Moses Malone, page 11
Executives and attorneys from both leagues met at the Cape Cod Room at Dunfey Family’s Hyannis Resort in Hyannis, Massachusetts, in mid-June to finalize the terms.13 The NBA accepted the four-team plan, with the Spurs, Nuggets, Nets, and Pacers joining the league, and was unwilling to call it a merger or recognize ABA statistics. The four would be treated like expansion teams and be required to pay a $3.2 million fee to join. The Nets were forced to pay an additional $4.8 million to the New York Knicks as compensation for invading their territory. The deal was finalized on June 17.14
The Colonels were given $3 million to fold their franchise, but the Spirits owners held out for more. Daniel and Ozzie Silna negotiated their own deal with the help of Donald Schupak. They would be paid for every Spirits player drafted by NBA teams, which amounted to $2.2 million. Additionally, they’d receive one-seventh share of the “visual media rights” of each of the four ABA teams, in perpetuity, that entered the NBA. Cable television was in its infancy, and no one could have imagined how enormous that payout would be. The Silnas had received a reported $300 million as of 2014 when they negotiated an end to the agreement for an additional $500 million.15
As part of the deal between the two leagues, the New Orleans Jazz relinquished its rights to Moses from the December draft. That didn’t stop Jazz minority owner Shelly Beychok from trying to sign Moses before the dispersal draft, which drew a written rebuke from Deputy Commissioner Gourdine.16 Such shenanigans were indicative of the NBA in the 1970s, a small-time operation fighting for credibility while staving off insolvency.
The NBA agreed to honor all ABA contracts, and the four ABA teams joined with their rosters intact. The Spirits and Colonels entered what was called a dispersal draft, in which teams could select them for a fee determined by the league on an individual basis. Artis Gilmore, a 7-foot-2-inch center who had won a championship with the Colonels, was valued the highest at $1.1 million, followed by Marvin Barnes at $500,000, Moses at $350,000, Maurice Lucas at $300,000 and Ron Boone at $250,000.17
The Chicago Bulls selected Gilmore first. Bucky Buckwalter was working as a scout for the Trail Blazers and pushed them to choose Malone, which they did with the fifth pick. The Blazers also selected Maurice Lucas with the second pick, which they had acquired form the Atlanta Hawks the day before the draft.18
Berlyn Hodges served many roles for the Trail Blazers since their inception in 1970 and was working in ticket sales when they acquired Malone. He picked up Moses from the airport in Portland and drove the young center forty-five miles to Salem, where the team held training camp at Willamette University. Hodges turned on the car radio, and the two men heard a radio personality announce that Malone wouldn’t be in Portland long. The Trail Blazers were going to trade him.
Hodges knew the report was true and frantically changed the station. He tried to fill the awkward silence by asking Malone if he had any hobbies. Moses mumbled something that sounded like “swimming pools.” Hodges asked, “Your hobby is building swimming pools?” “No,” Malone replied, “swimming and pool. Man, playing pool.” They drove the rest of the way in silence.19
Jack Ramsay was the new coach of the Blazers and was intrigued about adding Malone to the roster. He was immediately informed by owner Larry Weinberg that they selected Moses for the purpose of trading him.20 The Blazers had a crowded frontcourt with Bill Walton and Maurice Lucas slated to start at center and power forward and a serviceable backup at both positions in Lloyd Neal. Management was unwilling to pay Malone’s draft fee and significant salary for a bench player.
Ramsay was also skeptical as to whether Moses could play in his system. The coach wanted to run a “play action offense” based on reading and reacting rather than set plays. He sought highly skilled, intelligent players who could contribute immediately.21 Moses was a poor passer, couldn’t shoot, and had received relatively minimal coaching. It would take time for him to develop.
Malone was naturally quiet, and the knowledge that he wasn’t wanted in Portland caused him to withdraw further. He’d sit on the trainer’s table to be taped before practice, point to his feet, and say to the athletic trainer, Ron Culp, “Feet.” Once during a scrimmage, he said, “Wrist” to Culp, though Culp thought he said, “Rest.”
The trainer yelled to Ramsay, “Moses wants to come out and take a rest.”
