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In looking for a contract worth $100 million or more, Gilbert Arenas may have limited his options to one team, his Washington Wizards. Theodore A. Wagner/Icon SMIMarty Burns's Mailbag
The NBA's free agent signing period begins Tuesday, meaning teams can begin talking to free agents, but don't expect a whirlwind of activity right away. For one, contracts cannot be signed until July 9. Also, this year's crop is considered mediocre at best -- and only three teams (the Sixers, Grizzlies and maybe the Clippers) are far enough below the salary cap to make a run at a top-tier free agent. The rest of the league's teams will be limited to using their mid-level exception, which means they can offer a prospective free agent a deal starting at around $5.8 million. The biggest intrigue heading into Tuesday might be which players decide to exercise "opt out" clauses in their contracts to become free agents. Elton Brand, Baron Davis, Ron Artest and Corey Maggette are among those who must decide Monday. Of that group, only Maggette is considered likely to test the waters.
Here's a quick primer on the 2008 free agent market:
Three teams that could make a splash 1. Sixers: Philadelphia will be around $11 million under the cap, and GM Ed Stefanski has said he won't be afraid to use it to pursue a big-time free agent. The Sixers have needs at power forward and shooting guard. Josh Smith, Antawn Jamison and Maggette are among the players who could be targets. 2. Grizzlies: Memphis has around $15 million to spend, but it will be more like $12 million if it signs Spanish center Marc Gasol as expected. The Grizzlies could use a veteran shooting guard to help while top rookie O.J. Mayo learns the NBA game. Or Memphis can hold on to the money and use it next year. 3. Clippers: It's not likely to happen, but L.A. could get some $15-20 million under the cap if Brand and Maggette both were to opt out and sign elsewhere. The Clippers say they intend to re-sign both. But if they were to walk, L.A. would be in position to nab a big-time player. Three teams facing tough decisions 1. Hawks: With two key restricted free agents in Smith and Josh Childress, new Hawks GM Rick Sund has his work cut out for him. Smith, in particular, is likely to get a whopper offer. He's a major talent, for sure, but is he the kind of leader they need to take their franchise to the next level? 2. Bulls: Like the Hawks, the Bulls have two restricted free agents in Luol Deng and Ben Gordon. GM John Paxson already has Kirk Hinrich on the books at a high salary for a number of years, so he might have to make a choice. He also has a glut of guards, making a sign-and-trade involving Gordon a definite possibility. 3. Warriors: GM Chris Mullin has seven free agents, including restricted free agents Monta Ellis and Andris Biedrins. He says he plans to keep them both. But with Don Nelson likely in his last year, does Golden State want to invest heavily in two players who might not thrive as readily in a different system?
Three best unrestricted free agents 1. Gilbert Arenas: The explosive point guard opted out of the final year of his contract and is seeking a max deal worth around $120 million over six years. But Philly and Memphis already are set at point guard, so it's hard to see where he could go to get his riches. Barring a sign-and-trade, he'll likely settle for a compromise with the Wizards along the lines of $100 million for six years. 2. Antawn Jamison: The 6-9 All-Star forward is a proven scorer inside and out, and a good clubhouse presence. He won't make the $16.3 million he did a year ago, but he will get a nice offer somewhere. The Sixers, in need of a veteran frontcourt scorer, are said to be interested. But Arenas has made it clear he wants Jamison back in the fold, and the Wizards will likely bring him back, too. 3. Corey Maggette: The 6-6 veteran swingman is expected to opt out of a deal that paid him $7 million next season, so he is going to want more than that. Coming off a season in which he averaged 22.1 points and 5.6 rebounds, Maggette will be in high demand. The Magic, for one, would love to have him. If the Clippers can't re-sign him, they will do a sign-and-trade to get something for him. Best of the rest: Beno Udrih, DeSegana Diop, James Posey, Ricky Davis, Kurt Thomas, Mickael Pietrus, James Jones, Jason Williams, Eddie House, Carlos Arroyo, Tyronn Lue, Chris Duhon, Sam Cassell
Three best restricted free agents 1. Josh Smith: The athletic Smith had a big year (17.2 points, 8.2 boards, 1.5 steals, 2.8 blocks) for a Hawks team on the rise. At age 22, he might just be scratching the surface. He could fetch a deal starting at $12-13 million per year, forcing the Hawks to decide whether they want to match. 2. Emeka Okafor: The '05 Rookie of the Year turned down a reported $60 million extension last year in hopes of cashing in this summer. Good big men are hard to find, and he's coming off a season in which he averaged 13.8 points, 10.7 rebounds and 1.7 blocks. 3. Andre Iguodala: The 6-8 small forward is coming off a strong season in which he helped lead Philly back to the playoffs. He passed on a reported $57 million extension last year. It is possible he'll get an offer in that range again, but the Sixers will probably match. Best of the rest: Jose Calderon, Ellis, Deng, Gordon, Childress, J.R. Smith, Nenad Krstic, Biedrins, Sebastian Telfair Three potential bargains 1. James Jones: The 6-8 forward quietly put together a strong season last year for the Blazers, finishing third in the NBA in three-point shooting (44.0 percent) while bringing other intangibles that helped that young team blossom. He opted out of the final year of his contract ($3.1 million), but he probably could be picked up for only slightly more. 2. Pietrus: Once considered a rising star in Golden State, he has been buried on the bench in Nelson's system. But the 6-6 swingman is a terrific athlete who can defend and shoot the three. With a change of scenery, Pietrus just might live up to his potential and turn out to be a steal at the right price. 3. Chris Quinn: The second-year guard from Notre Dame was one of the few bright spots for the Heat last season. Filling in for the injured Jason Williams, he averaged around 15 points and six assists down the stretch with a 3-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. Quinn is restricted, and the Heat will probably match any offer, but it might be worth a shot for a team seeking a hard-nosed guard who can shoot with range.
ROUND 1 Sel# Team Player Pos. Ht. Wt. School 1 Chicago Derrick Rose PG 6-3 205 Memphis 2 Miami Michael Beasley SF 6-10 235 Kansas State 3 Minnesota O.J. Mayo SG 6-5 200 Southern California 4 Seattle Russell Westbrook PG 6-3 189 UCLA 5 Memphis Kevin Love PF 6-10 271 UCLA 6 New York Danilo Gallinari SF 6-9 210 Milan (Italy) 7 L.A. Clippers Eric Gordon SG 6-4 215 Indiana 8 Milwaukee Joe Alexander SF 6-8 230 West Virginia 9 Charlotte D.J. Augustin PG 6-0 180 Texas 10 New Jersey Brook Lopez C 7-0 260 Stanford 11 Indiana Jerryd Bayless PG 6-3 199 Arizona 12 Sacramento Jason Thompson PF 6-11 250 Rider 13 Portland Brandon Rush SF 6-6 210 Kansas 14 Golden State Anthony Randolph SF 6-11 220 LSU 15 Phoenix (from Atlanta) Robin Lopez C 7-0 255 Stanford 16 Philadelphia Marreese Speights PF 6-10 245 Florida 17 Toronto Roy Hibbert C 7-2 275 Georgetown 18 Washington JaVale McGee C 7-0 237 Nevada 19 Cleveland J.J. Hickson PF 6-9 242 North Carolina State 20 Charlotte (from Denver) Alexis Ajinca PF 7-1 225 Hyeres-Toulon (France) 21 New Jersey (from Dallas) Ryan Anderson SF 6-10 240 California 22 Orlando Courtney Lee SG 6-5 200 Western Kentucky 23 Utah Kosta Koufos C 7-0 265 Ohio State 24 Seattle (from Phoenix) Serge Ibaka PF 6-10 220 L'Hospitalet (Spain) 25 Houston Nicolas Batum SG 6-8 214 Le Mans (France) 26 San Antonio George Hill PG 6-2 180 IUPUI 27 New Orleans (to Portland) Darrell Arthur PF 6-9 225 Kansas 28 Memphis (from L.A. Lakers) Donte Greene SF 6-11 226 Syracuse 29 Detroit D.J. White PF 6-9 251 Indiana 30 Boston J.R. Giddens SG 6-5 205 New Mexico
Round 2 ROUND 2 Sel# Team Player Pos. Ht. Wt. School 31 Minnesota (from Miami through Boston) Nikola Pekovic PF 6-11 243 Belgrade (Serbia) 32 Seattle Walter Sharpe PF 6-9 245 UAB 33 Portland (from Memphis) Joey Dorsey PF 6-9 265 Memphis 34 Minnesota (to Miami) Mario Chalmers PG 6-1 190 Kansas 35 L.A. Clippers DeAndre Jordan C 7-0 255 Texas A&M 36 Portland (from New York) Omer Asik PF 7-0 220 Istanbul (Turkey) 37 Milwaukee Luc Richard Mbah a Moute SF 6-8 232 UCLA 38 Charlotte Kyle Weaver SG 6-6 201 Washington State 39 Chicago Sonny Weems SG 6-6 203 Arkansas 40 New Jersey Chris Douglas-Roberts SG 6-7 200 Memphis 41 Indiana Nathan Jawai PF 6-10 220 Cairns (Australia) 42 Sacramento (from Atlanta) Sean Singletary PG 6-0 185 Virginia 43 Sacramento Patrick Ewing Jr. SF 6-8 240 Georgetown 44 Utah (from Philadelphia) Ante Tomic PF 7-1 230 Zagreb (Croatia) 45 San Antonio (from Toronto) Goran Dragic PG 6-4 180 Ljubljana (Slovenia) 46 Seattle (from Portland) Trent Plaisted PF 6-11 245 Brigham Young 47 Washington (to Boston) Bill Walker SG 6-6 220 Kansas State 48 Phoenix (from Cleveland) Malik Hairston SG 6-6 220 Oregon 49 Golden State Richard Hendrix PF 6-9 255 Alabama 50 Seattle (from Denver) DeVon Hardin C 6-11 250 California 51 Dallas Shan Foster SG 6-6 205 Vanderbilt 52 Miami (from Orlando) Darnell Jackson PF 6-8 250 Kansas 53 Utah Tadija Dragicevic PF 6-9 222 Belgrade (Serbia) 54 Houston Maarty Leunen SF 6-9 220 Oregon 55 Portland (from Indiana through Phoenix) Mike Taylor PG 6-2 165 Iowa State 56 Seattle (from Houston through New Orleans) Sasha Kaun C 6-11 250 Kansas 57 San Antonio James Gist SF 6-9 235 Maryland 58 L.A. Lakers Joe Crawford SG 6-5 207 Kentucky 59 Detroit Deron Washington SF 6-7 202 Virginia Tech 60 Boston Semih Erden C 7-0 220 Fenerbahce (Turkey)
This is an excellent look at which schools have sent the most 1st rounders in the past 7 years. http://yahoosports.com
Andrew Skwara Rivals.com College Basketball Staff Writer
