It's a pity the old American Basketball Association could not be included in this discussion, for it could probably supply 10 embarrassing/worst/hilarious moments on its own. Many of them would involve Marvin Barnes and the St. Louis Spirits, perhaps the most colorful pro basketball team of all time.
On Feb. 6, 1975, the Spirits decided to hold a "Beat the Nets" night. They were the New York Nets then, the defending ABA champions and led by an Afro-ed young star named Julius Erving. Barnes, a free spirit who spent most of his postgame nights -- most of his nights, in fact -- at parties and in pool halls, decided to write a couple of poems for the evening. Here is one of them:
There once was a doctor named Erving,
Whose slam dunks were especially unnerving,
But when Marvin gets movin',
And the crowd gets to groovin',
For the doctor a hospital bed they'll be reserving.
Alas, the final was 113-92, Nets.
See? I got an ABA story in anyway.
Herewith the NBA moments:
1. Snoozeball: Nov. 22, 1950
Opponents of the Minneapolis Lakers could never figure out what to do with George Mikan, their giant, bespectacled center and the game's first dominant player. But on this night Murray Mendenhall, coach of the Fort Wayne Pistons, had an idea. A bad idea, but an idea nonetheless.
He instructed his team to do little else but hold on to the ball, thus rendering Mikan all but useless.
As Fort Wayne passed the ball listlessly around the outside and various players held on to it for minutes at a time, the officials, Jocko Collins and Stan Stutz, screamed at them to do something. But the Pistons were not violating the rules at the time. There was a "flurry" of scoring at the end of each of the first three quarters, but when the Pistons scored a basket in the final seconds, they took a 19-18 lead and held on for the victory.
NBA president Maurice Podoloff expressed his concern the next day that fans would be turned off -- gee, you think? -- but it wasn't until four years later that the league instituted a 24-second clock. This game was listed prominently as one of the reasons for the innovation.
2. The Punch: Dec. 9, 1977
When a fight broke out during a Los Angeles Lakers-Houston Rockets game at the Forum in L.A., Rudy Tomjanovich, then a 29-year-old, 6-foot-8 All-Star forward, did what seemed natural -- he rushed to the aid of his Houston teammate Kevin Kunnert, who was engaged in a tussle with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Kermit Washington, also 6-8, and one of the game's first real power forwards, did what seemed to be natural to him, too. He sensed Tomjanovich coming from behind and, thinking he was protecting himself and his teammate Abdul-Jabbar, turned around and threw a haymaker at Tomjanovich. It landed as squarely as any punch in any game has ever landed, and basically crushed Rudy T's face. Abdul-Jabbar later said that he didn't see the punch but heard it.
Tomjanovich subsequently required five surgeries, and though he later returned to the NBA, he was never quite the same player. But in the long run, the punch was worse for Washington, and not because he was fined $10,000 and suspended for 60 days. Though he was a gentle man with a good basketball mind, Washington was labeled a villain and a thug, and after retiring from the game in 1982 he could never climb the coaching ladder. Rudy T., meanwhile, coached the Rockets to back-to-back championships in 1994 and '95.
The men have since reconciled. But rarely is there a punch thrown on an NBA court when that moment in the Forum is not recalled.
3. The unseen work of art: May 16, 1980
If an NBA rookie, playing out of position in an important Game 6 in the NBA Finals, scores 42 points, grabs 15 rebounds and dishes out seven assists but nobody sees it, did it really happen?
This is how low the NBA had sunk in 1980: Its national-TV contract with CBS called for tape-delayed coverage of even the championship series. That's why America missed seeing live Magic Johnson's transcendent performance that gave the Lakers a 123-107 win over the Philadelphia 76ers and the first of Magic's five championships.
The story after the game was not Magic (who was moved to center because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had sprained his ankle in Game 5) but, rather, how no one had seen what Magic had done. When David Stern took over as commissioner four years later, he pointed to this game as exactly what he didn't want to happen during his reign. And it never did.
4. The Len Bias shocker: June 19, 1986
Another NBA Draft, another Boston Celtics steal. Virtually every NBA expert evaluated Len Bias, a University of Maryland forward whom the Celtics got with the second pick, as the best talent available, the future successor to Larry Bird, the perfect player to keep Boston competitive until 2000.
