“You don't win a world championship with a guard. You do win with a dominating guy inside. Bowie is not going to be that the first year, but in a couple years he will be. He was as good as anyone else when he first came in.”
Kiki Vandeweghe, Portland Trail Blazers forward, before the 1984-85 season

Of course, given what we know now, Kiki doesn't sound too smart. And of course, if you saw the title, you realize that's my point.

For years, the Blazers have been mocked and criticized for passing up Michael Jordan in order to take Sam Bowie with the second pick in the 1984 NBA draft. It was a gamble that blew up in their faces, but in the same situation, you or I might have done the same thing.

Some Quick Background

The Portland Trail Blazers were not a bad team. They finished 48-34 in 1983-84, and the only reason they had the second pick in the draft was because Indiana decided it needed Tom Owens a few years earlier. The Blazers, then coached by Dr. Jack Ramsay, had the sixth-best record in the league and the second best in the Western Conference. They saw themselves as needing only a little tweaking to contend for a championship.

The Blazers were young, but they had overloads at some positions and nothing at all in others. They had a genuine all-star in shooting guard Jim Paxson, an exciting youngster in Clyde Drexler, and two talented young point guards in Fat Lever and Darnell Valentine. They also had a rugged power forward in Kenny Carr.

But at small forward, the Blazers were passing off Calvin Natt, who didn't really have the quickness for the position. At center, they were using the offensively challenged and defensively disappointing Wayne Cooper, and Mychal Thompson, a finesse player who wasn't equipped to play in the trenches on a regular basis. Plus, Valentine wasn't much of an outside shooter, so teams had no reason to honestly respect Portland's outside game.

So in the offseason, the Blazers traded Natt, Lever and Cooper to Denver for Kiki Vandeweghe, giving the team a small forward who could really shoot and putting Valentine in charge of the offense. What they still needed was a center.

Bigger is better, and biggest is best

At this time, basketball people believed that the most important position was center, in the same way that baseball people say you need to be strong up the middle to win. This concept was so widely believed that people weren't about to argue it.

That's why, in 1980, when the Celtics magically got the first pick in the NBA draft, the first thing Red Auerbach tried to do was convince Ralph Sampson to leave Virginia after his freshman season. And no, I'm not kidding about this. When Sampson said “Thanks, but no thanks,” Auerbach was publicly irate.

In the last 20 years before the Bowie/Jordan draft, 18 of the 20 Most Valuable Player selections were centers, the exceptions being Larry Bird and Julius Erving. NBA people believed that quality centers were rare, and you couldn't win without one.

To hammer that point home, look at the centers who had started on NBA champions from 1960 to 1984: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Willis Reed, Dave Cowens, the Clifford Ray/George Johnson combo, Bill Walton, Wes Unseld, Jack Sikma, Robert Parish and Moses Malone.

Other than the Ray/Johnson combo (and they had their supporters as being the best center in the league), who was the worst player in that group? Walton had a short career, Unseld was league MVP as a rookie, Sikma was one of the best centers in the league for seven years, Parish played forever. They were all very good players.

In contrast, look at the top guards in NBA history to that point:

Bob Cousy -- never won a title until the Celtics got Russell

Oscar Robertson -- never won a title until he played with Kareem

Jerry West -- teamed up with Elgin Baylor, and the Lakers still never won a title until they got Wilt, in part because they were playing people like Jim Krebs, Gene Wiley and Leroy Ellis at center.

Magic Johnson -- won NBA titles...with Kareem as the center

You can list other guards (Walt Frazier, Tiny Archibald, Dave Bing, etc.) None of them won unless they had a quality center. Even the Warriors team that won with Ray and Johnson got a lot more from Rick Barry than guards Butch Beard and Charlie Johnson.

Of course, Kareem only won titles when he had Magic or the Big O. But people didn't see it that way.

Be Like Jim

Most people, if they ever give a defense for Portland, talk about how Clyde Drexler was waiting in the wings. But that's only part of the story, and at the time, it was the smaller part.

Jim Paxson, at that time, was a heckuva player. He averaged over 20 points per game in 1983-84, and made second-team ALL-NBA. The New York Knicks tried to make him a multi-millionaire when his contract with Portland ran out.

In the manner of many white athletes in other sports, Paxson was lauded as a player who was better than his physical talent because of his intelligence and hustle. When the Celtics acquired him years later, there was a lot of talk in Boston about how he and Larry Bird were the two best players in the league at moving without the ball.

I'm not picking on Kiki Vandeweghe, but here's another quote from the same article:

“And there's Paxson. If Jordan came in, he wouldn't have started ahead of Paxson no matter how well he played.”

And at the time, like the quote at the beginning of the article, this made a lot of sense. Jordan was a rookie. Even if you picked a rookie at a position where you already had one of the 10 best players in the league, would you normally think that rookie would start right away? And why would you pick a shooting guard in the first place, when you already had two good ones?

The Bulls, and the aftermath

Chicago, unlike Portland, didn't see itself as one piece away from being the best team in the league. The Bulls were awful, with a collection of supporting players like Orlando Woolridge, Quintin Dailey and David Greenwood, but no one who was in danger of making all-NBA.

(As a side note, if you ever want to win a bar bet, David Greenwood had more rebounds in the 1980s than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Just send me a thank-you note if you cash in.)

The Bulls had alienated their fans by trading popular Reggie Theus the year before, so they needed someone exciting to make people forget that. Jordan, obviously, fit that role very well.

As you know, the Blazers didn't get closer to winning a title because of Bowie and Vandeweghe. They traded the wrong point guard, and Bowie got hurt. Bowie could have just as easily stayed healthy and Jordan's injury in his second season could have ruined his career, but it didn't happen.

In a sense, the Blazers were kind of like the Cosby Show. In its time, the Cosby Show was funny and not always warm (I remember a TV GUIDE reader writing in and saying that Cosby's comments to his son on the show “border on mental child abuse.”).

Since that show went off the air, sitcoms have gotten more edgy, so that shows like The Cosby Show and the Brady Bunch became passe in comparison. Things changed, and they changed quickly. Just like edgy sitcoms like Roseanne changed the traditional view of what a sitcom was supposed to be, Michael Jordan changed the idea of an NBA champion.

But can we really pick on the Blazers for not seeing the future? In the 1980s, you probably sat down to watch the Cosby Show and got a kick out of it. And you probably believed that you couldn't win an NBA title without a top-notch center. And you very well might have picked Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.