» BY THE NUMBERS: NBA Draft picks by school, 2000-2007 Only one conference has had each of its teams produce at least one NBA draft pick this decade – but it's probably not the one you are thinking of. The football-crazed SEC holds that unique distinction, and it's not as if half the league is just reaching the minimum requirement. Ten of the 12 SEC schools have produced multiple picks since 2000. Russell Westbrook is expected to be added to the list of first-round picks from the Pac-10. Rivals.com looked at each draft this decade and where the prospects played in college. While we found that the NBA-caliber talent in the SEC is particularly widespread, we also found that it isn't particularly abundant. The Big East has combined for 56 draft picks over the time span, the most of any of the "Big Six" conferences. The SEC has 38, which is fourth, behind the ACC (52) and Pac-10 (47) but ahead of the Big Ten (36) and the Big 12 (33). The Big East has a significant advantage in that it expanded to 16 teams three years ago. For the purpose of this exercise, a school's current conference affiliation is what matters. The "Big Six" league with the highest average of picks per school is the Pac-10, with an average of 4.7 per its 10 schools. Only 19 (40 percent) of those were first-round picks. The ACC has produced 30 first-round picks, which makes up 64 percent of its 52 picks, the highest percentage among the "Big Six." The Big 12 is second with 20 of its 33 (60 percent) being first-rounders. Duke's 12 picks are the most of any school this decade. UCLA has 10 picks and will add at least two more Thursday night. UCLA sophomore Russell Westbrook and freshman Kevin Love almost assuredly will be taken among the top 20 picks. Junior Luc Richard Mbah a Moute is not considered a first-round pick but could go in the second. Duke has one player eligible for the draft, DeMarcus Nelson, and he isn't expected to be drafted. Connecticut has produced the most first-round picks – eight – of any school this decade. The Huskies tied a record with four first-rounders (Rudy Gay, Hilton Armstrong, Marcus Williams and Josh Boone) in the 2006 draft. The non-"Big Six" school with the most draftees is Fresno State with five, which is more than 33 "Big Six" schools, including Kentucky (four), Indiana (four), Arkansas (two) and Louisville (two). Ten "Big Six" schools haven't had a player drafted this decade: Baylor, Clemson, Kansas State, Nebraska, Northwestern, Oregon State, Penn State, Virginia Tech, Washington State and West Virginia. That list promises to shrink soon. Kansas State's Michael Beasley, Rivals.com's 2007-08 national player of the year, is expected to go No. 1 or No. 2 during Thursday's draft. Beasley will be the first Wildcat drafted since Steve Henson in 1990. West Virginia's Joe Alexander is projected as a first-rounder as well. He would be the first Mountaineer drafted since Gordon Malone in 1997. There have been nearly as many international players drafted (106) than the combined picks produced from the Big 12, Big Ten and the SEC (107). I would have to go with the ACC that has sent the most and they seem to last in the NBA for awhile. BREAKDOWN OF NBA DRAFT PICKS SINCE 2000 ACC School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Duke 12 7 (Shelden Williams, 2006**) North Carolina 9 7 (Brandan Wright, 2007) Georgia Tech 6 5 (Thaddeus Young, 2007**) Maryland 6 2 (Chris Wilcox, 2002) Boston College 4 3 (Sean Williams, 2007**) Wake Forest 4 2 (Chris Paul, 2005) Florida State 4 1 (Al Thornton, 2007) Miami 3 1 (John Salmons, 2002) N.C. State 2 2 (Cedric Simmons, 2006) Virginia 2 0 (Cory Alexander, 1995) Clemson 0 0 (Sharone Wright, 1994) Virginia Tech 0 0 (Dell Curry, 1986) TOTAL 52 30 (Brandan Wright, 2007) ATLANTIC 10 School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Xavier 3 1 (David West, 2003) St. Joseph's 2 2 (Jameer Nelson, 2004**) Temple 2 1 (Mardy Collins, 2006) Charlotte 1 1 (Rodney White, 2001) George Washington 1 0 None La Salle 1 0 None Massachusetts 1 0 None St. Louis 1 0 None TOTAL 12 5 (Mardy Collins, 2006) BIG EAST School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Connecticut 11 8 ( Rudy Gay, 2006**) Cincinnati 7 3 (Jason Maxiell, 2005) Syracuse 6 3 (Carmelo Anthony, 2005**) DePaul 5 3 (Wilson Chandler, 2007) Villanova 3 3 (Randy Foye, 2006**) Georgetown 3 2 (Jeff Green, 2007) Marquette 3 1 (Dwyane Wade, 2003) St. John's 3 1 (Erick Barkley, 2000) Providence 3 0 (Austin Croshere, 1997) Louisville 2 2 (Francisco Garcia, 2005) Notre Dame 2 2 (Ryan Humphrey, 2002) Seton Hall 2 2 (Eddie Griffin, 2002) Pittsburgh 2 0 (Vonteego Cummings, 1999) Rutgers 1 1 (Quincy Douby, 2006) South Florida 1 0 None West Virginia 0 0 (Ron Williams, 1968) Total 54 31 (Wilson Chandler, 2007) BIG SKY School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Eastern Washington 1 1 (Rodney Stuckey, 2007) BIG TEN School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Michigan State 9 4 (Shannon Brown, 2006**) Illinois 7 4 (Deron Williams, 2006) Ohio State 6 3 (Greg Oden, 2007**) Indiana 4 2 (Jared Jeffries, 2002) Minnesota 3 2 (Kris Humphries, 2004) Wisconsin 2 2 (Alando Tucker, 2007) Michigan 2 1 (Jamal Crawford, 2000) Purdue 2 0 (Glenn Robinson, 1999) Iowa 1 0 (Ricky Davis, 1998) Northwestern 0 0 None Penn State 0 0 None Total 36 18 (Greg Oden, 2007) BIG 12 School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Texas 9 4 (Kevin Durant, 2007) Kansas 6 5 (Julian Wright, 2007) Missouri 4 3 (Linas Kleiza, 2005) Oklahoma State 4 3 (Joey Graham, 2005) Iowa State 4 2 (Jamaal Tinsley, 2001) Texas A&M 2 2 (Acie Law IV, 2007) Colorado 2 1 (David Harrison, 2004) Texas Tech 1 0 (Tony Battie, 1997) Oklahoma 1 0 (Stacey King, 1989) Baylor 0 0 (Brian Skinner, 1998) Kansas State 0 0 (Mitch Richmond, 1988) Nebraska 0 0 (Tyronn Lue, ) Total 33 20 (Kevin Durant, 2007) BIG WEST School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Cal-St. Fullerton 1 0 None COLONIAL School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Hofstra 1 0 None CONFERENCE USA School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Memphis 4 3 (Rodney Carney, 2006**) Rice 1 1 (Morris Almond, 2007) SMU 1 1 (Jeryl Sasser, 2001) Houston 1 0 None Marshall 1 0 None HORIZON School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Detroit Mercy 1 0 None METRO ATLANTIC School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Manhattan 1 0 None Marist 1 0 None Ohio 1 0 None MID-AMERICAN School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Central Michigan 1 1 (Chris Kaman, 2003) MISSOURI VALLEY School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Bradley 1 1 (Patrick O'Bryant, 2006) Creighton 1 0 None MOUNTAIN WEST School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick BYU 2 1 (Rafael Araujo, 2004) Colorado State 1 1 (Jason Smith, 2007) New Mexico 1 1 (Danny Granger, 2005) San Diego State 1 0 None UNLV 1 1 (Marcus Banks, 2003) Utah 2 1 (Andrew Bogut, 2005) NORTHEAST School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Central Conn. State 1 0 None OHIO VALLEY School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Austin Peay 1 0 None Eastern Illinois 1 0 None Morehead State 1 0 None PAC-10 School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Arizona 10 3 (Channing Frye, 2005) UCLA 10 3 (Arron Afflalo, 2007) Stanford 6 4 (Josh Childress, 2004) Oregon 5 4 (Aaron Brooks, 2007) USC 5 1 (Nick Young, 2007) Washington 4 3 (Spencer Hawes, 2007) Cal 4 0 (Ed Gray, 1997) Arizona State 3 1 (Ike Diogu, 2005) Oregon State 0 0 (Corey Benjamin, 1996) Washington State 0 0 (Don Collins, 1980) Total 47 19 (Spencer Hawes, 2007) SEC School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Florida 9 5 (Al Horford, 2007**) LSU 5 2 (Tyrus Thomas, 2006) Alabama 4 1 (Gerald Wallace, 2001) Kentucky 4 3 (Rajon Rondo, 2006) Auburn 3 1 (Mamadou N'Diaye, 2000) Vanderbilt 3 0 (Will Perdue, 1988) Mississippi State 3 0 (Erick Dampier, 1996) Arkansas 2 2 (Ronnie Brewer, 2006) Georgia 2 1 (Jarvis Hayes, 2003) Tennessee 2 1 (Marcus Haislip, 2002) South Carolina 1 1 (Renaldo Balkman, 2006) Ole Miss 1 0 (Gerald Glass, 1990) Total 38 16 (Al Horford, 2007) SOUTHERN School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Western Carolina 1 1 (Kevin Martin, 2004) SUN BELT School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Arkansas State 1 0 None La.-Lafayette 1 0 None La.-Monroe 1 0 None WEST COAST School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Gonzaga 4 2 (Adam Morrison, 2006) Pepperdine 1 1 (Brandon Armstrong, 2001) WESTERN ATHLETIC School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Fresno State 5 3 (Melvin Ely, 2002) Nevada 3 1 (Kirk Snyder, 2004) Louisiana Tech 1 0 None Idaho 1 0 None INDEPENDENTS School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick N.C. Central 1 0 None NAIA/DIVISION II School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick Walsh University 1 0 None North Dakota 1 0 None OTHER School Picks First-round picks Most recent first-round pick International 106 43 (Yi Jianlian, China, 2007**) High School 32 23 None JUCO 5 2 None **—Highest of multiple first-round selections
This is a wonderful article written by Michael Weinreb for ESPN.com!!! LEN BIAS........ RIP
The Day Innocence Died by Michael Weinreb t's true, what she says about the graves. I went to see them not long after I heard Lonise Bias tell an incredible story to a group of South Carolina high school students: While witnessing the burial of her son Jay, she looked down and realized she was standing on the grave of her eldest son, Leonard. I had assumed it was a rhetorical flourish, a metaphor crafted for effect by a guest speaker who was getting paid to whack some sobriety into a room of spaced-out pubescents with self-image issues. But then I drove to the cemetery, in a Maryland suburb of Washington called Suitland, and I trudged up a hill, and I found the markers, a couple of rectangles blotched with age, stamped into the dirt and rocks and tufts of grass. And it is true -- there is perhaps a foot of space between her boys. They are, quite literally, resting side by side. Len and Jay Bias, brothers who died less than five years apart, are literally now resting side by side. The graves, tucked together like this, are a stark testimony to the complexity of Lonise Bias' grief. It is impossible to comprehend the hellish depths she has plumbed, and it is equally difficult to see how she emerged with such palpable vigor, determination and self-assurance. This is what makes her come across as a bit strange, especially to a roomful of teenagers; instead of crushing her spirit, unspeakable family tragedy has stripped her of the angst and self-doubt that paralyzes much of her audience. She opens her speeches by telling people she does not particularly care what they think of her, which permits her to bellow phrases like, "I AM THE LEGACY THAT WAS LEFT BEHIND!" and "I CAME THROUGH TO SHOW YOU THE WAY!" and somehow make them sound authoritative rather than bombastic. "I've been termed as being ABNORMALLY ENTHUSIASTIC," she is saying. "But I am full of passion BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN YOU. I am standing here to TELL YOU that you CAN MAKE IT." It is a Monday morning, and Lonise Bias is sweating underneath the spotlights on the stage of a high school auditorium in a quiet corner of South Carolina. The assembly is mandatory. And it doesn't matter that no one in this room knows who she is anymore, or who her sons were, or where they came from, or why her story means anything at all. It doesn't matter that she was hired blind by a teacher who read her biography on the Web site of a speakers' bureau and thought, "Well, that sounds kind of appropriate for a schoolwide assembly," and it doesn't matter that she momentarily forgets where she is, and