But just a day after the draft, Bias, 22, returned from Boston to his Maryland campus suite in Landover and, sometime in the middle of the night, ingested cocaine that may have contributed to his sudden death by cardiac arrest. "It's the worst thing I've ever heard," said Bird, who days earlier had led the Celtics to the championship.
The impact of the tragedy was profound: A flurry of self-examination at college campuses and in pro sports leagues about the perils of drugs; an investigation into Maryland athletics that eventually led to the resignation of coach Lefty Driesell; a domino effect that tore through that '86 Draft, which produced a number of other drug victims and early washouts; and a low point for the Celtics franchise, which has not won a championship since.
5. A Magic moment, but not a magical one: Nov. 7, 1991
The rumors started early that day. Magic Johnson, slightly past his prime but still one of the best players in the game, is retiring. But why? Finally, at a nationally televised news conference, Johnson announced that he had the AIDS virus and, indeed, would be quitting. In typical Magic fashion, what he said was that he had "attained" the AIDS virus, as if it were a conquest.
And over the next few months, indeed, "conquest" became the operative word. Johnson said he had contracted the virus through heterosexual contact, of which there was no shortage -- encounters in elevators and offices, sometimes with more than one woman.
As with the Bias tragedy, there was an immediate self-examination of NBA players and casual sexual encounters. But as one NBA hound reported at the time, "Outside of a few more condoms, nothing much changed."
6. Michael lost how much? May 1993
Around the NBA it was an open secret Michael Jordan loved to gamble -- in casinos, on the golf course, in private card games. He would come in from a night of gambling in Atlantic City, take a shower, go to the arena and beat up the Knicks or the 76ers. So whose business was it what Jordan did with his personal money?
But then a heretofore unknown lawyer named Richard Esquinas came out with a book called Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction, in which he alleged that he had won $1.3 million from Jordan on the golf course. The book, coupled with the $57,000 check that Jordan had written to a guy named Slim Bouler to cover gambling losses -- any time you gamble with a "Slim," you deserve what you get -- suddenly made Jordan's alleged "addiction" a matter for national consumption.
A few months later Jordan announced his retirement from basketball -- that would be his first retirement -- and speculation began as to whether NBA commissioner David Stern had demanded he get away from the game because of his unsavory gambling associations. To this day Jordan and Stern vehemently deny it, but the accusation has never gone away and probably never will.
7. Is that my neck or are you just glad to see me? Dec. 1, 1997
The relationship between Golden State Warriors guard Latrell Sprewell and his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, was never a good one. The latter didn't appreciate the former's rather loose approach to things such as schedules and practice habits, while the former didn't appreciate the latter's intensity and attention to detail. Trouble had been brewing (Carlesimo had fined Spree for missing a flight three days earlier) when on this day the coach instructed the player to make crisper passes during a practice session. Spree warned the coach to get out of his face. Carlesimo didn't.
So Spree wrapped his hands around Carlesimo's neck for, as witnesses later recalled, at least 10 to 20 seconds. The two were pulled apart and Sprewell left practice, but 20 minutes later, not being a man to forgive and forget, he returned and threw a few punches at the coach before they were separated again. Spree's take on the incident? "I wasn't choking him that hard." Still, photos surfaced showing red rings around Carlesimo's neck.
Both of them have moved on. Sort of. Carlesimo is an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs but hasn't gotten another head-coaching opportunity. Sprewell played with the Knicks and the Timberwolves but may have talked himself out of the league a couple of years ago when, after rejecting a multimillion-dollar free-agent contract, he said, "Hey, a man has to feed his family."
8. The U.S. just lost to who? Aug. 16, 2004
You could pick out several bad moments from the United States' disastrous performance at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, which ended with a bronze medal. But I'll take this one: A point guard from Puerto Rico named Carlos Arroyo, who had completed three undistinguished seasons in the NBA, led Puerto Rico to a 92-73 victory in the U.S.' opening game, setting the stage for America's generally tepid play throughout the remainder of the competition.
Arroyo finished with 24 points, and Larry Brown, the U.S. coach, finished with a sinking feeling brought on by the realization that he had suffered the first Olympic loss since NBA stars were allowed to play, in 1992, a stretch of 24 games. But it wasn't Brown's fault alone. His allegedly All-Star backcourt of Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury was simply embarrassed by Arroyo and his teammates.
