ON THE UP AND UP?
Current Warriors president Welts, in 1985, devised NBA’s first draft lottery, a controversial event that left the Knicks with Ewing and many crying foul
For true believers, the annual NBA draft lottery will always be a day of reckoning for the league. Of course, they’re also willing to excoriate the NBA on any other day when the subject of its very first lottery comes up.
In the minds of those cynics, D-Day (as in Dupe) was 35 years ago today when they say a lowdown trick took place high atop New York City’s famed Waldorf Astoria hotel. That’s when the NBA conspired to send Patrick Ewing to the New York Knicks instead of any of the other six deserving teams, most notably the moribund Warriors.
Or so goes history’s biggest sports conspiracy theory.
Video from CBS’ old lottery broadcast has been dissected and analyzed so much over the years that only “The Immaculate Reception” rivals it for pro sports’ version of the Zapruder film.
Theorists still can’t agree how the league did it. Was the corner of an envelope intentionally bent? Were tiny bumps placed on the envelope? Was the envelope chilled or frozen? Perhaps all of the above? They can only agree that by hook or by crook the struggling NBA rigged its new lottery to ensure the sealed envelope with New York’s logo inside was picked first. That would mean Ewing, the best big man to enter the NBA in decades, would go to the slumping Knicks, the league’s marquee franchise.
If Warriors president Rick Welts didn’t have such a sanguine nature, he might take those ’85 draft lottery accusations a little more personally. You see, it was Welts, one of Commissioner David Stern’s proteges back then, who was responsible for devising the NBA’s first lottery system.
“I still get a kick out of it,” Welts said during a Zoom call last week. “We talk about it every year around this time. Someone always reaches out. It’s amazing to me, like I can’t even comprehend how anybody thought that everyone would risk their career, and we’d be smart enough to figure out a way to do it.”
Welts, though, is comfortable enough in the league’s innocence to at least appreciate the outlandish theories.
“I like the frozen envelope one. That was really smart,”
Welts said with a chuckle. “I don’t think there was a refrigerator way up there in the Waldorf Astoria. I guess we could have put one in?”
When discussing the process in 1985, Welts’ transparency matches that of the clear plastic drum he had the league use for the lottery’s debut. But it doesn’t mean his attempts at unfiltered honesty get through to everybody.
“To this day, I think Joe Lacob is among the many who believe I’m not yet telling him the truth about the lottery,” Welts said with a slight smile about the Warriors owner and his immediate boss.
One former Warriors front office staff member, though, has much clearer thoughts about the Ewing sweepstakes.
“We always felt like we were going to be screwed because the league wanted Ewing in New York,” said Scott Pruneau, who rose from a Warriors ballboy to its scouting director during his 28 years with the team. “The feeling in the organization was it wasn’t going to happen for us. We just knew somehow we were not getting the pick.”
Chatty NBA executives also were perpetuating the fixed-lottery theory among themselves.
“I remember one high-ranking team executive, who I will not name, was a million percent convinced of what was going to happen,” said Stan Kasten, then the general manager of lottery participant Atlanta. ” ‘(Ewing’s) going to the Knicks,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s going to the Knicks. It’s all arranged.’ “
The irony over the lottery backlash is the NBA switched to a lottery to restore some integrity to the player selection process, where tanking had become rampant. Before 1985, the NBA had the worst teams from the two conferences flip a coin to determine who picked first. The Rockets, heavily utilizing “load management” before it even had a name, had finished last in the West two straight years. Houston then won two consecutive coin flips to grab the No. 1 pick in both ’83 and ’84 — using them to draft Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon.
Further complicating matters for the NBA was the reality it was still a fledgling business despite being in its 40th season. It had trouble attracting any major sponsorships and its modest television contract with CBS was in its final year.
“I think we approached the lottery as a real opportunity to get people to pay attention to the NBA,” said Welts, who was only the league’s 35th employee when he was hired in 1982. “It was not a time in our history that we were particularly popular.”
The league also wasn’t quite as savvy as it eventually would become under Stern’s leadership. If conspiracy theorists knew of some of the farcical prelottery moments they’d never believe the league was equipped to pull off a choreographed sleight of hand.
Like the time when Welts and his crew, after countless hours perfecting their new lottery system, lugged their huge drum into Stern’s office to show off their creation, removing two doors in the process. Then, with Stern looking on, their mock lottery came to a thudding and uncomfortable halt when the envelopes went flying out of the spinning drum and were strewn everywhere.
“In the category of ‘If looks could kill,’ Stern would have killed everybody on sight,” Welts said.
