“I was in a restaurant with my wife when I found out,” PJ Washington tells me. “We were just happy and screaming.” This is surely not the typical NBA player’s recounting of the moment he finds out he’s been traded. But the Dallas Mavericks forward isn’t on the typical NBA player’s trajectory. Five years after he was drafted in the first round by the longtime cellar-dwelling Charlotte Hornets, Washington got a call at the trade deadline in February that was life-changing: he was headed home to Texas.
We sat down with Washington ahead of the Mavericks’ opening game against the red-hot Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday night in the Western Conference finals, a best-of-seven-games battle for a place in the NBA’s championship round.