Sirius XM NBA: “Jason made Giannis toe the line, if you will, when Giannis was a rookie” @Hoophall member Rod Thorn tells @Frank Isola & @Eddie Johnson why Jason Kidd deserves a lot of credit for the player Giannis Antetokounmpo has become #FearTheDeer | @Giannis Antetokounmpo pic.twitter.com/Xt25YPlxEL
Tag: Rod Thorn
“We call heads,” said Thorn. A pause. …
“We call heads,” said Thorn. A pause. “OK, gentlemen, here we go,” boomed the deep voice of O’Brien. “The coin’s in the air.” Another pause. Another pause. Another pause. “Tails it is!” O’Brien said. Hearn let out a triumphant whoop. “I was playing basketball at Venice Beach,” said Pat O’Brien, at the time a reporter for KNXT-TV in Los Angeles. “The news came over a transistor radio, and people started screaming. ‘Yes! Yes! We’re getting Magic! We’re getting Magic!’ ”
ESPN’s recently aired documentary …
ESPN’s recently aired documentary series “The Last Dance,” chronicling Michael Jordan’s final championship season with the Chicago Bulls, rekindled interest in Jordan’s long-running feud with Isiah Thomas, including how the Pistons’ star was left off the 1992 Dream Team that won Olympic gold in Barcelona. Author Jack McCallum addressed the controversy in the most recent episode of his “The Dream Team Tapes” podcast series. McCallum said Jordan brought up the issue of Thomas himself in a 2011 interview. “When they called me and asked me to play — Rod Thorn called me. I said ‘Rod, I won’t play if Isiah Thomas is on the team.’ He assured me. He said, ‘Chuck doesn’t want Isiah. So, Isiah is not going to be part of the team,’” Jordan said on the recording that McCallum played during the podcast.
Not long before the 1984 NBA Draft, Rod …
Not long before the 1984 NBA Draft, Rod Thorn received a phone call from the Mavericks. Dallas was about to make a serious play for Michael Jordan. Mavs general manager Rick Sund told Thorn, then the GM of the Bulls, he’d part with All-Star forward Mark Aguirre if Chicago was willing to give up the No. 3 pick, which the Bulls would use to draft Jordan. Sund figured this one had a chance. The Bulls were coming off a 27-win season, and Aguirre was a local hero who drew huge crowds while starring at DePaul. He was the No. 1 pick in the draft only three years before and was coming off of a season as the NBA’s second-leading scorer.
Sund had fallen in love with North …
Sund had fallen in love with North Carolina’s recent teams and had dreams of pairing Jordan with his college teammate, Sam Perkins, who had also entered the ’84 draft. If he could finagle the third pick, he’d be able to do it. The Mavericks were already choosing fourth. So, as he puts it, he “dangled” Aguirre. But there was one problem: Thorn and the Bulls had been waiting a long time for this moment, and they weren’t exactly trying to flush it away. “(Rod and I) talked about this a couple weeks ago,” Sund told The Athletic. “And I said, ‘You know, Rod. You’d have won the press conference, but we’d have won NBA championships.’”
Sund wasn’t the only GM who called …
Sund wasn’t the only GM who called Thorn about No. 3. The 76ers, owners of the fifth pick, were signaling all over to see if they could move up. Then-general manager Pat Williams says they offered Portland No. 5 and a player for No. 2. That was a no-go. He can’t recall what he proposed to the Bulls, but it wasn’t enough. “People are shocked. ‘We didn’t know (Jordan) was gonna be that good and so forth.’ Well, we certainly knew he was gonna be good,” Williams told The Athletic. “Greatest player of all time? Nobody saw that coming. But everybody knew. And if you were in that Carolina pipeline, which we were because of Billy, you had all the inside skinny on what was going on in Chapel Hill.”
This was a long time coming. NBA front …
This was a long time coming. NBA front offices in 1984 were not what they are now, neither in size nor procedure. Organizations didn’t overflow with scouts, as they do today. There wasn’t nearly the same emphasis on studying every nook and cranny of a player’s off-court life. Chicago never even brought Jordan in for a pre-draft interview or workout. “We never had a conversation until we drafted him,” Thorn said. Instead, the Bulls did their homework old-school. Thorn was in contact with Smith, his close friend, who provided intel. Thorn, as well as scouts Gene Tormohlen and Mike Thibault, regularly traveled to Chapel Hill to watch Jordan play. Thibault estimates he was at UNC six or seven times during the 1983-84 season, Jordan’s junior and final year at the school.
“Before the Olympics, [selection …
“Before the Olympics, [selection committee chairman] Rod Thorn calls me and says we would love for you to be on the Dream Team,” Jordan said. “I said, ‘Who’s all playing?’ “He said, ‘What’s that mean?’ I said, ‘Who’s all playing?’ He says, ‘Well, the guy you are talking about and you are thinking about is not going to be playing.’ It was insinuated I was asking about him, but I never threw his name in there. “You want to attribute it to me, go ahead. Be my guest. But it wasn’t me.”
“I respect Isiah Thomas’s talent,” …
“I respect Isiah Thomas’s talent,” Jordan says today. “To me, the best point guard of all-time is Magic Johnson, and right behind him is Isiah Thomas.” Jordan reaffirms in The Last Dance that he didn’t tell Dream Team overseer Rod Thorn to keep Thomas off the 1992 Olympics squad, though his denial is notably understated compared to some of his other more boisterous pronouncements.
Since Thomas, then one of the most …
Since Thomas, then one of the most accomplished players in the NBA, was left off the Dream Team in 1992, it’s largely been attributed to his poor relationships with some of the players who made the roster, namely Jordan. In Episode 5, Jordan says when he asked Rod Thorn, then the head of USA Basketball, who was playing, Thorn told him, “The guy you’re talking about, who you’re thinking about, he’s not gonna be playing.”