The greatest journeymen in NBA history

In an ideal world, we would all have tremendous job security, have contracts for life, and be unfireable. We would all have a place to call our home, at our discretion. We would all fall in love on the first try and not repeatedly have to go back to the cutthroat market of dating apps. Everything would be secure, always.

Life is often pain, however. And in the world of professional sports, job security is particularly hard to come by. The NBA routinely offers guaranteed contracts, but it often does not offer them for very long, and as contracts continue to get shorter with successive Collective Bargaining Agreements, players now switch teams more than ever before.

This freedom of movement – which, at the cost of offending the sensibilities of the older generations, is far better than the days of the reserve clause – creates more of what are commonly known as “journeymen”. A journeyman is a player who has played on many different teams during the course of their career, and in the NBA, that record is currently held by Ish Smith, whose 13 teams in 13 years breaks a four-way tie of players stuck on 12.