- 3 months ago
Jordan got 6 with Pippen, he probably has 7 or 8 with Drexler
IG: aj_mckenzie416
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Twitter: AJMckenzie94847
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00:00On the line!
00:01It's five bucks there!
00:03Michigan can't take a timeout.
00:18Brian Kenney, and welcome to ESPN Classics' Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame.
00:22A series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities
00:25who are remembered largely for their mistakes,
00:27controversial moments, or questionable decisions.
00:30Our mission is not to further vilify these teams or individuals,
00:33but instead to challenge the conventional wisdom
00:35and re-examine what has been accepted as fact.
00:38In this show, we'll count down the reasons why you can't blame
00:41the Portland Trailblazers for drafting Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.
00:45It seems so obvious now, but in the early 1980s,
00:48Portland was a perennial playoff contender,
00:50but one that had slipped from its championship level of 1977.
00:53In 1984, it had the second pick in a draft absolutely loaded with talent.
00:58The choices made at the top of that draft would have a tremendous effect on NBA history
01:02and on each franchise involved for more than a decade to come.
01:07Michael Jordan, there's Michael, Jack,
01:13Elijah Wan with a great rebound.
01:16Oh, there's Barkley!
01:17That was one of the best drafts in NBA history.
01:20Obviously, you know, you had Elijah Wan and Jordan and Sam Bowie and Charles Barkley.
01:24It was a terrific draft.
01:26They used to have this show, Let's Make a Deal,
01:28and they had three boxes.
01:30Which box do you want to pick?
01:31And it was like there was a Cadillac behind box number two.
01:35And yet the stupid, idiot general manager goes,
01:37I'll take box number one.
01:38Portland drafts from the University of Kentucky, Sam Bowie.
01:42Sam Bowie?
01:43Give me a freaking break!
01:46After Houston began the day by selecting Hakeem Elijah Wan,
01:50Portland picked Sam Bowie.
01:51And the greatest player of his time, perhaps any time,
01:55was chosen by Chicago.
01:57The break to Michael Jordan.
02:00You can blame the Blazers for not drafting Jordan
02:02because somebody was stupid enough not to recognize his talent
02:05and what his potential was.
02:06You got two surefire, can't-miss players,
02:09and you end up with a guy, good player, good guy,
02:12but he's not going to be in that top 50, right?
02:15You have to think that.
02:16There was some sort of mistake made there.
02:18You don't pass up on a Michael Jordan to take a Sam Bowie.
02:23Well, I'm looking very forward to playing with the Portland Trailblazers.
02:26When people looked at it, they looked at Dr. Jack Ramsey,
02:29they looked at everybody within the Blazers organization,
02:32and they said, hell, we should have fired them twice.
02:35Ha!
02:37Portland coach Jack Ramsey and general manager Stu Inman knew talent.
02:41They had built a championship team by making smart draft choices.
02:45But in 1984, they strayed from their basic approach.
02:49This franchise had been emphatic about drafting the best player available
02:55no matter the position, and had they stuck to that,
02:58I think they would have taken Michael Jordan.
03:00That was the classic NBA thing.
03:03When you don't know what else to do, draft the biggest guy available.
03:06Nobody will ever question.
03:07Who's the guy who got in a fight with Darryl Dawkins?
03:13Maurice Lucas?
03:15Maybe if I take the big guy.
03:18Well, yes they will, if you miss on Michael Jordan.
03:21He came in and took the league by storm his rookie year and never stopped.
03:29I'd be lying to you if I didn't say I'd look in the box scores
03:32and I'd see where I had 11 points, Michael had 60,
03:36and people would say, wow, they had a chance to draft Jordan and they took Bowie.
03:43As much of the sports world knows,
03:45Jordan won 10 scoring titles and 6 championship rings with the Bulls.
03:50By comparison, Bowie was a monumental bust for the Blazers,
03:54spending much of his five seasons with him on the injured list.
03:58His injury record was really scary.
04:00He missed two full seasons with injuries,
04:02but they had to know they were taking a gamble with his brittle bones.
04:06There was always something brittle about Sam Bowie's game,
04:10and a guy with those kinds of physical ailments
04:13is almost by definition going to be brittle.
04:16Jordan had this great career,
04:17and Sam Bowie had almost an injury-prone, non-existent career.
04:22The public feels that if we had Michael Jordan,
04:26would we have won six championships?
04:30Michael Jordan in Portland, everything would be different here.
04:32The identity of the city would just be a little different.
04:36There's no statue of Michael Jordan in front of the Rose Garden.
04:43We admit, it is tantalizing to think about a Portland team
04:46that had Clyde Drexler, Jerome Kersey, Terry Porter, and Michael Jordan.
04:50Trailblazer fans would be counting the championships.
04:52But we're here to assert that you can't blame the Blazers
04:55for drafting Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.