“No,” said Malone, pointing to his wrist, “not rest, wrist.”22
Moses failed to impress Ramsay during the team’s six-day training camp. He wasn’t familiar with the offense and was tentative with the ball. The coach played him just one minute in the Blazers’ first preseason game against the Los Angeles Lakers and four minutes in the second game against the Seattle SuperSonics. Lloyd Neal underwent knee surgery after the Seattle game, resulting in a slight uptick in Moses’s playing time to sixteen, sixteen, ten, and eleven minutes over the next four games. Ramsay didn’t give him a chance.23
Lucas knew Moses could play from their battles in the ABA. As for the rest of guys, “his game and talent preceded him,” said Walton.24 Johnny Davis was a rookie on the team and recalls Walton and Malone going at one another day after day in practice. They had two very different styles but were both dominant in their own way. Lucas was a fierce competitor, and he and Malone talked trash to each other throughout practice. Lloyd Neal liked to mix it up down low as well. Davis played ten years in the NBA and coached in the league for twenty-five more. Those were the most intense practices he’s ever seen.
Moses grew more comfortable with his teammates, and they enjoyed his presence. He played practical jokes on the guys. Davis went to get his ankles taped before practice one day and couldn’t find his shoes when he returned to his locker. He looked all over. Then he noticed Moses staring at him, and the big fellow erupted in laughter.25
Lucas immediately established himself as the leader of the team and the ringleader in the locker room. Walton and Malone both stuttered, and he teased them mercilessly about their trouble speaking. “The whole rest of the team would just be howling with laughter,” said Walton. “And tears of fun would be streaming down our cheeks.”26
The Trail Blazers tried to trade Moses over the summer and during training camp. However, unless an NBA executive’s team had played an interleague exhibition against the Stars or Spirits, the executive likely hadn’t seen the Petersburg product play, and there was a stigma against ABA guys. General manager Harry Glickman offered the Celtics Malone and Sidney Wicks for All-Star guard Jo Jo White, but Red Auerbach turned him down.27 Denver inquired about Malone before trading for veteran Paul Silas instead.28 Portland reached out to Knicks general manager Eddie Donovan to gauge his interest in Moses. Donovan asked, “Is he better than Gianelli?” referring to John Gianelli, the team’s journeyman center.29
The Buffalo Braves finally stepped forward with an offer of a first-round pick for Malone, but they wanted to see him play first.30 Portland told Braves executives to attend the team’s last preseason game on October 16, against Seattle. Moses entered the game at the start of the second quarter with Portland leading 32–27. He scored 11 points in his first five minutes and ended up with 15 points and 10 rebounds in the second quarter alone. The Blazers outscored the Sonics 35–14 during that stretch for a 70–41 halftime lead. Moses finished with 24 points on 11 of 14 shooting and 12 rebounds in twenty-six minutes.31
Blazers president Larry Weinberg and his wife Barbi were in attendance. Midway through the second quarter Barbi said, “Larry, you can’t trade Moses.”32 Walton had been pushing Ramsay to keep Malone, and the coach admitted after the game that he needed to reevaluate his position on Moses. At a team meeting a couple of days later, Ramsay and others voted to keep him, though Glickman interrupted to tell them that Moses had already been traded to Buffalo.33 The Braves surrendered a first-round draft pick and $232,000 (the remaining two payments of the dispersal-draft fee).
Ramsay informed the team of the trade at practice later that day. “What did you get for him?” Walton asked.
“We got a first,” Ramsay answered.
“You didn’t trade him away,” Walton said, “you gave him away.”34
Portland won the NBA championship that season and started the 1977–78 campaign 50-10 before Walton was sidelined with chronic foot problems. He missed the entire following season, his last with Portland, while Moses was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. “I believe if we had kept Moses, we would have won multiple championships even with Bill Walton hurt,” said guard Lionel Hollins.35 “They should have kept Moses and traded me,” Walton said in 2006.36
Malone joined a talented squad in Buffalo that included three-time scoring champion Bob McAdoo, a heralded rookie out of Notre Dame named Adrian Dantley, and speedster Randy Smith. But it was a franchise in flux. Owner Paul Snyder had threatened to move the team to Toronto or Florida if it couldn’t sell five thousand season tickets, and McAdoo requested a trade heading into the final year of his contract when management wouldn’t meet his financial demands. Snyder sold half of the team to John Y. Brown, the former owner of the Kentucky Colonels.37
Moses allowed the Braves to move McAdoo to power forward and served as insurance in case he left. The Braves’ new coach was Tates Locke, the former Clemson coach who had recruited Moses and was fired for violations, in part involving Malone. Tates acted as if he didn’t hold a grudge, but Moses felt otherwise.38 Locke played him a total of six minutes in the first two games, and that was with McAdoo missing the first one.