And, if the logistics of holding the lottery at the opulent but antiquated Waldorf Astoria, weren’t challenging enough — such as finding a way to run wires up 18 floors from CBS’ production trucks on the street — the NBA and the TV network had huge troubles just getting into the Starlight Roof to set things up.
Cost-conscious at the time, the NBA only reserved the glamorous Starlight Roof beginning Sunday morning for the lottery scheduled for 1 p.m. ET. That allowed the Philippines ambassador to the United States to book the room for a huge event for his daughter on Saturday night that was supposed to end around 10 p.m.
So Welts’ crew, armed with their lottery drum, and a production team from CBS assembled outside the Starlight Roof before 10 to start preparations. Then waited. And waited. And …
“Those of us sitting there waiting for it to end probably reached the panic stage at midnight when this party was still going strong,” Welts said. “The Philippine ambassador apparently was not an NBA fan and he was not impressed with our issue. And I think he was paying more than we were, so we couldn’t ask him to leave.
“People from CBS were besides themselves because they didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for the broadcast because the party didn’t end until around 1:30,” Welts added. “Looking back on it, I think we could have forked out a couple more bucks to be able to reserve the room. But it was a different NBA back then.”
Once the set was finally in place there was even more tension in the Starlight Roof as a huge crowd of media and guests filed in for the new lottery ceremony.
“I’ve been in courtrooms and murder trials that weren’t that tense,” CBS host Pat O’Brien once told Sports Illustrated.
The sense of trepidation in the room wasn’t limited to the seven seated executives for the lottery teams — the Warriors, Knicks, Pacers, Suns, Clippers, Kings and Hawks — whose teams each had an equal 14.3 percent chance of winning the rights to Ewing.
“All any of us who worked in the NBA and were in the room cared about was having this process go perfectly,” Welts said. “It’s so funny now to think that we could be smart enough to figure out a way to arrange a winner.”
Then it finally came time for Jack Wagner from the accounting firm of Ernst & Whinney to load the envelopes into the drum so Jack Joyce, the NBA’s head of security, could use the hand crank to begin things by spinning the drum five times. Commissioner Stern then reached in and fumbled around before pulling out the first envelope, which would unveil the winner.
First, though, Stern unsealed the other envelopes beginning with the Warriors, who would have the last lottery pick at No. 7. To this day, it’s painful for Warriors fans to see the reaction on the face of Golden State general manager Al Attles. Old 76ers general manager Pat Williams may have best described it by saying Attles “looked like he got hit in the face with an ax handle.”
Sitting in the Warriors locker room 2,900 miles away watching the TV broadcast with trainer Dick D’Oliva, Pruneau felt Attles’ pain.
“Just shocked. But not shocked, if you know what I mean,” Pruneau said. “We were prepared for it, but when it actually happened I was like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ “
Attles, one of the finest gentlemen in the history of the league, reportedly got up after the ceremony and left the hotel without speaking to anyone. Pruneau said Attles briefly contemplated doing something much more drastic after seeing the Warriors’ lottery dreams dashed.
“Al told us, ‘I wanted to pick up that table and just flip it over. That’s how I felt,’ ” Pruneau said.
If it was any consolation to the Warriors and their fans, and it probably shouldn’t be, Ewing was also somewhat disappointed with the lottery results.
“The Knicks were my second choice. First was Golden State because Sleepy Floyd was on that team,” Ewing said on the Dan Patrick Show. “(Sleepy) was somebody I played with. And I thought it would be a great idea to play with someone I knew.”
“You know, it might have been fixed and I don’t care. I ended up where I was supposed to go.”
The Knicks got a Hall of Famer in Ewing, who helped turned the team’s fortunes around but never delivered a title to the Big Apple. From their No. 7 spot, the Warriors incredibly also wound up with a Hall of Famer in Chris Mullin.
“Mullin was the perfect fit for the Warriors,” Welts said. “Obviously, everything about his time here has been awesome.”
Now, 35 years after surviving his first lottery, Welts will once again be involved in the process he helped oversee for 14 years with the NBA. The Warriors currently have the NBA’s worst record, but with league play suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no telling when this year’s lottery will be conducted.
But since this is the 35th anniversary of NBA employee No. 35’s role in the inaugural lottery and this will be the first lottery since his old boss David Stern passed away, maybe it’s fitting that Welts be appointed the Warriors’ representative this year, even if just for a virtual lottery?
Welts just laughed at that notion.
“I think we have better good luck charms than me,” he said, before playfully adding. “I think maybe we give Al another shot at it. Give him a chance to redeem himself.”