04:57Before we get to our top five reasons why Portland has gotten a bum rap,
05:01let's take a look at some additional points in its favor.
05:03We call them the best of the rest.
05:07The coin flip.
05:08The Rockets and the Blazers,
05:09who obtained the pick from Indiana in a 1981 trade for Tom Owens,
05:14flipped for the first selection in 1984.
05:16Both teams had their sights set not on Jordan, but Olajuwon.
05:21I was hoping and praying that we win the flip,
05:24because we had to call.
05:26I blame it on the coin flip.
05:28I don't know who told them numerically it was going to come up tails,
05:32what seance they went to, any place that tells fortunes.
05:37You've got to blame it on that.
05:39On the way to the coin flip, our owner, Mr. Weinberg,
05:42was flipping the coin numerous times,
05:43and just before he went into the building,
05:46he flipped it and it came up tails,
05:47and he decided that's what he would call.
05:51Almost any coin flip in which I've been involved automatically calls heads.
05:56Larry called tails, and the rest is history.
06:00Had Portland gotten Olajuwon,
06:02there wouldn't be the conversation about Michael Jordan,
06:05no matter what he did.
06:08In a coin flip for the number one pick in 19...
06:10I had a Olajuwon with Clyde Drexler.
06:14Olajuwon and Drexler got together in 95 in real life
06:18and won a championship immediately.
06:22They could have won probably three.
06:26In 1972, the Blazers correctly called tails
06:30and selected LaRue Martin,
06:32who had averaged five points over four seasons.
06:36The blame goes to calling tails.
06:38That's where it gets dropped down to.
06:40It didn't work for Olajuwon Martin.
06:42You should have switched strategies.
06:45Another best of the rest, Patrick Ewing's mother.
06:49She's not entirely blameless.
06:52Ewing had made a promise to his mother
06:54that he was going to get his Georgetown degree,
06:56and he did get his Georgetown degree in four years,
06:59as promised, and he was not going to leave that program.
07:02Patrick elected not to come out.
07:05So that put us with Sam.
07:07We would have gone Akeem, Patrick, Sam, in that order.
07:12We had hoped that Ewing was going to come out that year.
07:15I wish he'd have come out,
07:16because then it would have been easy
07:18if you lost the wise and won't you take Ewing.
07:20We'd have been happy with either one of them.
07:25Our final best of the rest, the Rockets.
07:28They also passed on Jordan.
07:31Why don't people blame the Houston Rockets for taking Akeem?
07:33Did Akeem win as many championships as Michael Jordan?
07:36No.
07:37So, you know, Houston must be just as stupid as Portland.
07:40If Michael Jordan hadn't taken a couple years to go try baseball,
07:43I'm not convinced Elijah Wan would have ever won championships,
07:46thereby justifying somehow his pick as the number one player in the draft.
07:50Every team that looked back had the opportunity to take a Michael Jordan.
07:54I said they'd blow it.
07:59Reason number five.
08:01The draft is a crapshoot.
08:05We got human beings trying to judge other human beings selecting players.
08:10There's a gamble with whomever you take.
08:13The Blazers, ironically, were one of the best drafting teams of that era.
08:19Nine of the 12 players on their 1977 championship team were drafted by the Blazers.
08:24In the nine drafts that followed, Portland made their share of bad picks,
08:29but also selected three players, Clyde Drexler, Jerome Kersey, and Terry Porter,
08:34who had become the foundation of a team that reached the NBA Finals twice in the early 90s.
08:40Stewieman had the ability to go to a former girls' school in Virginia and find Jerome Kersey
08:46to grab Terry Porter out of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
08:50They had a great intuitive sense for talent.
08:53They just made a lot more right decisions than wrong.
08:57I would match our draft picks over the years with anybody's.
09:03This is a franchise that has a tremendous track record.
09:07And then to say that because they missed one guy,
09:11that it put a curse on the franchise, I think, is totally unfair.
09:18Before we get to reason number four, let's take a look at how the 1984 draft impacted the future.
09:24Well, 1984 was the pivotal year that set up the whole lottery system.
09:28That was the year that Houston decided to go on a downward spiral.
09:36After winning the first overall pick in 1983, the Rockets selected Ralph Sampson.
09:41But late in the next season, they slumped badly, losing 27 of their last 36 games.
09:48Some cried foul.
09:50Far be it from me to be the guy who said that Houston tanked a few games to get into
09:54that slot of getting to the coin flip and having a chance at the number one.
09:58Every game with signs, you know, wanting to lodge around.
10:01It wasn't too hard to figure out what the right business decision was.
10:03I don't think we played the way we could have to go and win more games.
10:08I think, you know, played for, I think, the first pick.
10:10At the owners meeting that June in 84, no committees formed this time.