It was bizarre for the Braves to give up a first-round pick and significant cash for Malone and then not play him. There were rumors that people within the organization believed he wasn’t intelligent and didn’t want to invest in his development. The Braves reworked Moses’s contract when they acquired him, then, according to Snyder, Fentress demanded an additional clause guaranteeing that Moses would play at least twenty-four minutes per game. Fentress denied that and began working the phones in search of a new destination for Malone.39
Claude Terry was a veteran guard who had also recently joined the Braves. He and his wife were staying at a two-bedroom efficiency in Buffalo until they were able to move into their rental. When the team acquired Moses, they set him up two doors down from the Terrys. Claude spent four seasons with the Denver Nuggets, so he was familiar with Moses from the ABA. One day, he returned home from shopping with his wife and saw Malone sitting on the curb with his bags packed. Terry asked what was going on.
Moses replied, “I was just traded.”
Terry was in disbelief, as Malone had just arrived a week earlier. He asked what happened. Moses explained that it had something to do with his contract. He appeared to be unfazed by the turn of events.
Players didn’t get involved with team affairs at that time, particularly a journeyman like Terry. He had never contacted a general manger before but felt compelled to call Braves GM Bob MacKinnon to find out what happened. MacKinnon gave a vague answer.
Terry told him, “I watched this kid in the ABA, and you possibly could have traded the best offensive rebounder in the history of basketball.”40
The Braves traded McAdoo six weeks later, and Locke was fired midway through the season. “If we had kept that one club together, maybe we could have won the championship,” MacKinnon said years later. “We had Moses Malone, Bob McAdoo, [John] Shumate and [Adrian] Dantley, all on one club. To let that slip through our hands was very poor.”41
Tom Nissalke had recently taken over the reins of the Houston Rockets and had been pushing GM Ray Patterson to trade for his former player. Patterson had seen Moses play a few times and wasn’t that impressed, though he engaged in discussions with Portland based on Nissalke’s strong recommendation. He was offended when Portland asked for the entire $232,000 up front, and Patterson backed out. Moses’s agents, Donald Dell and Lee Fentress, also represented John Lucas, whom the Rockets selected first overall in the 1976 draft. They developed a strong relationship with Patterson during contract negotiations, and Fentress contacted the general manager to inform him that Moses was available again. This time Nissalke pushed harder. “Ray said, ‘If you’re that impressed with him, we’ll roll the dice,’” he recalled.
Snyder had been ambivalent about acquiring Malone. Brown, who knew Moses from the ABA, was the driving force behind the deal. The Rockets offered to reimburse Buffalo for the $232,000 they sent to Portland and throw in two first-round picks for Moses. Brown was overseas at the time, and Snyder jumped at the opportunity to turn the pick they sent out for Malone into two a week later. “If Brown had been there, the trade never would have happened,” said Fentress.42
In less than a year, Moses had been shunted between five teams (six, if you count the New Orleans Jazz) across two leagues. He was on the trade block for months without generating much interest, and executives voiced doubts about his skills and intelligence. It was a lot to handle for a young man two years removed from high school.