refers to the students of Greenwood High School as the students of Greenville. It doesn't matter, because it is hard not to listen when a woman with this kind of overbearing presence IS TALKING RIGHT AT YOU. She has always possessed a robust set of vocal cords. When she was in elementary school, and the faculty needed a child to speak loudly enough for a large group to hear, they chose her. She grew up tall and imposing, with a natural-born gravity; after her speech at Greenwood, more than one student said Lonise Bias reminded them of their mothers. Perhaps, she always thought, she would teach someday, but she imagined it would be in Sunday school, not in a place like this, a public school several hundred miles from the suburban Maryland county where her life has played out like a soap opera. She was working as a customer service manager at a bank back in June 1986 when her eldest son's death became a national headline. If you were alive then, and you cared at all about sports, or about drugs, you most likely remember it well. It was one of those moments -- like JFK, like Martin Luther King Jr., like the space shuttle Challenger earlier that same year -- when we, as a society, stopped and stared collectively into the void and declared that human existence was entirely unjust. Here, though, is what's weirdest of all about Lonise Bias: She, of all people, does not believe the events of that day were unjust. In fact, she believes the events of that day were unavoidable. She has never allowed herself to project into the future, or to examine the possibilities, the endless permutations of what-ifs that guide the discussion of her son whenever his name arises. For her, there was only this future. For her, there was only this possibility. In the days after her son died, her public demeanor was so stoic and unflinching that she received letters from people declaring her a phony. And she admits that among the other emotions her son's death brought on, it brought relief. Not long after Len Bias' death, she made a life-changing appearance on a Christian television program, "The 700 Club," in which she explained why. She described the premonitions she'd been having, and the dreams, and the inexplicable emotional breakdowns, and the visions she assumed were coming directly from above, all imbuing her with a heavy and inextricable feeling that her son was not meant to play professional basketball. Her son, who in his senior season at the University of Maryland was widely regarded as the best college basketball player in America, a can't-miss talent with absurd hang time. Her son, who had been drafted with the No. 2 pick by the NBA champion Boston Celtics on June 17, 1986. Her son, who would be described in an autopsy report two days later as a "well-developed young Black male," 6-foot-7, 221½ pounds, otherwise fit and healthy and clean, with the exception of the copious amount of cocaine in his system . "I can remember speaking to this woman once before Len died, and she had said, 'Things are going to be so wonderful for you all,'" Lonise Bias says. "And I remember telling her this very clearly. I said, 'It looks like I can go over to that table and pick up whatever's on that table. It looks like I can do it, but there can be something that can stop me from doing it.' So I guess what I'm saying is, while everyone else was cheering, I was still waiting to see if it was going to happen, because ..." For a moment, she is somewhere else, her gaze fixed on a table a few feet from where she sits in an office adorned with photographs of her posing next to presidents and congressmen as a well-compensated motivational speaker of some renown, as a proud foot soldier in the war on drugs. Twenty-two years have passed, and Len Bias has been dead as long as he was alive. And clouds of doubt and shame and confusion linger, and truthfully, no one wants to talk very much about the long-term meaning of Len Bias except Lonise Bias, who cannot stop talking about it. All because, several years before her sons would come to lie side by side in those two narrow burial plots and several months before her life became altered by grief, the mother had a vision of her eldest son as a martyr. Rob Tringali for ESPN.com As a motivational speaker, Lonise Bias tries to help others learn from her son's tragic death. CAUSE OF DEATH Autopsy No. 86-999 Prince George's County Leonard K. Bias June 19, 1986 DIAGNOSIS: 1. Cocaine Intoxication OPINION: LEONARD K. BIAS, a 22-year-old Black male, died as a result of cocaine intoxication, which interrupted the normal electrical control of his heartbeat, resulting in the sudden onset of seizures and cardiac arrest. The blood cocaine level was 6.5 milligrams per liter. Toxicological studies for alcohol and other drugs were negative. Due to the ongoing investigation of the circumstances surrounding his death, the manner of the death is ruled UNDETERMINED at this time. A DISCLAIMER, OF SORTS I do not know whether Len Bias was a martyr, or whether in death, as his mother often says, he has brought life. I do not know whether, as Jesse Jackson claimed in eulogizing Bias -- likening him to Martin Luther King Jr., Mozart, Gandhi and Jesus -- that the Lord "sometimes uses our best people to get our attention." I do not know whether Len Bias died for any reason at all, divine or otherwise, beyond the fact he ingested a massive amount of dangerously pure cocaine in a brief period of time, short-circuiting the electrical impulses to his heart muscle. I do not know whether, as many claim, the Boston Celtics would have extended the Bird-McHale-Parish dynasty by several seasons if Len Bias had lived. I do not know if he was the catalyst for another decades-long New England curse. I do not know whether he would have been better/as good as/in the same stratosphere as Michael Jordan if he had lived to play in the National Basketball Association. We can argue these issues all we like, but I believe that, because the answers to such questions can never be determined, the questions have become irrelevant, obscured by the mythology that Autopsy No. 86-999 has engendered. I do know death -- especially sudden and premature death -- has a way of obscuring many truths (see: Dean, James; Cobain, Kurt; et al.). I do know I was 13 when Len Bias died, and it scared the hell out of me. It was supposed to scare the hell out of me; this was a moralistic passion play, an after-school special come to life. I do know the public narrative was deceptively simple: Len Bias had just experienced the most euphoric moment of his life, and he had an unquestionably bright future, and he had chosen to experiment with illicit substances for the first time -- perhaps, some errant rumors went, it was crack cocaine -- and in a freak occurrence of bad karma, his heart had stopped. And I do believe that because of this public narrative and the consequences of this narrative, the death of Len Bias can be classified as the most socially influential moment in the history of modern sports. A DISSENTING VIEW Or perhaps -- as Len Bias' former college basketball coach, a crusty old Southerner named Charles G. "Lefty" Driesell, told me -- Len Bias changed absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps it was just a "bad accident." Perhaps the meaning of the demise of Leonard Kevin Bias is this: "Some guy was doing cocaine, and he died." THE MORNING AFTER The Len Bias Morality Play began with a single bizarre phone call, placed from a dormitory on a college campus to a 911 dispatcher whose Baltimorese hammered flat the word "phone" and who, from his tone of voice, apparently assumed this whole thing was a put-on, a prank by a bunch of rowdy university kids with nothing better to do. It was approximately 6:30 in the morning. The voice of the caller was slurred and hesitant, and the voice kept repeating the victim's name until the dispatcher declared, "It doesn't matter what his name is." But Brian Tribble was also (presumably) prodigiously high, and this was really happening to him -- his friend was having a seizure on the floor of his suite, 1103 Washington Hall, on the University of Maryland campus. So Tribble kept repeating the name, and uttering panicky phrases like, "This is Len Bias. You have to get him back to life. There's no way he can die." A moment earlier, we have since learned, Len Bias sat up on a bed, bent over a mirror, proclaimed himself "a horse" -- a nickname his teammates had used for him because of his on-court grace and physical presence -- and snorted one last line of cocaine. A moment earlier, Bias was fine, just a young man celebrating his future the way many young men have/will celebrate their futures. Then he got up to use the bathroom, and he stumbled, and he sat back down on the bed, and he lapsed into a seizure. There were three other men in the room. One, Terry Long, placed the handle of a pair of scissors in Bias' mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue; another, David Gregg, held Bias' legs. Brian Tribble phoned his mother, who told him to call 911. Filmmaker Kirk Fraser will release a documentary on Bias' death later this year. The 911 call prompted a dozen more phone calls, the story quickly rippling outward. The paramedics arrived and transported Bias to Leland Memorial Hospital, as Tribble and two of Bias' Maryland teammates, who had been partying with him, began to clean up after themselves. Another teammate, Keith Gatlin, phoned Lonise Bias to tell her Len had had a seizure and was clinging to life; in their haste, she and her husband, James, rushed off to the wrong hospital. Before Bias even arrived at Leland, a source phoned a television reporter named Dave Statter, who did not cover sports but knew Len Bias because everyone in D.C., and especially in Prince George's County, knew Len Bias, because he was a kid who had grown up within walking distance of the Maryland campus, because he had played ball at nearby Northwestern High School. And because hours earlier he had moved close to becoming a millionaire, agreeing to a lucrative endorsement deal with Reebok that he planned to sign the next week, and proclaiming that by being drafted by the Celtics, his dream had been realized. Statter phoned a woman at the dispatch center. She confirmed his tip. He phoned his supervisors at Channel 9 in Washington. His supervisors phoned the station's sports anchor, James Brown, and Statter went live on the air as the first reporter at Leland Memorial Hospital. He knew Len Bias was in critical condition. He did not know why. At this point, only four people knew why, and one was dying and the other three were too freaked out to say anything. To this day, they have spoken about it only rarely, though Tribble, along with several of Bias' Maryland teammates, has recently talked to a local filmmaker, Kirk Fraser, whose documentary on Bias reportedly will be released later this year. They will recount