should have peaked.
None of this makes Wallace the better player Hill was in 1997. It doesn't erase what Hill actually was for six seasons in Detroit: a do-everything wing who passed like a point guard, defended multiple positions, and was, by every count that mattered at the time, on a trajectory toward the top of the sport. He kept playing for nine more seasons after the injury, in Orlando and then Phoenix and the Clippers, respected everywhere he went, a Hall of Famer by 2018 on the strength of a peak that ended before it was supposed to.
But the trade is the part of the story that doesn't get told enough, because it complicates the tragedy rather than deepening it. Detroit didn't just get unlucky losing its best player. It also got fortunate in what came back, and the team that lost Grant Hill ended up winning a championship four years later, in large part because of the guy nobody was paying attention to the day the deal was signed.
That's really the whole shape of it: a career-altering injury on one side of the trade, and a quietly franchise-altering role player on the other, and neither one had much to do with how good Hill actually was.