{"id":728553,"date":"2026-05-08T02:45:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T02:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/728553\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T02:45:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T02:45:19","slug":"p-j-tucker-announces-retirement-after-nba-career-spanning-19-seasons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/728553\/","title":{"rendered":"P.J. Tucker announces retirement after NBA career spanning 19 seasons"},"content":{"rendered":"

P.J. Tucker<\/a> was never an NBA All-Star, but he started on some pretty good teams over the course of a professional basketball career spanning two decades.<\/p>\n

That career officially ended Thursday, with Tucker announcing his retirement on Instagram.<\/p>\n

The 41-year-old Tucker ended up playing for eight different NBA teams, winning an NBA title with the 2020-21 Milwaukee Bucks<\/a>. He played for the New York Knicks<\/a> last season, going unsigned after New York declined his team option for 2025-26.<\/p>\n

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It took a long time for Tucker, notably undersized as a 6-foot-5 forward, to find anything resembling NBA success. He was a second-round draft pick out of Texas for the Toronto Raptors<\/a> in 2006 and played sparingly as a rookie, spending more time in the D-League.<\/p>\n

After getting waived and failing to find an NBA home, Tucker spent the next five seasons playing internationally for teams in Israel, Ukraine, Greece, Italy and Germany. He made a return to the NBA with the Phoenix Suns<\/a> in 2012 and stuck around a bit longer that time, distinguishing himself as a starter-level defender who could do the dirty work in every phase of the game.<\/p>\n

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Tucker wound up appearing nine different times in the playoffs. After playing only 83 minutes total as a rookie, he logged more than 3,000 in his postseason career. He started 19 of 23 postseason games for the champion Bucks and made more than $90 million in his career, per Spotrac<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"P.J. Tucker was never an NBA All-Star, but he started on some pretty good teams over the course…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":728554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,121,6,1408,191,10017,472,90379,476],"class_list":{"0":"post-728553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-milwaukee-bucks","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-nba-teams","12":"tag-new-york-knicks","13":"tag-p-j-tucker","14":"tag-phoenix-suns","15":"tag-professional-basketball-career","16":"tag-toronto-raptors"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116536667227995547","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}