a story that has been revealed over the years in bits and pieces, through leaks and rumors and sworn testimony, most notably in a Prince George's County courtroom more than a year after Bias' death, when Brian Tribble -- either a scapegoat or a murderer, depending upon your point of view -- went on trial, charged with providing the drugs that killed his friend. At 8:51 that morning, according to the autopsy report, Leonard Bias was pronounced dead. Larry Bird, reached by phone at his home in French Lick, Ind., declared to a reporter -- in a quote that would be woven into the legend -- that this was "one of the cruelest things I've ever heard." Bias' body was wheeled out of Leland Hospital, in front of TV cameramen and newspaper photographers, in front of onlookers and teammates who had gathered near the entrance to the emergency room. Statter, who has covered fires and murders and seen all manner of dead bodies, said the sight of Bias underneath a sheet, his outline long and lean, chilled him to the bone. Meanwhile, Lonise Bias, who had arrived at the hospital and heard the doctors say they were doing all they could, felt the fulfillment of her prophecy was at hand. She listened, and she nodded, and then she told herself, "He's already gone." THE NOON NEWS In the first hours after Bias' death, there was nothing but shock on the afternoon news. One broadcaster, George Michael, actually broke down on the air. Another, Frank Herzog, had taken his kids to see Bias speak at an event a couple of weeks earlier; he imagined, like many others, that Bias must have had a congenital heart condition. Hundreds of Maryland students, upon hearing the news, gathered at Cole Field House to cheer on a ghost. "Lenny elevated above mortal men," one of them told Tony Kornheiser of The Washington Post. Over the years, we have come to expect the worst from our public figures, and there is little question, if Len Bias died today, the immediate speculation would have been unfettered. But the television news was different back then, still in the middle stages of its transition from sobriety to sensationalism. This was eight years B.O.J. (Before O.J.), and the market was not yet saturated, the cable news channels were in their infancy, and the broadcasts themselves had not been subsumed by the modern troika of scandal, cynicism and splashy graphics. An athlete's personal life was still sketchy territory. "I think today, it would be different," Statter says. "We've seen so many of these things happen to athletes, people expect it more now. We're so jaded now that if it's a real medical condition, we're almost surprised." Also, it should be noted that we were in the heart of the Reagan era, at the midpoint of the second term of a president Time magazine put on its July 7 cover. Headline: "Why Is This Man So Popular?" As a nation -- even in the wake of the January space shuttle explosion that the president blamed on "a carelessness that grew out of success" -- we were generally optimistic. Iran-Contra had yet to break; a month earlier, Ivan Boesky had delivered a commencement speech during which he declared, "Greed is all right, by the way. ... I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." We maintained a certain amount of faith in public institutions, and in the notion of laissez-faire democracy that dictated the Reagan philosophy. We were in the mood to believe in dreams. And the media, Herzog admitted, was "so naive" about drugs. Few imagined a human as healthy and robust and muscular as Bias could actually die from a substance like cocaine. This was not John Belushi we were talking about; this was not a man who abused his body to its breaking point. This was just the opposite. Bias had the potential, according to Indiana Pacers personnel director Tom Newell, to "become one of the best to ever play his position," the very model of a futuristic NBA power forward, an inside-outside threat, both intimidating and graceful, with the uncanny ability to hang in midair while his opponents shrank beneath him. There is one extraordinary sequence -- available via YouTube -- against North Carolina during his senior season that illustrates Bias' ability to redefine the parameters of his position: With his team trailing by eight, Bias hit a long jump shot, then galloped toward the baseline, stole the inbounds pass and, with a defender closing, dunked with his back to the basket, before landing in a tangle of limbs on the floor. Maryland would win the game in overtime. Bias averaged 16.4 points per game in his Maryland career and was named ACC Player of the Year in 1985 and 1986. How could someone who could do that die like this? Equally confounding to Herzog, a question that seems incredibly innocent in retrospect: Where did a college athlete get the money for such extravagances? Of course, there are many things we know now that we did not know then, both from a larger perspective, and a smaller one. We know, for instance, Brian Tribble was once a member of the Maryland JV basketball team, and would later spend time in jail on drug charges, and once had been accused by Driesell of stealing balls from the gym. We know Tribble and Bias had been friends for several years and had spent a great deal of time hanging around a nightclub in Southeast Washington called Chapter III. We know Bias' moods had been growing more sullen as his senior year passed, and he had essentially stopped attending class, acquiring, according to The Washington Post, "the style of one about to become rich and famous." "Whether Brian got Lenny started doing drugs, I don't know," says Derrick Curry, who was friends with Tribble and Jay and Len Bias. "I've heard stories from people who were around him much more than me, but personally, I had never seen Lenny use drugs. Lenny didn't even drink at clubs." To do so would have contradicted the public persona of Bias, who was, like his mother, a born-again Christian and who considered himself a role model for children. This was the dawn of the era of image consciousness among athletes: The burgeoning success of Michael Jordan had opened a whole new world, that of the athlete as sponsorial cipher. It was not just about the game anymore. There were shoe contracts and endorsement deals to be cultivated and protected. It was unquestionably a business, and Bias was either self-aware or innocent enough to pass every drug test he ever took, and to emerge clean from all the pre-draft physicals. Bias' advisers claimed to have told him, in the days before the draft, that if he even happened to be in a car with someone smoking a joint, he should remove himself immediately. Yet Leonard Bias was also 22 years old, just coming to terms with his own maturity. He liked to draw and had imagined pursuing a career in interior design, until advisers at Maryland, seeming to act on the advice of the basketball coaching staff, reportedly steered him into a less demanding curriculum. He had an introspective side, but he was slow to mature (both on and off the court), and often petulant in his dealings with opposing players and officials, and not immune to peer pressure. "If you put him with a bunch of bums, he'd be the best bum," his high school coach, Bob Wagner, once told a reporter. "Put him in with good people, and he'd be the best there, too." As the legend grew and Maryland students hung life-sized posters in their rooms (Caption: I'm Bias), Bias developed an affinity for the high life that drove the cultural narrative of the era, a high life he imagined he'd be living soon enough. In the months before his death, he purchased fine suits and stereo equipment and jewelry, including a $1,300 gold necklace he bought on the installment plan so he could wear it during a television interview. He took out two personal loans and used most of the money to lease a cobalt blue Nissan 300ZX with a T-top. And he vowed once he signed his NBA contract, to buy a pair of Mercedes -- one for himself and one for his mother. He used his celebrity to pick up girls. Early on the night of his death, he made a trip to a local liquor store to buy a couple of six packs of Haffenreffer Private Stock malt liquor, and then returned shortly afterward to buy an $18 bottle of Hennessy. He called at least one of his girlfriends. He was allegedly pulled over for speeding on the Maryland campus as many as three times. Portions of the timeline of that night remain obscure and unsubstantiated. What seems clear is Bias, on the night of his return from Boston, was celebrating. More important, he appeared to be escaping -- from his parents (his father had traveled to Boston and back with him), from the friends who thought they knew him, from the reporters whose questions tried his patience, from the weeks of pre-draft workouts, from his role as a neighborhood hero, from the inherent responsibilities that would soon guide his adult existence, from the notion of authority itself. After completing his noon broadcast, Statter received a call from a source, who told him cocaine had been found in Bias' system. Statter, Brown and their colleague Mike Buchanan confirmed it with two other sources, then Statter went on the air with it. By that evening, the entire story had changed. There was a chill on the airwaves, and we all began to feel as if we had somehow been conned. Statter and his colleagues received death threats for broadcasting details of the previous night, details that suddenly seemed frighteningly intimate. All across the country, we began to question everything we thought we understood about drugs and athletes and our perceptions of modern celebrity. No one wanted to believe it, but this was the new reality. There were no secrets anymore. "I had a guy who called me and said, 'Listen, he wasn't doing lines of cocaine,'" Herzog recalls. "'Len Bias and I did mounds of cocaine. Mounds.' And I'm saying, 'Holy cow.' But I couldn't find anybody to confirm it. I'm sitting there listening to this guy and he's scaring the hell out of me. And I'm saying, 'What if he's wrong? What if he just wants to be on television?' It didn't make sense on a lot of levels at the time. "It was awful. But then, with everything that came after, you started to say, 'Yeah, what's your problem? What are you doing that we don't know about?'" GREED IS ALL RIGHT, BY THE WAY Even before he was drafted by the Celtics, Bias had developed an affinity for the high life. As the news congealed, as police discovered several grams of cocaine under the seat of Bias' leased sports car, as the autopsy was issued, as it became clear cocaine was the cause of Bias' demise, as denial turned to anger, we began to widen the scope of our outrage. We began to contemplate not just the mistakes of one man, but the mistakes of the institutions that led such a man to his death. Was it our fault? Were society's priorities so utterly skewed that we couldn't see the path down which we'd guided a star athlete?
