Following his serious car accident in January 2020, Chandler Parsons was cut by the Hawks a few days later, and we wondered if we would see him again one day on an NBA floor…
Two years later, the answer is definitely no since the 33-year-old winger had still not returned to competition and especially because he has just announced, on Instagram, that he is retiring.
“The last two years have been crazy and I’ve put a lot of things into perspective,” he writes. “I wanted to be an NBA player all my life and I wanted to play basketball at the highest level. I can proudly say that I did! It wasn’t perfect, but it was huge and I want to thank everyone who helped me achieve this dream. […] Thank you to the Rockets, Mavericks, Grizzlies and Hawks for believing in me, for giving me the opportunity to live my dream. […] I will miss the trips, the video sequences, the matches, but I can’t wait to write a new chapter in my life. “
It starts at… Cholet!
Indeed, everything was “not perfect”, especially in the second half of his career, as Chandler Parsons himself writes. However, everything had started well. Arrived late in the NBA, at 23, after a short stint by Cholet and France, the winger, drafted in the second round in 2011, quickly showed great things in Houston.
Discreet and clean player, he put his fifteen points in a franchise built around James Harden then Dwight Howard.
He then confirmed two seasons in a row in Dallas, where he had signed in 2014. On the strength of his solid seasons in Texas, in 2016, like so many others, he took advantage of the explosion of the salary cap to sign a huge contract of $94 million over four years in Memphis.
Knees giving way and a contract dragged like a cannoNBAll
Except that, from that moment, everything gets complicated for him on the physical level. He underwent knee surgery before the start of the season and only played 34 matches. Next season? 36 meetings only. In 2018/2019? 25 small parts… It is always his knees that creak and repeated operations plague him year after year.
Inevitably, he is criticized for his performance, in free fall, while he is paid more than 20 million dollars a year. For Memphis, he becomes a drag and one of the worst quality/price ratios in the league, even though he was quite the opposite in Houston (a salary of less than a million dollars per season).
In the summer of 2019, the Grizzlies finally manage to part with it. He is transferred to Atlanta where he still does not bounce back. Worse still, in January 2020, a few days before the death of Kobe Bryant, he was the victim of a serious car accident. We are then talking about a “traumatic brain injury” and a career in jeopardy.
Dismissed from the prosecution since then, he had given news for the rest of his career, without real conviction, last November. ” We’ll see. I’m training, I’m staying in shape, but I’m trying to recover from this car accident, so we’ll see. I still have to deal with all that but I’m still trying to train.“
Finally, at 33, he decided to hang up his sneakers and left the NBA after 440 regular season games played (13 playoffs). He will have compiled 12.7 points and 4.5 rebounds on average, but it is essentially his seasons in Texas that will remain, as the result has been painful for him.