9. Malice at the Palace: Nov. 19, 2004
No, this doesn't refer to the Three Stooges' classic movie in which Moe, Curly and Larry set out to recover the Rootin' Tootin' stolen diamond in a faraway desert land and dress up in Santa Claus costumes to ... oh, never mind. Certainly there were Stooges in this incident, though, primarily Ron Artest, his Indiana Pacers teammate Stephen Jackson and a few beer-woozy Detroit Pistons fans at the Palace of Auburn Hills.
Most everyone knows the details by now: With a Pacers victory in the bag late in the game, Artest delivered a hard foul to an already exasperated Detroit center Ben Wallace, who then shoved Artest, who then reclined on the scorer's table, which prompted a Pistons fan named John Green to dump a cup of beer on him. Artest charged into the stands, followed by Jackson, who began beating people up aimlessly. No one, least of all Artest and Jackson, knew if they had the beer-thrower, which, of course, they didn't.
The melee continued for several minutes as beer, soda, ice, popcorn and even a chair or two were tossed at Pacers players. It was easily David Stern's worst moment as commissioner -- over the next few weeks the ugly incident was replayed endlessly and is still never far from the public's collective mind. Most of the blame came down on Artest, who was suspended for the entire season, but in this opinion Jackson (who got a 30-game suspension) was equally culpable, as were the fans who believed that the price of admission gave them carte blanche to act like idiots.
10. Larry gives reporters a brake: May 30, 2006
The "when will Larry Brown get fired?" circus saw its finest hour on an otherwise uninteresting stretch of road that leads to the New York Knicks' practice facility in Greenburgh, N.Y. Reporters had been waiting for weeks to get straight answers out of Brown and general manager Isiah Thomas and were blanketing all conceivable escape routes, including the highway. On this day, though, the reporters struck gold when Brown suddenly pulled over and told the media, "I feel like a dead man walking."
Sure enough, after Brown was officially fired and made a dead man on June 22, the Knicks used that interview, and others like it, to claim that Brown had violated tenets of his contract (i.e., interviews had to be given with a public-relations person present) and is not entitled to the full $40 million that is owed him. The dollar figure that will be paid to Brown remains unresolved at this writing, though Knicks beat writers no longer have to act like policemen on a stakeout.
On Feb. 6, 1975, the Spirits decided to hold a "Beat the Nets" night. They were the New York Nets then, the defending ABA champions and led by an Afro-ed young star named Julius Erving. Barnes, a free spirit who spent most of his postgame nights -- most of his nights, in fact -- at parties and in pool halls, decided to write a couple of poems for the evening. Here is one of them:
There once was a doctor named Erving,
Whose slam dunks were especially unnerving,
But when Marvin gets movin',
And the crowd gets to groovin',
For the doctor a hospital bed they'll be reserving.
Alas, the final was 113-92, Nets.
See? I got an ABA story in anyway.
Herewith the NBA moments:
1. Snoozeball: Nov. 22, 1950
Opponents of the Minneapolis Lakers could never figure out what to do with George Mikan, their giant, bespectacled center and the game's first dominant player. But on this night Murray Mendenhall, coach of the Fort Wayne Pistons, had an idea. A bad idea, but an idea nonetheless.
He instructed his team to do little else but hold on to the ball, thus rendering Mikan all but useless.
As Fort Wayne passed the ball listlessly around the outside and various players held on to it for minutes at a time, the officials, Jocko Collins and Stan Stutz, screamed at them to do something. But the Pistons were not violating the rules at the time. There was a "flurry" of scoring at the end of each of the first three quarters, but when the Pistons scored a basket in the final seconds, they took a 19-18 lead and held on for the victory.
NBA president Maurice Podoloff expressed his concern the next day that fans would be turned off -- gee, you think? -- but it wasn't until four years later that the league instituted a 24-second clock. This game was listed prominently as one of the reasons for the innovation.
2. The Punch: Dec. 9, 1977
When a fight broke out during a Los Angeles Lakers-Houston Rockets game at the Forum in L.A., Rudy Tomjanovich, then a 29-year-old, 6-foot-8 All-Star forward, did what seemed natural -- he rushed to the aid of his Houston teammate Kevin Kunnert, who was engaged in a tussle with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Kermit Washington, also 6-8, and one of the game's first real power forwards, did what seemed to be natural to him, too. He sensed Tomjanovich coming from behind and, thinking he was protecting himself and his teammate Abdul-Jabbar, turned around and threw a haymaker at Tomjanovich. It landed as squarely as any punch in any game has ever landed, and basically crushed Rudy T's face. Abdul-Jabbar later said that he didn't see the punch but heard it.
