Sebastian Telfair, formerly of the Minnesota Timberwolves
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NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 07: Former NBA player Sebastian Telfair departs after being arraigned in Federal Court on October 7, 2021 in New York City. Mr. Telfair is one of 18 people indicted for allegedly trying to defraud the NBA's health care plan. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
It has not been a good time in the news cycle for former NBA point guard Sebastian Telfair over these past few years.
After being convicted for his role in the same fraud scheme that caught up so many former NBA veterans, he ended up serving jail time for his involvement, and made the news most recently for being pictured sharing yard time with Diddy. Now a free man again having served his time, the 40-year-old Telfair has announced his intention to compete to resume his career by playing in the Big 3, and is also doing some podcast appearances to reclaim the SEO spots – but is not exactly sharing wisdom in the process.
In an appearance on The Pivot podcast, asked for a frank and honest answer as to how he ran through all the earnings of his playing days, Telfair makes it sound as though he never made much. He justifiably rationalizes down his circa-$20 million in career earnings by halving it for tax, but then loses the rationaliity when he claims that this is “no money”, and that he never did make enough to
Not Now, Sebastian
“You’ve got to be a real strategic dude to make one million dollars a year and think you’re going to end up with everything”, said Telfair, before further citing that having 14 siblings and both parents was a reason that much of his money disappeared.
It is fair enough that $10 million does not get a man and his family “everything”. There is however an enormous difference between not having everything, and losing it all. And it is doubly tone-deaf to claim that $1 million net is “no money”.
If he wanted it all, but did not have enough to fund the lifestyle he wanted to live, perhaps he should have lived a lesser one. Falling victim to one’s own greed and thirst for status is not a very sympathetic story; saying that $1 million annual net salary is not meaningful money at a time when the spiraling post-pandemic inflation rates are making life considerably tougher for all those in the lower tax brackets feels positively alienating. Perhaps better boundaries and better discipline over his money would have helped – and acknowledging that over discredit the value of $1 million to an audience struggling to make car payments would have been the PR-friendly move.
Telfair’s NBA Career
Telfair’s NBA career spanned ten seasons, from 2004-05 through 2014-15, but perhaps underwhelmed relative to expectation, or at least to the expectations of amateur talent evaluator.
Across his 564-game NBA career, Telfair averaged 7.4 points, 3.5 assists, and 1.6 rebounds per game, shooting 39.0% from the field and 31.9% from three-point range. Telfair was first selected by the Portland Trail Blazers with the 13th overall pick in the first round of the 2004 NBA Draft out of high school, one of the last players to make that leap, but never reached the heights that his high school mixtapes led us to believe might be possible.
He nevertheless played for a long time, and to a decent level. Over the course of his career, Telfair played for eight different NBA franchises: the Trail Blazers, Boston Celtics, Minnesota Timberwolves, Los Angeles Clippers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Phoenix Suns and Toronto Raptors, before finishing up with the Oklahoma City Thunder. His most significant playing time occurred with Portland and Minnesota – in the 2005-06 season with Portland, he appeared in 68 games, started 30, played 24.1 minutes per game, and averaged 9.5 points, 3.6 assists, and 1.8 rebounds, while his best season came with Minnesota in 2007-08, where he averaged 9.3 points and 5.9 assists in 32.2 minutes per game.
Telfair had a good career, and had a lot of money to show for it. He did not have “everything”, in either sense. But he had considerably more money than the podcast viewers he pleaded poverty to. It might pay to remember that next time.