Philadelphia 76ers: Nik Stauskas’ improbable journey back to the NBA
The 2021-22 NBA season has been weird.
Injuries are (seemingly) up, COVID has been running wild through the association, and as a result, teams have been forced to search far and wide to find enough replacement players to field a viable roster.
Some teams, like the Philadelphia 76ers, have been relatively spared from this search. While roughly half of the team has been in protocol through the first 35 games of the season, with Danny Green, Tyler Johnson, Myles Powell, Sam Cassell, and Doc Rivers all out for the time being, they’ve only had to sign one player – Johnson – to a 10-day hardship contract. While the Delaware Blue Coats haven’t been so lucky, as Shaquille Harrison, Charlie Brown Jr., Haywood Highsmith, Jarron Cumberland have all been signed away to a 10-day hardship contract, most of those players could be back in time for the G-League bubble relaunch in February.
And, in another welcomed twist for long-ish term fans of the Sixers, a few old fan favorites from the previous era are back in the league too.
From Justin Anderson to Greg Monroe and even Dakota Mathias, players many assumed were done are back in the association and playing legitimate minutes for teams in need. Is it bad for the integrity of the game? Some have surely made that case, but at the same time, why not give a few guys jobs for at least a few weeks at a time of such global crisis? If nothing else, it gives fans a chance to check back in with old friends like Nik Stauskas, who has improbably returned to the NBA after two and a half years out of the association.
Nik Stauskas might just face off against the Philadelphia 76ers on January 15th.
Sauce Castillo is one of the more fun stories of the Process-era of Philadelphia 76ers basketball.
The nickname, which came into existence due to one of the stranger closed captioning errors you’ll find, stuck, and the then-Sacramento forward capitalized on it to great effect, selling branded hot sauce and even some merch with the magically generated nickname as his new alter ego.
Who’d have even though that on that seeming inconsequential March day when the Philadelphia 76ers took on the Sacramento Kings, the former ninth overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft would eventually get traded over to the team that put his nickname on the map alongside a first-round pick, one of the more lopsided pick swaps deals the NBA has ever seen, and two more players – Carl Landry and Jason Thompson – to free up cap space in order to be players in free agency.
Pro tip: Vlade Divac was eventually fired in no small part for executing that deal. Why? Because Sacramento should never trade draft capital to free up cap space considering their biggest free agent signing of the last half-decade are probably Harrison Barnes and Richaun Holmes.
Despite flaming out in Sacramento in spectacular fashion, going down as one of the biggest draft busts of the last decade according to some, Stauskas was a relatively steady contributor for the Sixers for the better part of two years, starting 62 of the 159 games he appeared in for Brett Brown’s squad. While Stauskas’ outside shooting never quite lived up to his pedigree coming out of Michigan, as he only shot 34.7 percent on 4.3 attempts per game, he still averaged 8.7 points per game and served as a decent enough 7th-8th man for one very bad team and one deceptive fun team.
For Stauskas, life was good. Sure, he wasn’t the second coming of Steph Curry, which is what Sacramento hoped he would be when he was drafted, but he was playing 25ish minutes of action a night and became fast friends with many of his teammates like T.J. McConnell, who eventually had him as a groomsman at his wedding.
From there, Stauskas fell out of Brown’s rotation at the start of the 2017-18 NBA season in favor of new additions J.J. Redick, Markelle Fultz, and Jerryd Bayless and was eventually traded alongside Jahlil Okafor and a second-round pick to the Brooklyn Nets for Trevor Booker. He appeared in 35 games, played 478 total minutes, and was eventually allowed to leave in free agency. He then signed with the Portland Trail Blazers, was traded with the Cleveland Cavaliers alongside Wade Baldwin and two second-round picks for Rodney Hood, and was then acquired by the Houston Rockets, who released him shortly thereafter. While Stauskas did eventually sign with the Cavs, his run was fairly inconsequential, and he effectively left the league entirely after the final game of the season.
With no other NBA options, Sauce signed with Kirolbet Baskonia of the Spanish EuroLeague. He played for the team for one season but asked for his release in 2020 to participate in training camp with the Milwaukee Bucks.
*spoiler alert* he didn’t ultimately make the team.
Instead of taking his talents back to Europe, Stauskas opted to stay close to him and signed with the Raptors 905 for the 2020-21 season. He then signed with the Denver Nuggets in the training camp leading up to the 2021-22 season but was ultimately waived and ended up with their G-League team, the Grand Rapids Gold, as an affiliate player.
If the 2021-22 NBA season didn’t fly off the rails and the term 10-day replacement player hadn’t gone from an obscure provision to common phraseology, maybe Stauskas would still be a member of the Gold today. But instead, he got a call from the Miami Heat on December 31st to join the team on a 10-day contract and made his return to the NBA on New Year’s Eve, scoring six points in 10 minutes of action.
Fun fact: If Stauskas signs another 10-day contract with the Heat when his current deal expires on January 9th, Mr. Costillo could face off against his former team on a January 15th Eastern Conference showdown. If you want to relive the process glory days, that would be the game to watch.
Next. Matisse Thybulle is an offensive battle ax. dark
Will Nik Stauskas actually stick around with the Miami Heat? Eh, probably not. But could he earn a few more opportunities around the league before the season is done? Yeah, I think that is totally possible, maybe even with the Philadelphia 76ers if things shake out in a particular way. But until/unless that day happens, try to catch a Heat game and relive the glory days when wins didn’t really matter, and the future was incredibly bright.