He’s done so many things wrong since he traded in his sneakers for wing-tipped shoes, has folded so many times in the clutch, that you almost forget that there was a time when Isiah Thomas owned the tensest moments of any big basketball game.
Almost always it was true – when Isiah would take over – doing what the so-called experts said could not be done, which was to be a little man and lead a team to an NBA championship.
There wasn’t any question that Thomas, just 20 years old, was the most spectacular player available in the 1981 draft. He was coming off an NCAA title with Indiana University, and would be, after only two years in college, either the first or second pick overall.
The Dallas Mavericks held the first pick off the board.
The Mavs fancied small forward Mark Aguirre, a Chicagoland friend of Thomas’s, from DePaul University. It was a toss-up as to whether the Mavericks would pick the scorer Aguirre or the playmaker Thomas.
“Isiah was the more complete player,” Jack McCloskey, Pistons GM at the time, told me last year in a telephone interview. “We knew we’d absolutely take him if the Mavericks didn’t. I knew we needed the creativity that Isiah provided.”
So the Mavs took Aguirre, and McCloskey snapped up Thomas, and almost as soon as he did, the naysayers were out.
It was still the era of the Big Man in the NBA. It didn’t help that, two years earlier, the Los Angeles Lakers drafted themselves a 6-foot-9 point guard, Magic Johnson. History has told us that when the Boston Celtics battled first the Philadelphia 76ers, and then the Lakers for league supremacy in the late-1960s, early-1970s, you might as well forget the other eight players on the court – the real duel was between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, the two centers. The two big men. Both teams had Hall of Fame players galore, but Celtics-Sixers/Celtics-Lakers boiled down to Russell-Chamberlain.
No way, the basketball masses said, could you ever hope to build a championship team around a 6-foot-1 point guard.
McCloskey was a Big Man guy. Height fascinated him, to a fault. There was a seven-foot jewel named Ralph Sampson, dominating at Virginia, when Thomas went pro. But Sampson elected to stay in school. Had he come out, McCloskey would have drooled. And after looking at Ralph Sampson’s pro career, I’ll bet McCloskey thanks his lucky stars that Sampson opted to stay in college in 1981.
So McCloskey went to work, trying to build a championship team around a Little Man. It took him eight years, but he did it. One of the final pieces he added, via trade, was a scoring small forward named Mark Aguirre.
That McCloskey succeeded was because Isiah Thomas, all six-foot-one of him, wouldn’t have it any other way. If he had to score, he scored. If he had to pass the ball, he passed the ball. And when a game needed to be seized, he did that, too. He smiled a lot in those days, his cherubic face hiding the heart of an assassin.
Now, though, Thomas can do little right. And he doesn’t smile as much.
His missteps actually began before he even officially retired as a player.
Filled with some sort of jingoism, Thomas announced, prematurely, that he had an agreement with Pistons owner Bill Davidson to be involved mightily in the team’s front office after his playing days. Only, there never really was such an arrangement, and the public proclamation irritated Davidson to no end. And Thomas then learned what the last great Pistons guard before him, David Bing, learned about 20 years earlier: Bill Davidson had little use for nostalgia and history if he felt slighted. Bing had held out for more money in 1974, Davidson’s first year of ownership. This was against the businessman’s grain. A year later, Davidson traded Bing.
So there was no place at The Palace for Isiah when he retired. His spot in the front office would be taken a few years later by his backcourt mate, Joe Dumars.
The Midas Touch was gone from Isiah’s hands in retirement. First he tried to resuscitate the Continental Basketball Association, which was kind of like AAA-ball for the NBA. He finagled his way into a commissioner-like role with the league, and the results were less than impressive.
Next up was an executive position with the Toronto Raptors. Isiah was back in the NBA. His few years in Toronto were very forgettable. Thomas was now 2-for-2 in leaving a basketball entity in worse shape than when he found it.
Rare post-playing smiles: Thomas breaking out with the Raptors (above) and celebrating a birthday with the Pacers (below)
Make it 3-for-3. The Indiana Pacers were next in Isiah’s path of destruction. He was a GM. Then he was a coach. Then Larry Bird took the keys to the executive washroom, and he and Isiah didn’t see eye-to-eye, a carryover from their playing days. Bird soon dismissed Thomas.
Today, Isiah is fiddling around with the New York Knicks, once one of the proudest franchises in the entire NBA. They’ve been a mess for awhile, and in fairness, they were out of sorts a bit when Isiah arrived a few years ago. But he hasn’t done anything to stop the blood flow. First he was strictly a GM, then he was told to coach the team, too, if he wanted any chance to hold on to his job.
The results on the court have not been for the squeamish, but even worse has been what’s gone on off the court.
There was a suit brought by a former female employee, accusing Thomas of sexual harassment. Out of those proceedings came the allegation that Thomas apparently saw fit to call certain women “bitches” – and without remorse, pending the circumstance.
Then, two weeks ago, guard Stephon Marbury inexplicably left the team for a couple of days, with little to no explanation. When he returned, Thomas reinserted him into the starting lineup, as if nothing had happened. Marbury was fined $200,000, but that was done by the team. Serious concerns were raised about Thomas’s leniency, when the mere thought of pulling a stunt like that in his playing days would have been folly.
The other night, the Celtics destroyed Thomas’s Knicks, 104-59. Total annihilation. His team fell to 4-10 on the season.
Isiah Thomas has now been retired as a player for about as long as he was employed by the Pistons. Nothing much has gone right for him in Armani. Can’t blame this one on his height, though.