10:16Boom.
10:17That's the end of the coin flip.
10:19The lottery was instituted immediately.
10:24Reason number four, size matters.
10:27Until Jordan changed the game, an NBA tenet was you can't win a championship without a dominant big man.
10:34Right.
10:35From 1959 to 1980, there were 21 MVPs.
10:4120 of them were centers.
10:42Exactly.
10:42It was pretty much an accepted theory that you couldn't win a championship without a good big man.
10:50What Russell, Chamberlain, Jabbar, Bellamy, Nate Thurman did, it elevated their position.
10:56No, no.
10:57And there goes Oscar Robertson.
10:59The only MVP of that era, those 21 years, to not be a center.
11:04But Walt Bellamy and Nate Thurman didn't win championships.
11:09You have players like that, and you don't have one, you have a real problem.
11:14The theory still stands that if there's a big man available, that's your franchise player.
11:22In 1984, the Blazers were merely following conventional wisdom by picking Bowie instead of Jordan.
11:28In the previous 26 seasons, only one team, the 1975 Warriors with Clifford Ray, had won the championship without a
11:36star center.
11:38The Blazers were coming off a decade of getting their brains beat in by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar down in L
11:44.A.
11:45And the conventional wisdom at that time was, you have to have the big guy in the middle or you're
11:49never going to get there.
11:50Everybody was trying whatever they could to get another big man or to get some way to defend Kareem and
11:56to slow down the Lakers at that time.
11:59For 55 years, every team, except the one Jordan was on, had a Hall of Fame power forwarder center that
12:10won a championship.
12:15Okay, except the Jordan Bulls and the Isaiah Thomas Pistons.
12:20That's about it.
12:22Eight championships.
12:23With Abdul-Jabbar still going strong and the Twin Towers looming in Houston, there was every reason to think big
12:31was better.
12:32While everybody loves to talk about the preening pretty boys on the perimeter, it's still a game that's dominated by
12:39men who make their name in the paint.
12:44To me, that's a no-brainer.
12:45You need a seven-footer.
12:47Sam Bowie's the biggest seven-footer you have available at the time.
12:50You know, so you got to roll with it.
12:52Another factor that played into the Blazers' pick of Bowie was the memory of letting Moses Malone go even before
12:59he played a game.
13:00Portland acquired him in the 1976 ABA dispersal draft.
13:04But with Bill Walton in tow, the front office felt they didn't need a second multi-skilled center.
13:10Yeah, I wish we'd have kept Moses Malone.
13:12That was a serious mistake.
13:14They traded Moses Malone to the Buffalo Braves for a first-round draft pick.
13:21And days later, the Buffalo Braves traded him to Houston for two first-round draft picks.
13:25If they had traded me and kept Moses, that team would have had untold championship banners.
13:41Basketball's favorite deadhead, Bill Walton.
13:44You can blame me for just about everything.
13:48Late in the 1978 season, a year after the California Redwood from Westwood led Portland to an NBA title,
13:56Walton's career was stalled by stress fractures in the feet.
13:59The Blazers were desperate to regain their past glory.
14:03Once they had Walton, they wanted more Waltons.
14:08Good passing centers are not easily come by.
14:15Sam possessed a lot of those skills, and at seven foot, he could see the court pretty well and deliver
14:20a ball, as Walton did.
14:21Right pass by Tom to Horde.
14:25But if Portland hoped for the second coming of Walton, they were blind to the downside possibilities both players shared.
14:32In his second season, the seven-foot-one center's legs began to break down.
14:37And over the next four years, he missed 265 regular season games.
14:43Most people look in and say, well, both of them had injuries.
14:45That kind of kept them from really going a lot further in their careers.
14:50They got the one really good complete season out of Bill before injuries took him away.
14:58They never got the one really good season out of Sam Boone.
15:02I'm not one to point the finger, but I had some major injuries that obviously restricted me from reaching my
15:09full potential.
15:13Bowie's physical problems began while he was at Kentucky, where he missed two full seasons.
15:18He had suffered certainly a very serious leg fracture.
15:22He was locked up really in plaster for 42-plus weeks.
15:29It was an extremely rare form of tibial fracture, and we found only 16 cases of that particular fracture worldwide.
15:38And the majority were in male ballet dancers.
15:43Stu Inman spent an awful lot of time in Kentucky talking to their medical people, and we also had our
15:51people look at him.
15:53The consensus from everybody was that he had a good, predictable future in the NBA.
15:59Sam had his physical and passed with flying colors.
16:03It was just one of those things that happens.
16:07After both were named to the all-rookie team, it was Jordan, and not Bowie, who went down early in
16:13his second season with an injury.
16:15He broke a bone in his foot and missed almost a whole year.
16:19A lot of people were looking like, wow, I'm glad we drafted Bowie instead of Jordan.
