Draft night from the year 2001 is one which the Memphis Grizzlies will remember for a long time.  Not only was it the draft which united Pau Gasol with Shane Battier to form the nucleus of the team assembled now, but it was also the night where the Grizzlies received a lot of negativity after trading their two stars.

Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the heart of the franchise at the time, was always going to be difficult for the team to give up.  Abdur-Rahim ended up going to Atlanta in a pre-arranged deal which brought the Grizzlies the third overall selection - Pau Gasol - to Memphis.

Their other bona fide star, Mike Bibby, was then shipped to Sacramento for the out of control highlight film Jason Williams, a move which shocked almost everyone.

"We decided that if Shareef was our best player, we were going to have a tough time because we didn't have more assets than just him," said Grizzlies general manager Dick Versace, who was director of basketball operations in '01. "We worked a long time on the Shareef trade. He was a coveted player. It was hard personally to trade him because you're talking about one of the great human beings you'll ever meet.

"But we needed more assets on this club. You have to look what we got from the trade - we got Lorenzen Wright and Pau Gasol, and that's two starters for one. Pau has turned out to be a better player that Shareef; he can do a lot of things well."

The trade for Williams was a stunner, especially since he had languished on Sacramento's bench in the fourth quarter of playoff games because of his tendency to play out of control at times. But Versace had talked to Williams previously, and liked him.

"I just had a connection with Jason when I interviewed him," Versace said. "Now, I thought he was a character. But I liked him and I loved his footspeed, I'm a speed and shooting junkie, and we desperately needed speed at the point. I gave up shooting (in Bibby) for speed. I also felt in the first year here that Jason would help us sell tickets."