What had we done? Although college sports have been ripe for corruption since the turn of the 20th century, the 18 months leading up to June 19, 1986, were especially raw for the NCAA. The violations were not just rampant, but blatant. Regard for the rule of law had been entirely subsumed; several coaches complained they could not win without cheating. At North Carolina State, Chris Washburn was suspended for stealing a stereo. At Baylor, basketball coach Dan Haller resigned amid allegations he gave a player money for car payments. At Tulane: point-shaving. At Vanderbilt (Vanderbilt!): a strength coach accused of distributing anabolic steroids. At Memphis: potential ties between the basketball program and gamblers. At SMU: probation for the football team. At TCU: possible cash payments from boosters to football players. At Kentucky: cash and gifts for basketball players. At Clemson: steroids. At Tennessee: quarterback Tony Robinson arrested for drug trafficking. At Georgia: a former instructor alleged athletes were given special academic treatment. Ultimately, only seven of the 18 players chosen in the first round of the 1986 NBA draft had earned their degrees. That draft would be remembered not just for the death of Len Bias but for its sheer multitude of colossal busts and burnouts, young men who entered the world entirely unprepared for what was coming, for the ever-increasing demands of celebrity. At Maryland, the scrutiny began immediately, and the scrutiny was relentless: Reporters from the Post and The Baltimore Sun and the TV stations chased down leads for months. A grand jury was called, and a Prince George's County prosecutor named Arthur A. "Bud" Marshall happened to be running for re-election, and what better opening was there than for Marshall to find the persons/places/things that had killed Leonard Bias? To Marshall, and a certain segment of the public, suspects included not only Brian Tribble, but the entire athletic culture at the University of Maryland. "Money," James Bias would lament in the weeks afterward. He later filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against both Bias' agents and Reebok (he has since retired from his job as an equipment repairman). "That's what it's all about. It's all about making money for the university. It's not about athletes. It's not about athletes and how you feel about them." In the days following Len Bias' death, the basketball team's academic counselor submitted her resignation amid revelations Bias and several other players were flunking their classes. Task forces were assigned to study several areas of the university's infrastructure. The headlines were brutal as the grand jury dragged on, interviewing some 80 witnesses. And leaks abounded: UM PLAYERS CONSISTENTLY USED DRUGS, OFFICIALS TOLD REPORT CHASTISES MARYLAND ON PROGRAMS FOR ATHLETICS BIG-TIME COLLEGE BASKETBALL IS AN EXERCISE IN HYPOCRISY The whole thing took on the grand scope and skewed morality of a Tom Wolfe novel: Driesell, the longtime Maryland coach, was accused of covering up his initial knowledge of Bias' cocaine use (he testified in court and was never charged). He clashed with university chancellor John Slaughter, a dignified man with a background in engineering, and with athletic director Dick Dull, who had extended Driesell's contract by a decade just one year earlier. In the end, all three would resign. Marshall would lose the election for prosecutor. Brian Tribble would be acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence that he was the drug provider that night. "If I did anything wrong, why am I in the Maryland Hall of Fame?" Driesell asks. "You're bringing up all this crap that happened, but there's nothing to it. There's some stuff that went on there, that I haven't talked about, but if you've got any sense, you can figure it out yourself. Go ahead and figure it out. I don't want to talk about this junk, man." Twenty minutes after he says these things and hangs up, Driesell calls back and indirectly apologizes for his tone of voice. Still, he refuses to admit he made any mistakes, even in the face of evidence that he might have pressured the school to accept athletes who might not otherwise have been accepted at Maryland. He speaks of the team's graduation rates during his tenure, which he insists were solid. He reminds me that Len Elmore and Tom McMillen, who played at Maryland in the 1970s, were both superior students. He calls Slaughter "a jerk," and says the academic adviser who resigned was "trying to save her butt." This is the essence of Driesell: He is famously brash and combative and stubborn. He comes across -- often on purpose -- as an unsophisticated hayseed, but he graduated from Duke. He once challenged a reporter, the Post's Ken Denlinger, to a street fight after a particularly critical column. But he also has a way of softening and endearing himself to his critics. (This, says Denlinger, is "Lefty being Lefty.") Lefty's stubbornness also might have contributed to a certain myopia. In an era when athletes were growing accustomed to a culture of permissiveness, Driesell had simply lost his way and "started recruiting a different kind of kid," according to Denlinger. In turn, Driesell might have inadvertently changed the atmosphere within his program. "Lefty didn't buy the drugs for Len Bias, and he didn't encourage him to take drugs," says Mark Hyman, who covered the aftermath for The Sun. "But the question is, was his style of discipline such that the kids thought it was OK to do this?" As Lonise Bias told me recently, "When you're talking about the life of a child being lost, regardless of how it took place, it's going to fall on the university. There was no covering." A QUAINT NOTION So, what has changed? Certainly, academic standards have been raised at many schools, including Maryland, and athletic departments are much more tightly regulated and controlled than they were back then. "If it hadn't been Lenny, and it hadn't been right before the draft, and it hadn't been the Celtics, nobody would have noticed," says one longtime Maryland official who is still wary of speaking publicly about it. "I guess that's the good that came out of it." But let us examine the key recommendations of the academic task force at the University of Maryland, formed in the weeks after Bias' death, to realize how far college sports have drifted toward the business end: We recommend that coaches and other officials charged with the coordination of competition schedules endeavor to minimize the number of classes missed. ... We believe that postseason games, tournaments and all-star games should be restricted to occur over semester or holiday breaks or after the end of an academic year. ... The Task Force recommends ... an end to freshman eligibility in men's and women's basketball and in football. That task force was chaired by J. Robert Dorfman, then the acting dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Dorfman was not, and is not, a basketball fan, but he holds no hostility toward athletes, either. At one point, he says, he and Driesell fell into a "discussion" about the meaning of statistics. "It's a little hard for me to describe how he viewed things," Dorfman says. Dorfman's own view has been that a university's mission should be in education; when he encountered certain members of the athletic department, he realized their thinking was entirely different. Hence the task force recommendations, which today, in the era of Tuesday night football and Maui-Anchorage-Festival-Challenges and the O.J. Mayo saga, seem refreshingly quaint. "I don't mind quaint," Dorfman says. But most of us have moved on from such lofty ideals. It is too late to turn back. All of us who escape to major college athletics for solace have a little bit of Lefty in us. We would prefer to view the death of Len Bias not as an indictment of an entire system rife with hypocrisy, but merely a poor decision by a young man who should have known better. "There was nothing I did wrong -- what did I do wrong?" Driesell says. "Leonard Bias was a great kid. I loved him. But he was not under my jurisdiction in any shape or form. It wasn't anything I had something to do with. He made a bad decision to try cocaine for the first time." Like the mourners gathered outside the Pilgrim A.M.E. Church in Washington for Bias' wake, America was stunned by the basketball star's death. TWO COMMONLY TOLD ELEMENTS OF THE BIAS NARRATIVE THAT ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE
1. Len Bias was experimenting with cocaine for the first time that night.
Origin: Q: Could this have been his first encounter with cocaine?