Tomjanovich subsequently required five surgeries, and though he later returned to the NBA, he was never quite the same player. But in the long run, the punch was worse for Washington, and not because he was fined $10,000 and suspended for 60 days. Though he was a gentle man with a good basketball mind, Washington was labeled a villain and a thug, and after retiring from the game in 1982 he could never climb the coaching ladder. Rudy T., meanwhile, coached the Rockets to back-to-back championships in 1994 and '95.
The men have since reconciled. But rarely is there a punch thrown on an NBA court when that moment in the Forum is not recalled.
3. The unseen work of art: May 16, 1980
If an NBA rookie, playing out of position in an important Game 6 in the NBA Finals, scores 42 points, grabs 15 rebounds and dishes out seven assists but nobody sees it, did it really happen?
This is how low the NBA had sunk in 1980: Its national-TV contract with CBS called for tape-delayed coverage of even the championship series. That's why America missed seeing live Magic Johnson's transcendent performance that gave the Lakers a 123-107 win over the Philadelphia 76ers and the first of Magic's five championships.
The story after the game was not Magic (who was moved to center because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had sprained his ankle in Game 5) but, rather, how no one had seen what Magic had done. When David Stern took over as commissioner four years later, he pointed to this game as exactly what he didn't want to happen during his reign. And it never did.
4. The Len Bias shocker: June 19, 1986
Another NBA Draft, another Boston Celtics steal. Virtually every NBA expert evaluated Len Bias, a University of Maryland forward whom the Celtics got with the second pick, as the best talent available, the future successor to Larry Bird, the perfect player to keep Boston competitive until 2000.
But just a day after the draft, Bias, 22, returned from Boston to his Maryland campus suite in Landover and, sometime in the middle of the night, ingested cocaine that may have contributed to his sudden death by cardiac arrest. "It's the worst thing I've ever heard," said Bird, who days earlier had led the Celtics to the championship.
The impact of the tragedy was profound: A flurry of self-examination at college campuses and in pro sports leagues about the perils of drugs; an investigation into Maryland athletics that eventually led to the resignation of coach Lefty Driesell; a domino effect that tore through that '86 Draft, which produced a number of other drug victims and early washouts; and a low point for the Celtics franchise, which has not won a championship since.
5. A Magic moment, but not a magical one: Nov. 7, 1991
The rumors started early that day. Magic Johnson, slightly past his prime but still one of the best players in the game, is retiring. But why? Finally, at a nationally televised news conference, Johnson announced that he had the AIDS virus and, indeed, would be quitting. In typical Magic fashion, what he said was that he had "attained" the AIDS virus, as if it were a conquest.
And over the next few months, indeed, "conquest" became the operative word. Johnson said he had contracted the virus through heterosexual contact, of which there was no shortage -- encounters in elevators and offices, sometimes with more than one woman.
As with the Bias tragedy, there was an immediate self-examination of NBA players and casual sexual encounters. But as one NBA hound reported at the time, "Outside of a few more condoms, nothing much changed."
6. Michael lost how much? May 1993
Around the NBA it was an open secret Michael Jordan loved to gamble -- in casinos, on the golf course, in private card games. He would come in from a night of gambling in Atlantic City, take a shower, go to the arena and beat up the Knicks or the 76ers. So whose business was it what Jordan did with his personal money?
But then a heretofore unknown lawyer named Richard Esquinas came out with a book called Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction, in which he alleged that he had won $1.3 million from Jordan on the golf course. The book, coupled with the $57,000 check that Jordan had written to a guy named Slim Bouler to cover gambling losses -- any time you gamble with a "Slim," you deserve what you get -- suddenly made Jordan's alleged "addiction" a matter for national consumption.
A few months later Jordan announced his retirement from basketball -- that would be his first retirement -- and speculation began as to whether NBA commissioner David Stern had demanded he get away from the game because of his unsavory gambling associations. To this day Jordan and Stern vehemently deny it, but the accusation has never gone away and probably never will.