“When he started to consider the pros, I was concerned for him,” Moses’s high school coach Pro Hayes told Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated. “I was afraid that if he was defeated then, he could be destroyed. And so much more has happened than we ever feared—his team folding, then the league, being traded all around, so much—and he’s still Moses. The same Moses. He’s not Billy Showboat. No, sir. You see, Moses had a lot more faith in himself than we did.”43
11
A Launch Pad
Ray Patterson was a child of the Depression, the product of a single-parent home, who relied on wit and guile to survive a childhood in rough neighborhoods throughout the Midwest. He was a raconteur who knew how to relate to people. In the fall of 1976 Patterson was on the receiving end of a tall tale about a 7-foot-2 center who could score like Wilt Chamberlain and rebound like Bill Russell. Nissalke laid it on thick when trying to convince his GM to acquire Malone.1
Patterson risked his job in trading for the third-year center. The Rockets were cash-strapped, and the GM sacrificed cheap labor in the form of first-round draft picks for Moses and his hefty salary. Patterson met Moses in Houston and immediately realized the center wasn’t 7 feet 2 but more like 6 feet 10. Then the two men shook hands, and Ray went pale. Moses’s hands were tiny for a big man, dwarfed by the size of the 6-foot-3 Patterson’s. This was the guy he had bet his job and the future of the franchise on?2
The Moses trade wasn’t the first time Patterson put his neck on the line for the Rockets. The team had been in financial trouble since moving to Houston in 1971 and came within days of selling its best players to save the franchise. Ray brought staff members with him from the Milwaukee Bucks when he joined the Rockets in 1972 and felt a responsibility to them, in addition to the organization. On one dire occasion, he took out a second mortgage on his home to meet payroll. “My mother wasn’t too happy about that,” recalled his son Steve.3
The club joined the NBA in 1967 as the San Diego Rockets. San Diego was using the slogan “a city in motion” to promote its emergence as a first-class city. The name Rockets fit the theme and was even better suited for Houston, home of the Space Center, where they relocated in 1971. A group of Houston businessmen led by Wayne Duddleston, Billy Goldberg, and Mickey Herskowitz hoped to build on the excitement generated by the Game of the Century in 1968 between the University of Houston and UCLA that drew fifty-three thousand spectators at the Astrodome.4 The hero of that game, Elvin Hayes, played for the Rockets and was expected to put fans in the seats.
Unfortunately, Houston didn’t have an arena to host professional basketball. During their first season in Space City, the Rockets played “home” games in Waco, El Paso, and San Antonio, in addition to three Houston locations: Astrohall, Hofheinz Pavilion, and the Astrodome. A mere 759 people attended their first game in Waco, and the Rockets used fake crowd noise for the radio broadcast.5
Texas was football country. Bud Adams, the owner of the NFL’s Houston Oilers, told Patterson and anybody else who would listen that basketball would never make it in Houston.6 The team scheduled an appearance for the players at a mall to generate interest. Nobody talked to them. After two hours, a little old lady approached and said, “Oh my God, I love you guys, I love you.” They signed autographs for her and posed for a picture. Then the woman asked, “How do you guys fit into those spaceships?” She thought they were astronauts.7
The Rockets brought in Patterson and traded Hayes after that first season. In their second year in Houston (1972–73), they reduced their home courts to Hofheinz Pavilion and HemisFair Arena in San Antonio. “The good news was that we drew large crowds to HemisFair Arena,” recalled Rudy Tomjanovich. “The bad news was that those crowds generally cheered for the other team.”8 In 1973–74, they played before less than 3,000 spectators at home games eleven times, and only 2,160 showed up at Hofheinz for the home opener in 1974–75.9
The Rockets went through a series of owners and were placed in receivership after one of them, Irv Kaplan, filed for bankruptcy in 1975.10 The franchise’s fortunes began to turn that year when they moved into a permanent home in a new arena called The Summit. Then they were thrown a lifeline by the NBA-ABA “merger” when each NBA team received $700,000 in cash from the ABA teams joining the league. That was enough to keep the Rockets afloat and convince the holding company to add Malone.11
Patterson believed the franchise would have folded or moved had it been located in any other city. Houston was a boom town in the ’70s, with people making millions overnight on oil. Development was rapid, and real estate prices soared. Optimism and a sense of adventure were in the air.12 Moses joined a franchise that had experienced as much turnover as he had, though he shared the hope and resilience of his new city. The two would grow together.
* * *
Houston was a welcoming environment for Malone. The Rockets paid a significant price to acquire him and were invested in his future. In Nissalke and assistant Del Harris, he had coaches who cared about him and believed in his abilities. He and John Lucas, whom the Rockets drafted months earlier, moved into the same apartment complex and became close friends.13 Nissalke also brought in Goo Kennedy, Malone’s buddy from the Stars.14