A: That is possible, yes. Contrary evidence: Court testimony of Terry Long, who claimed "Len Bias introduced me to coke," and portrayed Bias as a "courtesy middleman" in the drug trade. "One time he knocked on my door and he had a dollar bill and he said, 'Try this,'" Long told the court. University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died June 19 of a cocaine-induced heart attack, probably was not a first-time user of the drug, the state medical examiner said. Why this matters: Perhaps this doesn't matter at all. "What can I do about what anybody says?" Lonise Bias tells me. "The only thing I saw in 1986 was dirty laundry being put in a dead man's coffin who couldn't speak for himself. You don't know if there's another story that hasn't been told yet." So perhaps this is one of those wishful notions -- perpetuated by Len Bias' negative drug-test results (easily manipulated), and by the claims of friends and family, and by the medical examiner's initial opinion (later revised) that this might have, indeed, been Bias' first experience with cocaine -- that benefits everyone and harms no one. Perhaps, in burnishing a legend, the claims of Driesell and Lonise Bias (who still believes her son had never tried cocaine before, and might, in fact, have tried it accidentally, or even been poisoned that night) actually proved far more positive for society than the truth might have. As evidence, I return to myself, at age 13, and all the other children of my generation, products of the skewed value system of the '80s, for whom the most potent advertisement for the "Just Say No" campaign might have been the notion that a single splotch of cocaine -- and this is how I imagined it as a child, that Bias had simply touched several stray crystals of processed coca leaves to his nostrils, and shortly thereafter departed this mortal coil -- could kill us without prejudice, if our bodies were so genetically inclined. This is no doubt a major reason why I have never touched cocaine myself, and why, several years ago, when an acquaintance of mine who was a product of the same generation tried cocaine for the first time, he thought immediately of Len Bias, as I'm sure hundreds or thousands of others did, too. "All of us like to generalize our experience," says Eric Sterling, an expert on drug policy. "But it's a big country, with a lot of different kids. I wouldn't say that it 'worked.'" Still, I ask: Would Bias' story have achieved the same status as a cultural touchstone if we had known he -- while probably not a habitual user -- had dabbled in cocaine for months, or that his close friend was apparently dealing cocaine, or that the truth was far more nuanced than the mythology? Is there then something to be said, at least in this case, for a (seeming) lie proving far more powerful than the truth.
2. Len Bias was using crack cocaine that night.
Origin: University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died after smoking a pure form of cocaine free-base, the assistant state medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Bias has said. ..."Crack" is a relatively new and increasingly popular form of free-base cocaine extracted from the adulterated powder by using water, heat and baking soda, drug experts say. (The Evening Sun, Baltimore, July 9, 1986)
Contrary evidence: Eyewitness accounts, court testimony from Long and Gregg. See also: Smialek told reporters as he left the courthouse that it did not appear Bias freebased the cocaine found in his system. Earlier this month, Smialek's assistant, Dr. Dennis Smyth, who performed the autopsy on Bias, said the redness in Bias's windpipe and a high concentration of cocaine in his blood indicated the athlete "most likely" smoked cocaine rather than snorted it in powder form through his nose. ''We don't have any evidence to support that [freebasing] right now," Smialek said. Why this matters: "In the month following Bias's death, the [television] networks aired 74 evening news segments about crack and cocaine, often erroneously interchanging the two substances and blithely asserting it was crack that killed Bias." (From "Smoke and Mirrors," by Dan Baum)
Why this matters, II:
Because of Derrick Curry. Derrick Curry dreamed of following in Bias' footsteps on the court. Instead, he spent more than a decade in prison. WHO IS DERRICK CURRY? If there is a human thread to tie all this moral complexity together -- a Zelig-like figure who bore witness to the complexity of this entire saga -- it is Derrick Curry. He, too, was a basketball player at Northwestern High School, a fleet guard with Division I prospects who was a close friend and classmate of Len Bias' younger brother, Jay. He claims to have spent time in Len Bias' dorm room hours before his death, hanging out with David Gregg, another Northwestern graduate. Curry knew -- and liked -- Brian Tribble. The night after his brother's death, Jay Bias, who would turn 16 the next day, went out to play a basketball game as a tribute to a brother who had always warned him away from drugs. But over time, Curry saw the way Len's death ate at Jay's own sense of identity and his own passion for the game. He sought solace on the court, but what he carried, both within himself and through the projections of others, were a mythic set of expectations, as if Jay could carry on what his brother could not. On the court, he often resembled his brother, and he was endowed with undeniable talent: In their junior year, Curry and Jay Bias led Northwestern to the state championship. Jay scored 28 points in the finals, at Cole Field House on the Maryland campus, the gym where his brother had made his name. Jay Bias averaged 25 points and 12 rebounds his senior season, and was generally regarded among the top recruits in the nation. But something wasn't right. He got into disputes with the Northwestern coaching staff. He started fights. He fell into tantrums. His grades and test scores were poor, and he chose to enroll at a nearby community college. After a year and more problems, this time with the Allegany Community College coaching staff, he quit school and took a job, hoping, at some point, to enroll at American University. "After Lenny died, it took away [Jay's] love for the game of basketball," Curry says. "Part of him wanted to play and be the second Lenny, but the pressure people kept putting on him took its toll. Finally, Jay said, 'Man, I'm just tired.' He used to keep so much stuff inside." Curry watched the burden of Len's death eat away at Jay Bias. By then, the Len Bias legend had swelled to the point that it carried a strange cachet (and still does -- today, in the D.C. area, there is a rock band named after him). In the drug business, amid the perverse logic of celebrity that we would soon grow accustomed to, Tribble was seen as a rising star; he considered writing a book and hosted several parties at a local nightclub, posing for photographs with the attendees. His guilt also led him back to Jay Bias. "Brian used to look out for me and Jay, particularly after Lenny died," Curry says. "He'd give us money to take our girls out to the movies. He'd take us out shopping. Brian didn't look for anything in return -- he never asked me to do anything illegal for him. "I think what happened with Brian is that Brian was a very likable person, and Brian knew a lot of people, and they said, 'Do you want to make some easy money?' And Brian probably figured, 'Well, doggone, this is easy.' I can say that from his family's standpoint, he wasn't living in the ghetto. His family wasn't doing bad. Brian is and was a very intelligent person. "But sometimes people get into it so much that they can't get out of it." On Dec. 4, 1990, Jay Bias, then 20 years old, went to a shopping mall. He told Curry he planned to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend. Curry was going to go with him. He chose to get a haircut from a friend instead. Midway through his haircut, Curry saw a television news report about a shooting at the mall. The victim was Len Bias' younger brother. According to reports, the sales clerk had accused Jay of flirting with his wife, and Jay left and got into his car, and the suspect drove up behind him in the parking lot and shot him in the back. Curry later heard that Jay Bias and the man who murdered him had gone together in a limo to their prom a couple of years earlier. At the hospital, Eric Bias, the last living male progeny of Lonise and James Bias, kept repeating the words, "My brother's not dead." It made no sense, but what did make sense anymore? What logic could anyone extract from this without clinging to divine inevitability, to the theories of predestination and martyrdom favored by Lonise Bias? Like many of us, Derrick Curry was still terribly naive about the realities of the drug trade in the late 1980s. He was 20 years old, the son of a high school principal with a Ph.D., but he still reverted to sucking his thumb during stressful moments. He had enrolled at Prince George's Community College, but still had aspirations for a Division I basketball career at Georgetown, and he was something of a playground virtuoso, whose vertical leap was once measured at 43 inches. He had friends in the neighborhood, and those friends were -- like Tribble -- involved in illicit activity, in a drug ring that would later come to be known as the Woodridge Group, whose cell phones were being monitored by authorities. Curry did not do drugs, and he insists he did not profit from drugs, but a man he considered a friend and a role model, Norman Brown (whose cocaine supplier, according to a 1994 Washington Post report, was Tribble), had asked Curry to run some errands for him. "Curry needed what Brown's lifestyle offered: a casual acceptance of crime and danger; a casual defiance of the American power structure," Richard Leiby wrote in The Washington Post several years later. Maybe that sounds overly psychoanalytical, but it is hard not to wonder whether the relationship between Len Bias and Brian Tribble was guided by some of those same elements. One day after the death of Jay Bias, and two months after Tribble pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, federal agents broke up the remainder of the Woodridge Group. (In part, Curry says, they acted because they feared retaliation from the Woodridge Group against Jay Bias' murderer and his accomplices.) Curry, who had been driving Brown's car, in which a one-pound rock of crack was hidden, imagined he would pay a price; he imagined he would serve a short jail sentence and then be given a chance to atone for the sins of his naivete. He had no criminal record. One FBI agent called him a "flunky." But there were federal laws, hurriedly passed by Congress, and those laws decreed that drug offenders were subject to mandatory minimum sentences, and those who trafficked in crack were especially susceptible. Despite sympathy from a judge who could do nothing to help him, Derrick Curry was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in prison for his role in a drug conspiracy under laws that had been passed in the summer of 1986, in the midst of an unprecedented cry for reform in the wake of the death of Leonard K. Bias. Jay Bias, third from left, is comforted by Jesse Jackson, left, his father James and an unidentified man at a private funeral service for Len Bias. Less than five years later, Jay would be dead as well. SPORTS MEETS POLITICS This is America, after all, and it does not take long for tragedy to bleed into political strategems. Here is how this element of the Bias saga progressed: The speaker of the House of Representatives at the time was a Democrat named Thomas Phillip "Tip" O'Neill Jr., and Tip was an old-school Boston politico, and you can imagine how a politician with ties to both D.C. and Boston, two cities devastated by the Bias tragedy, would react the morning after such an event. Sterling, a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, came into work the next day and was overwhelmed by the response. Overnight, America's "vulnerability" to drugs had become the seminal issue in Washington. O'Neill was thinking about the midterm elections in November 1986; he was thinking about regaining the House