16:26Unfortunately, Jordan got healed, very much so, and Sam kept continuing to have his difficulties.
16:31We just couldn't depend on him because of the health problems.
16:34It wasn't anything to do with Sam.
16:36It was just his body just didn't have it.
16:38We were awfully good, and I think had he not gotten hurt, it would have been very, very interesting.
16:45If he'd have stayed injury-free, I mean, we'd have definitely won some more championships in Portland.
16:51Sam Bowie was a very promising player, but sadly, like way too many Blazer centers, his leg just wouldn't hold
17:00up.
17:05Reason number two, Dean Smith.
17:08I really blame Dean Smith because if Dean Smith would allow Michael to have averaged 40, it wouldn't have been
17:16no secrets.
17:17That's always the running joke was, Dean's the only guy to hold him under 20 points.
17:22He got hit on Dean Smith's team a little bit because they're so team-oriented.
17:28North Carolina had a host of guys that were playing under their ability, and the pro game sprung them, and
17:36they turned out to be great pros.
17:37But you didn't know that Jordan was going to be that same kind of guy.
17:43Jordan averaged 17.7 points per game in his three seasons at North Carolina.
17:49Although he was...
17:49...to be more before I looked it up.
17:5117 points for Jordan?
17:54He could have easily averaged 35.
17:58Named College Player of the Year as a junior in 1984, it would have taken extra-sensory perception to predict
18:05his future.
18:05Anyone that says that they knew from the beginning that Michael Jordan would be the greatest player ever, really didn't
18:13know what they were talking about.
18:14Michael was not LeBron James.
18:17Michael was not somebody who everybody said was God's gift to the game of basketball.
18:23Let's face it, he could barely hit a 12-footer when he came to the NBA, and could barely dribble
18:26with his left hand.
18:28It's easy for us to sit back and say, oh boy, you guys are really idiots, but, you know, I
18:32think Michael really hadn't emerged as a dominant player.
18:40Even though they had selected Jordan with their first pick, the Bulls were disappointed.
18:45GM Rod Thorne admitted as much when he apologized to Chicago fans.
18:50You know how Rod Thorne built the team by accident?
18:52He didn't want Michael Jordan.
18:54He wanted the big man.
18:56There was sentiment in the organization.
18:58The feeling was that, you know, Jordan was potentially a very fine NBA player, but to think he would turn
19:04out to be what he turned out to be, I wish I were prescient enough to, you know, to have
19:09thought that at the time.
19:11To the city of Chicago, thank God you drafted me instead of Portland.
19:17If I was general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers, and I knew Mike was going to have the career
19:22that he had, I'd have drafted Mike before Sam Bowie.
19:25Every time I see Mike, it's his fault, because nobody knew he was going to be as good as he
19:31turned out to be.
19:38Reason number one, Clyde Drexler.
19:41His presence meant the Blazers had no need for Michael Jordan.
19:45I thought it was a logical choice.
19:47We needed a center.
19:48We had Clyde Drexler.
19:49Clyde was just as good as anybody.
19:52So there was no really rush for him to go out and get a two guard.
19:56You can't sit Michael Jordan on the bench, right?
20:00They thought Jordan was like an imitation Drexler.
20:02Why do we need two guys like that?
20:04There's no balance in getting two players playing the same position to do the exact same thing at the same
20:09time.
20:10One of them is going to eventually have to go.
20:11So they did the smart thing in drafting Sam Bowie.
20:16Drexler wasn't the Blazers' only talented guard.
20:19The man he played behind, Jim Paxson, was fresh off a season in which he averaged 21 points per game.
20:25It wasn't even an argument.
20:27When Jordan's name came up, Stu said, you know, he's going to be a real good player in the NBA.
20:34But when you already have Paxson and Drexler, you need a center.
20:39People were thinking that, you know, you guys have a great team.
20:41All you need is a big man.
20:45Often buried in the blaming of Portland for picking Bowie over Jordan is the memory of an athlete with outstanding
20:51potential.
20:52Sam has been brilliant.
20:54He's got great mobility.
20:55He's agile.
20:56He runs the floor well.
20:58And he's got great range as a shooter.
20:59When you look at a specimen like that, any management team would have taken Sam Bowie over Michael.
21:07If I was in Portland's place, absolutely I'd have taken Bowie.
21:11It didn't work out, but you can't fault the Portland Trailblazers.
21:16Knowing what everybody knew, you can't fault them for taking Bowie.
21:21Any other general manager or coach who says it was a mistake, they wouldn't have done it, is probably not
21:26telling the truth.
21:33Would the Blazers have become a dynasty with Jordan and Drexler sharing the ball?
21:38Yeah, probably.
21:39But we'll never really know.
21:40I'm Brian Kenney.
21:41Thanks for watching.
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