Yesterday, the NBA community mourned the loss of one of its greatest big men of all-time in center Moses Malone, dead of an apparent heart attack at age 60. Moses only spent four years of his Hall-of-Fame career in the City of Brotherly Love — five if you count his 55-game second tour of duty as mentor to Shawn Bradley in '93-'94 — but still remains inextricably associated with the franchise, due to his iconic "fo, fo, fo" prediction for the '83 playoffs, and the fact that he ended up being only one game off, as he led the Sixers to their first championship in 16 years (and last to date).
Big Mo also remains an iconic part of Sixers lore for being at the epicenter of two of the most infamous trades in the team's modern history. The one that got him to Philly was essentially the heist to end all NBA heists. The Sixers nabbed Moses from the Houston Rockets for the cost of 32-year-old platoon center Caldwell Jones and a future first-round pick, which ended up being forward Rodney McCrae. Jones would give the Rockets two middling, lottery-bound years as their starting center, while McCrae would be an effective starter on a couple Rockets playoff teams — including their surprise finals team of '86 — but never reach star status. (Malone, of course would win both the regular season and finals MVPs for the Sixers the very next year.)
Miserable as that trade turnout seems today, it was arguably more justifiable at the time than it seems in retrospect. Though it only produced a quality role player in McCrae, the pick the Sixers gave up in the deal ended up being a No. 3 selection, owed to them by the Cleveland Cavaliers — thanks to a much less forgivable trade, in which notorious Cavs owner Ted Stepien traded '81 and '83 first-rounders to Philly in exchange for the mediocre wing Terry Furlow.
Unfortunately for Houston, the '83 draft ended up being kind of a bust, and none of the players selected in the 2-8 range ever made an All-Star team. But considering the Rockets needed to save money with their impending ownership change (Mo cost a then-unseemly $2 million a year), and considering the trade allowed them to rebuild in close to record time — in addition to McCrae, the team got big man mega-prospect Ralph Sampson with the top pick in the '83 draft, and paired him with future MVP center Hakeem Olajuwon a summer later — it's hard to say the deal didn't work out for them, too. A top-five pick is rarely worth giving up a future-Hall-of-Famer in his prime (Mo was just 27 at the time of the trade), but it's a better piece than anything Orlando got for Dwight Howard in 2012, for instance.
Then four years later, it was time for the Sixers to give up on Moses a little prematurely. In the '86 off-season, after missing the end of the season and playoffs with a fractured right-eye orbit, Malone was dealt from the aging 76ers to the Washington Bullets, along with power forward Terry Catledge and two middling future first-rounders, in exchange for All-Star center Jeff Ruland and 26-year-old big man Cliff Robinson (not to be confused with the Clifford Robinson that played with the Blazers in the '90s). The trade would of course end up disastrously for the 76ers, as Moses proved to have a couple years of near-MVP-caliber play left in him with the Bullets, while Robinson's play dropped off some with Philly and Ruland was decimated by injuries and never even gave the Sixers close to a full season.
Again, though, the trade was less indefensible than it seems now. Moses was an All-Star in all four of his Philly seasons, but his numbers had begun to decline — though he still put up 24 and 12 a night, he shot only 46% during his final season in Philly, and averaged under a block a game, posting his lowest PER (20.8) since his first season in the NBA. It was understandable that the Sixers would think that his stats would continue to trend downward as he grew older and more injury-prone, as was the temptation to pair the Sixers' future MVP candidate — a then-23-year-old Charles Barkley, already showing signs of being a franchise player — with Ruland, another All-Star player closer to his age range. With those two manning the frontcourt, the Sixers could've owned the East in the late '80s. It's the kind of ruthless maneuvering we'd applaud Sam Hinkie for today. (Well, half of us would, anyway.)
But of course, the reason why Ruland was even available is a reason that Hinkie himself knows all too much about today — foot problems. After averaging 22 and 12 in close to a full season in '83-'84 for Washington, Ruland played just a combined 67 games the next two years, as broken bones in his feet ended up derailing his career altogether. Today any GM would see that prognosis and trip over himself running in the other direction; in the mid-'80s, with less historical precedent, you could probably forgive Harold Katz for being more optimistic. (For what it's worth, Robinson was hardly peanuts himself, having averaged 19 and 9 for the Bullets the season before, but positional overlap with Barkley in Philly rendered his numbers ended up more pedestrian.) In the end, the trade ended up being the inverse of the Rockets-Sixers Malone deal, as neither team was able to use it to make the next step, and by the early '90s, both teams would have to endure an arduous period of rebuilding.
Both trades will endure as eternal entries on lists of the franchise's all-time best and worst trades, respectively, and they provide appropriately dramatic bookmarks to one of the most sweeping cameos any major athlete has paid the Philly sports scene. Moses was only here for the length of a presidential term, but three decades later, he continues to tower over team history, equally representative of their most blessed and most cursed moments.