Tip-Off by Filip Bondy

Author:Filip Bondy [FILIPBONDY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

11

The Safe Pick

More than two decades later, Norm Sonju still believes the Dallas Mavericks were cheated on several occasions out of Michael Jordan—though his theories require considerable explanation. The former Mavs president was a Chicago businessman, the nephew of a University of Wisconsin–Madison crew coach by the same name and a fellow with sports management in his blood. At different times, the nephew helped found two NBA franchises and was part-owner of a third, the Boston Celtics. While working years later as chairman and CEO of a Christian family resort in upstate New York, Sonju still drew a pension from both the Mavericks and the Celtics. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, he was not so much a basketball man as a master salesman. While Sonju was moving the Buffalo Braves to San Diego in the 1970s, he did enough research on available markets to understand that the two most hospitable vacancies remained in Orange County and Dallas. After Sonju was done fiddling with the Clippers, he focused on starting an expansion franchise in Texas. The Mavs were his studied brainchild from the start. He would do this right, from sales department to basketball personnel. He was in no hurry, and that helped enormously.

“I realized as an expansion team we wouldn’t be very good for a while,” Sonju said. “Whether we win 15 or 27 games that first season, it doesn’t make a difference. We planned and thought about it.” He hired Rick Sund, a first-time GM, and made him his right-hand man. Then the Mavs traded the present for the future, over and over. They became the model for every expansion franchise to come, plucking draft picks from the Cleveland Cavaliers as if they were fat navel oranges in an orchard. During the course of just one season, 1980–81, the Mavs traded away Mike Bratz, Richard Washington, Geoff Huston, Jerome Whitehead, and unsigned number 1 draft pick Kiki Vandeweghe. In return, they got five firstround draft choices, from 1984 through 1986, including all three of the Cavaliers’ first picks in those drafts. In ’84 and ’85, Dallas would have five firstround and four secondround choices. Dallas had plenty of picks, plenty of space under the salary cap. And Cleveland was just terrible enough to make this whole plan work to perfection.

But it turned out the Mavericks were too smart for their own good. Sonju was at the Hilton Airport in Chicago for a board of governors meeting in May 1983, when David Stern and his deputy commissioner, Russ Granik, ambushed Sonju in the hallway and led him into a room for a two-on-one arm-twisting session. “I was thinking, ‘What in the world are you talking about?’” Sonju said. “Why this big push for Norm Sonju?” He found out soon enough. Stern and Granik were urging Sonju to think macro, not micro, to be more than the Dallas Maverick president and more like an NBA caretaker. And they wanted Sonju to help rescue the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The Cleveland franchise was a mess, the league’s great disgrace.

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