from a popular second-term president. It didn't matter that Bias had nothing to do with crack -- Bias was a major story, and crack was a major story, and to conflate them was simply a shortcut to political progress. O'Neill thought Democrats should take the lead on getting tough on drugs, and that meant stricter sentences for drug offenders. It also meant both Democrats and Republicans were swept up in hyperbole and emotional appeals, in trying to out-tough each other, in a debate swept clean of nuance. Crack had altered the media's image of a typical cocaine user from white to black, from rich to poor -- in 1986, for the first time, more blacks were imprisoned than whites. Now, here was the perfect call to action, a young man of modest means on the verge of becoming rich, an athlete who had instilled pride in white and black communities, suddenly gone -- and for no good reason. That Cleveland Browns safety Don Rogers fatally overdosed on cocaine eight days later only served to reinforce the anti-drug rhetoric that was building to a fever pitch on Capitol Hill. "In death," Dan Baum wrote in "Smoke and Mirrors," Len Bias "would become the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs." Amid the fury and panic and ignorance, amid what Sterling calls a "legislative frenzy," Congress acted in a bipartisan fashion, passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. One Oklahoma legislator admitted it was "out of control," but added, "of course I'm for it." The law established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders; it also decreed that possession or sale of 1/100th of an amount of crack cocaine as compared to powder cocaine (5 grams versus 500 grams) would trigger those mandatory minimum sentences. That number was based entirely on fears of this new drug. What it had to do with the death of Len Bias, no one seemed to know. But it was all part of the same narrative now. In our haste to address what had been framed as America's most pressing problem, in our haste to atone for the sins of Leonard Bias, we took it too far. That is now widely acknowledged by both Democrats and Republicans and borne out in studies by advocacy groups like The Sentencing Project and Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The racial disparity, the targeting of black neighborhoods, the overcrowding of prisons with low-level drug offenders rather than major traffickers, and the outright absurdity of what happened to Derrick Curry and thousands like him, has prompted the introduction of seven bills between the House and Senate - sponsored by conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch of Utah, and liberals, such as Charles Rangel of New York -- to amend the laws passed in 1986. Derrick Curry (whose original sentence was nearly three times that served by most murderers) was 31 years old when his sentence was commuted by President Clinton in 2001. He worked out with the Knicks, but he tore up his knee, and any hope for a pro basketball career was gone. He still maintains contact with Brian Tribble, who was sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and now works as a trainer at a local gym, and who seems determined to begin his life anew. For a time in prison, Curry and Tribble shared a cell. They would talk sometimes about what happened, and they would talk sometimes about what would have happened if that night had never happened. "I think if Brian was a real friend -- and I know personally that he loved Lenny, and I have seen Brian break down from talking about Lenny -- he wouldn't have let him do it," Curry says. "I know how Brian felt about Lenny as a friend, and he shouldn't have put him in that situation." Rob Tringali for ESPN.com The impact of Len Bias' death still reverberates 22 years later. WHETHER IT BE A LIE OR THE TRUTH But here we are, and what's done is done. Time has been served, and the bodies have been buried, and a mother continues to tell the only story she knows, the only story she cares to believe. She has heard of the controversy over mandatory minimum sentences and the role of her son's death in the process, and she has heard of the continued corruption of college sports and of the Hall of Fame career of Lefty Driesell -- she still attends Maryland games with her grandchildren on occasion -- but these push-and-pulls over legislation and administration are not her greatest concerns. Her concerns, and the mission she has been charged with, are more concrete, more personal. She has aspirations of building a youth center in Prince George's County, named after her children. She believes that by addressing the way these modern children see themselves, she can affect the decisions they make. She believes this is her calling. She believes her son died for this very reason, to be a cautionary tale, to be a martyr. And we can fret all we want over the legacy of Len Bias, or the lack thereof, over whether, as one newspaper columnist wrote in the aftermath, ignorance should be a reason for heroism, or whether, as Lonise Bias says, "He went down to give life." Because she knows she is right. "It's not that I'm just some airhead that's just full of faith," she says. "It's just that you have to move on. And through your faith, you believe that things are working out for good, and when you see you're impacting people's lives as a result of this horrific thing that happened, and whether it be a lie or a truth, you continue to move forward in the midst of it." "It's not that I'm just some airhead that's just full of faith," Lonise Bias says. "It's just that you have to move on." So she sits here, in a classroom in Greenwood, S.C., eating a fried-chicken salad, granting an exclusive audience to the members of the boys' and girls' basketball teams before she rides back to the airport. "COMPARISON RUINS CONTENTMENT!" she told them earlier. "THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES THAT ARE GOING TO FOLLOW YOU!" she told them. The girls are cozying up to her. A boy named Sam Montgomery, who is a star player on the football team, a Division I recruit, tells me Lonise Bias reminds him of his mother, a "strong black woman" with a resonant message. Everything Sam says indicates he could not imagine poisoning his career with drugs. Everything he says seems heartfelt and truthful. Everything he says gives you hope for the next generation. And that's the thing: All of this is so admirable. Everything Lonise Bias preaches is backed by a moral certitude you can't help but find compelling. A woman who lost two of her children -- a woman who straddled the graves of two of her children -- is helping ensuing generations. Where are the flaws in such a story? What isn't redemptive and appealing -- what isn't downright American -- about a narrative like this one?
"Did you know your son was doing drugs?" one of the girls asks.
"It's been said it was his first time," Lonise Bias says.
Bryant, James to lead US team By ANDREW SELIGMAN, AP Sports Writer CHICAGO (AP)—MVP Kobe Bryant has a shot at another big prize after falling short of the NBA championship, and he’ll have plenty of help along the way. LeBron James is there. Dwyane Wade, too. They will lead a U.S. Olympic basketball team that was announced Monday and hopes to capture the gold medal in Beijing in August after a third-place showing in Athens four years ago. The team already has “re-established itself” on an international level, USA Basketball managing director Jerry Colangelo said during a news conference. The next step is to bring home the gold, and the U.S. will send a deep, versatile team to China. Carmelo Anthony and Jason Kidd were also among the 12 players chosen from a pool of 33. They were joined by the Detroit Pistons’ Tayshaun Prince, along with Carlos Boozer, Chris Bosh, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Michael Redd and Deron Williams. “It was a very difficult selection process,” Colangelo said. “When you have as many outstanding players as we have in this country—to select a group of 12 is obviously going to leave out a number of outstanding people.” The Pistons issued a statement from Prince in which he said he was “honored to be selected.” “I take great pride in being given the opportunity to represent my country, and I strongly believe that with the team that has been assembled, the United States will be represented well,” Prince said. The team was selected without a tryout. It will have a minicamp this week in Las Vegas and meet there July 20-25 to train and play an exhibition against Canada before heading overseas. The Americans open Olympic play against China on Aug. 10. Although the Americans captured the gold at the Sydney Games in 2000, they no longer dominate international play as they once did. The talent gap has narrowed and many top players have chosen to not play for the national team in recent years. Now, the U.S. team appears loaded. Then again, the Americans went 5-3 in Athens and lost for the first time since NBA players started competing in 1992 even though they had James, Anthony, Wade and Tim Duncan. That group got routed by Puerto Rico before losing to Lithuania and Argentina, but this one is confident it will take the gold. “It’s really the world’s game. We think we’re the best at playing that game,” said coach Mike Krzyzewski, warning that “unless we show the respect to the rest of the world that it is the world’s game” there will be no gold medal. Wade and Anthony said they didn’t know what to expect in Athens. “I’ve always seen greatness in the Olympics, but that was never one of my dreams,” Wade said. “I never really expected to be on the Olympic team, especially in my first year. I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into. … Now, we respect the game so much. We respect the team basketball that they play internationally so much.” Anthony saw the 2004 Games as a chance to have “some of the best workouts in the summertime with the best players in the world” and went there thinking “the USA is supposed to win everything.” “Going through that experience really helped me to learn the international game,” Anthony said. He’s part of a team that includes one of the best shooters (Redd) and defenders (Prince). There are role players and scorers, including the two biggest. Bryant will play in his first Olympics after winning his first MVP while leading the Los Angeles Lakers to the finals. James averaged 30.0 points, just enough to beat Bryant for the scoring title. Those two, along with Anthony, Kidd and Dwight Howard, started for a team that went unbeaten in the Olympic qualifying tournament last year. Eight of the 12 players headed to Beijing played on that team and six played in the 2006 world championships. “We’re a team already,” Krzyzewski said. “The thing that this program has done is … provide continuity and relationships. … We’ll hit the ground running.” Phoenix forward Amare Stoudemire withdrew from Olympic consideration, apparently concerned about pushing his body too hard after knee surgery in 2005 and 2006. So did Detroit’s Chauncey Billups, who would have had a tough time making the team given the backcourt depth. Wade’s season ended in March because of a sore left knee that had been bothering him since surgery in 2007. He started working out in his hometown Chicago in May, and James and Paul joined him to help sharpen his game. Colangelo visited recently and left convinced the 6-foot-4 guard was healthy. “This was to see how far along he had come in his rehab,” Colangelo said. “That was the whole thing. Plus, I had a little conversation I wanted to have with him. We took care of that. I watched him work. I saw him do a few things in terms of explosiveness that showed me that he was pretty much back.” Trainer Tim Grover has been working out with Wade. Colanagelo said Grover assured him the Miami Heat star will completely ready when the team gathers in Las Vegas next month. “I feel great,” Wade said. And he’d feel even better with a gold medal dangling from his neck. Now ask yourself, where are all of the big men? Will this haunt the US later on in the final rounds? Tayshon Prince???? Come on, there has to be a big, like Tyson Chandler. I hope this mix of players works out for the US to win GOLD!!!