7. Is that my neck or are you just glad to see me? Dec. 1, 1997
The relationship between Golden State Warriors guard Latrell Sprewell and his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, was never a good one. The latter didn't appreciate the former's rather loose approach to things such as schedules and practice habits, while the former didn't appreciate the latter's intensity and attention to detail. Trouble had been brewing (Carlesimo had fined Spree for missing a flight three days earlier) when on this day the coach instructed the player to make crisper passes during a practice session. Spree warned the coach to get out of his face. Carlesimo didn't.
So Spree wrapped his hands around Carlesimo's neck for, as witnesses later recalled, at least 10 to 20 seconds. The two were pulled apart and Sprewell left practice, but 20 minutes later, not being a man to forgive and forget, he returned and threw a few punches at the coach before they were separated again. Spree's take on the incident? "I wasn't choking him that hard." Still, photos surfaced showing red rings around Carlesimo's neck.
Both of them have moved on. Sort of. Carlesimo is an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs but hasn't gotten another head-coaching opportunity. Sprewell played with the Knicks and the Timberwolves but may have talked himself out of the league a couple of years ago when, after rejecting a multimillion-dollar free-agent contract, he said, "Hey, a man has to feed his family."
8. The U.S. just lost to who? Aug. 16, 2004
You could pick out several bad moments from the United States' disastrous performance at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, which ended with a bronze medal. But I'll take this one: A point guard from Puerto Rico named Carlos Arroyo, who had completed three undistinguished seasons in the NBA, led Puerto Rico to a 92-73 victory in the U.S.' opening game, setting the stage for America's generally tepid play throughout the remainder of the competition.
Arroyo finished with 24 points, and Larry Brown, the U.S. coach, finished with a sinking feeling brought on by the realization that he had suffered the first Olympic loss since NBA stars were allowed to play, in 1992, a stretch of 24 games. But it wasn't Brown's fault alone. His allegedly All-Star backcourt of Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury was simply embarrassed by Arroyo and his teammates.
9. Malice at the Palace: Nov. 19, 2004
No, this doesn't refer to the Three Stooges' classic movie in which Moe, Curly and Larry set out to recover the Rootin' Tootin' stolen diamond in a faraway desert land and dress up in Santa Claus costumes to ... oh, never mind. Certainly there were Stooges in this incident, though, primarily Ron Artest, his Indiana Pacers teammate Stephen Jackson and a few beer-woozy Detroit Pistons fans at the Palace of Auburn Hills.
Most everyone knows the details by now: With a Pacers victory in the bag late in the game, Artest delivered a hard foul to an already exasperated Detroit center Ben Wallace, who then shoved Artest, who then reclined on the scorer's table, which prompted a Pistons fan named John Green to dump a cup of beer on him. Artest charged into the stands, followed by Jackson, who began beating people up aimlessly. No one, least of all Artest and Jackson, knew if they had the beer-thrower, which, of course, they didn't.
The melee continued for several minutes as beer, soda, ice, popcorn and even a chair or two were tossed at Pacers players. It was easily David Stern's worst moment as commissioner -- over the next few weeks the ugly incident was replayed endlessly and is still never far from the public's collective mind. Most of the blame came down on Artest, who was suspended for the entire season, but in this opinion Jackson (who got a 30-game suspension) was equally culpable, as were the fans who believed that the price of admission gave them carte blanche to act like idiots.
10. Larry gives reporters a brake: May 30, 2006
The "when will Larry Brown get fired?" circus saw its finest hour on an otherwise uninteresting stretch of road that leads to the New York Knicks' practice facility in Greenburgh, N.Y. Reporters had been waiting for weeks to get straight answers out of Brown and general manager Isiah Thomas and were blanketing all conceivable escape routes, including the highway. On this day, though, the reporters struck gold when Brown suddenly pulled over and told the media, "I feel like a dead man walking."
Sure enough, after Brown was officially fired and made a dead man on June 22, the Knicks used that interview, and others like it, to claim that Brown had violated tenets of his contract (i.e., interviews had to be given with a public-relations person present) and is not entitled to the full $40 million that is owed him. The dollar figure that will be paid to Brown remains unresolved at this writing, though Knicks beat writers no longer have to act like policemen on a stakeout.