BEASLEY OR ROSE, WHO IS THE NUMBER ONE PICK IN THE NBA DRAFT? NBCSports.com “I’m only one player. I’m not God.” Those words came courtesy of Derrick Coleman on NBA draft night in 1990 after Coleman, selected No. 1 overall by the New Jersey Nets, had been asked to share his thoughts on turning around the Nets’ sad fortunes. New Jersey had won just 17 games the previous season. Coleman’s point is well-taken, but it will never prevent the NBA general managers, coaches and scouts from looking for the next savior. Will they find it in Derrick Rose, the quick and compact point guard from Memphis? Or in Michael Beasley, the power forward with shooting range and a thirst for rebounding? Or in someone else, someone perhaps the entire league thus far has miscalculated in its projections? Despite the studying — of film, of measurements, of body types, of private workouts, of similar players, of character and of more available research and data than ever before — the NBA draft still is not, and never will be, an exact science. At its best, it’s part evaluation, part craps table. Owning the No. 1 overall selection, however, is different. The process is the same, but the short- and long-term scrutiny, impact and pressure to get it right are immense. A team needs to land the player in the draft who will put together the best pro career, and that player had better be a multi-year all-star, the face of the franchise and the foundation around which the rest of the team will be built. Winning an NBA title wouldn’t hurt either. This year’s draft will be held Thursday. The Chicago Bulls will select first, which means they have the toughest decision of all. If there’s a future MVP candidate and/or Hall-of-Famer in the field, they have to identify him now. This year's decision is especially difficult because there is no consensus No. 1. Opinions differ on Rose, Beasley and even USC guard O.J. Mayo, three players all younger than 21. “You have to do all the research into what kind of people they are,” said former coach Chuck Daly, who won two championships with the Detroit Pistons. “Are they going to come to play every night? Who are they hanging out with? What are their habits? All of that enters into your decision.” In the 23 drafts beginning with the 1985 edition that also incorporated the first draft lottery, there have been several in which the No. 1 pick was clear: Patrick Ewing to the Knicks in 1985, David Robinson to Spurs in 1987, Shaquille O’Neal to the Magic in 1992, Tim Duncan to the Spurs in 1997 and LeBron James to the Cavs in 2003. The other years were more challenging, as teams made most of those No. 1 decisions with lots of hand-wringing and tentative tosses of those casino dice. Since 1985, there have been seven go-either-way drafts where teams with the No. 1 pick had to make a choice, similar to this year, between backcourt and frontcourt. On six of those occasions, teams determined big was better than small, a strategy that dates to, oh, roughly when the first baskets were built. Here are the results of those seven: 1990 — Nets selected Coleman over Gary Payton; 1991 — Hornets selected Larry Johnson over Kenny Anderson; 1994 — Bucks selected Glenn Robinson over Jason Kidd; 1998 — Clippers selected Michael Olowokandi over Mike Bibby; 1999 — Bulls selected Elton Brand over Steve Francis; 2002 — Rockets selected Yao Ming over Jay Williams. The only year when the guard won out was 1996, when the 76ers chose Allen Iverson ahead of Marcus Camby. The two are now teammates with the Denver Nuggets. As the list above indicates, sometimes the guard would have been the right choice. Other times, the frontcourt player proved better in the long run. There is disagreement, however, over how to build a roster. Some teams believe in starting in the middle, focusing on post play, rebounding and interior defense. The dissenting view is to secure a perimeter player, ensuring ball-handling and creating ability, lock-down defense and long-range shooting. With the recent emergence of dynamic point guards such as Steve Nash, Deron Williams, Chris Paul and, to a slightly lesser degree, Brandon Roy — and a desire shared by many teams to play at a faster, guard-driven tempo — the value of ball-handlers who not only facilitate, but also dominate, continues to rise. “In this day and age, I would go point guard, but he better really be good,” said Daly, who coached standout point guard Isiah Thomas with the Pistons. “He’d better be an all-star, and that encompasses a lot of things: his physique to take the pounding, his decision-making and what kind of shooter he is. This is key, because at the end of the shot clock, the ball usually comes back to the guard and he’s got to make something happen or shoot the ball.” For all the focus on point guards, however, the past 10 NBA champions have been anchored by elite centers and power forwards Shaquille O’Neal, Duncan, Detroit’s Wallaces and Kevin Garnett. The question is, should position preferences dictate draft selections? “You’d better take the best player, regardless of position, even if you’re strong in that position,” said Pat Williams, senior vice president of the Orlando Magic. “If you don’t, it will bite you. The Bulls have to figure out who’s going to be the better player regardless of position, regardless of anything else.”
Rose or Beasley? Beasley or Rose? Here’s a breakdown:
Derrick Rose Strengths: Rose is 19 years old, but already has a calm, quiet and mature demeanor that many older players never develop. At 6-foot-3, 190 pounds, Rose has an NBA-ready body. He thrives in the transition game and can summon an extra gear when he needs to get past opponents. The best part of his game right now is his ability to get into the lane and finish around the basket. He also shines in the spotlight, having played some of his best basketball during the NCAA tournament. Weaknesses: Two things stand out. One, can Rose consistently run an NBA offense? He will need to prove he can make the correct reads, get his team into its sets and create for teammates. Two, his outside shooting. At this point, the results are OK, but his shot mechanics are questioned. How will this transfer to the NBA, especially with its deeper 3-point line? Rose shot 34 percent on his 3s in his sole college season. In two collegiate seasons, Paul shot a stellar 47 percent. Draft campaign 2008: “Derrick’s an introverted kid who matured in a short period of time. He could have scored 25 a game, but he deferred a lot this year. He just wants to win. He has such an incredible will to win. I don’t know where that comes from. We played 40 games and had 115 practices, and he came to every single one of them focused and ready to work — that’s a skill. Then, his speed and ability to finish over people really stand out. He’s not chasing money, he’s chasing greatness. Point guards like him just don’t come along very often. And when they made Derrick, they broke the mold.” — Memphis coach John Calipari
Michael Beasley Strengths: Beasley is also 19, but clearly one of his strengths is his strength. At 6-8 and roughly 240 pounds, Beasley overpowered most college opponents. He plays with purpose around the basket, can finish with either hand and attacks the glass (12.4 per game). But the trait that really separates Beasley is his shooting touch and range for a guy his size. He wowed attendees at the Orlando pre-draft camp with a flurry of 3-point shooting. Weaknesses: Despite his size, Beasley is a bit short for a franchise power forward. Rebounding aside, can he anchor the defense? Can he defend the center position, if needed? These are the abilities that separate Duncan from Carlos Boozer. If Beasley slides over to small forward, does he have the agility to stay with quicker players? Likewise, would his perimeter game be more easily neutralized? And finally, questions linger about his attitude and maturity. Draft campaign 2008: “I listen to all of the reports questioning his character. It’s the biggest farce and joke I’ve ever heard of. He’s a tremendous kid, and the best teammate I’ve ever been around in 23 seasons. The thing I’m proudest of is how Mike embraced the leadership role. He accepted all of his responsibilities and came to compete every single day. When we returned from a loss at Texas Tech, he went straight to the gym and shot balls until 2:30 in the morning. He has a great work ethic. I think he’s a special person. Whatever NBA team he ends up with is going to be extremely happy.” — Kansas State coach Frank Martin Most evaluators believe Beasley and Rose both will be fine pro players, even all-stars. There’s a difference, however, between a fine pro, an all-star and a franchise player. For example, consider the 2003 draft, where the four selections after James were Darko Milicic, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. Milicic has played five years in the NBA and is still 22 years old; it’s too early to label him a bust, but clearly he wasn’t worthy of being selected in front of the other players on that list. Anthony, meanwhile, is a remarkable talent, but he doesn’t impact the game in enough ways to ever become the focal point of a championship team. Bosh made great strides the past two seasons and has showed the ability and desire to continue to improve. Wade’s performance and leadership already reached their pinnacle when he led the Miami Heat to the championship in just his second year, in 2006; since then he has battled injuries. Whether it boils down to ability (Milicic) or leadership (Anthony), assessing the components of talent is no easy task. For example, Clippers executive Elgin Baylor once said this about Olowokandi, the center Baylor drafted No. 1 overall in 1998: “He is a legitimate center with good wingspan and has good offensive skills. When he came in and worked out, it was amazing. I don’t see a great risk in taking him. Some of the great centers in the league are getting older. And he is going to be one of the top centers in this league.” In nine rather ordinary seasons, Olowokandi went on to average about eight points and seven rebounds per game. Imagine walking into an Economics 101 class at a local university, evaluating students and their academic records, and then attempting to predict success as a young business executive five, 10 years into the future. It takes research and good fortune, which is precisely what happened with the Houston Rockets and Hakeem Olajuwon. Former general manager Carroll Dawson, who spent 27 years in a variety of jobs with the Rockets, said there was little discussion going into the 1984 draft. The Rockets would take Olajuwon No. 1 overall, ahead of Sam Bowie and Michael Jordan. “We were certain, no doubt about it,” Dawson said. “But the thing is, we got a lot more than we bargained for. We had seen him a lot and he dunked, blocked shots, rebounded and ran the floor like a madman. We didn’t know about his shooting touch until we got him. The only touch you saw in college was when he shot free throws and he couldn’t make them (55 percent). But every year in the NBA he added something. He had shooting touch and could shoot phenomenally.” Most important, however, in Olajuwon’s development into a leader, a champion, and Hall-of-Famer was his maturity. Early in his NBA career, Olajuwon’s talents were undermined by personal fouls, technical fouls, fights and visible displays of negative emotion. Opponents easily frustrated him. But concurrent with a greater focus on his spirituality early in the 1990s, Olajuwon’s play and on-court demeanor matured. The result was two championships and some of the finest play in basketball history. Just how difficult is it to predict character and work ethic? On one hand, consider Tim Thomas, who went to the Nets in 1997 with the seventh pick, two spots ahead of Tracy McGrady. Thomas has the physical skills of an all-star, but has considerably underachieved his entire career. On the other hand, Paul Pierce slid all the way to No. 10 in 1998 because of concerns regarding his disposition. Pierce has been the Celtics’ rock for 10 seasons, improving his play each year, and recently was named MVP of the NBA Finals. What does the future hold for Beasley and Rose? Maybe one more piece of information will uncover a clue that will predict future success. “You want to be absolutely as thorough as you can be,” Williams said. “You are going to examine these two young men like no human beings have ever been examined. You want as much face time with them as you can get. Ideally you want to go and meet their families, spend as much time as possible with siblings and parents, and you want to go to their hometowns and their high schools, visit their youth coaches. You can’t do enough.”
