Rod Thorn

Sam Smith

It's not like Rod Thorn didn't know point guards. His acquisition of Jason Kidd got the New Jersey Nets to a pair of NBA Finals and helped Thorn be selected for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and enshrinement Friday along with Kidd.

Chicagoan Maurice Cheeks from DuSable High School also is being enshrined in the Hall of Fame Friday. It's mostly because of his playing career with the Philadelphia 76ers, with whom Cheeks became a champion and among the NBA's all-time leaders in steals and assists.

"It's my first draft as Bulls general manager in 1978 and we take Reggie Theus in the first round, good player," Thorn was saying Thursday afternoon at a Hall of Fame media reception in Springfield while Cheeks sat nearby also answering media questions. "Second round, I take Marvin Johnson from New Mexico. Never played for us. In the preseason, (coach Larry) Costello tells me he can't play and we cut him. But back at the draft, Mr. Cheeks is sitting in the front row at the Bismarck Hotel. Stupidest thing I've ever seen. We're sitting out in front of a big crowd doing the draft.

"Mr. Cheeks from the first row after we make our picks stands up and says, but in a nice way, 'You're going to regret not taking Mo Cheeks.' And then he gets up and leaves. I didn't know who he was. Someone tells me it's Mo's father. Our scouts and we felt Mo was OK, but we didn't see him being a terrific NBA player.

"When I got to the Bulls we had Wilbur Holland at point guard," recalled Thorn with a bit of a wince. "He was deaf in one ear and Wilbur would run up the court and Costello would call out a play and Wilbur would not hear or act like he didn't hear what the play was. We tried Reggie at point guard, but he wasn't a point guard. We ended up getting Ricky Sobers, who helped us. But Cheeks with Reggie would have been a heck of a backcourt and we had Artis (Gilmore), who could score. Mo would have been great."

As Thorn was relating the story Thursday afternoon, Cheeks walked by and stopped with some friends and family.

"Yeah, I heard about it," he said with a smile. "I was just trying to get picked by anyone. I didn't know I was going to get picked at all. I guess he (father) knew more than I did. Rod did OK. He got Michael Jordan later on."

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Mo Cheeks and Reggie Theus, it almost happened

Bulls.com

We've all experienced those moments, brief flashes of time that we know would have changed our lives. We call it different things, chance, luck, providence, fate, karma, destiny. We often come to believe, perhaps to reconcile our place in the world, it was meant to be, that some force was guiding the result. It was going to be that way, anyway, right?

Hesitating before stepping off a curb before a speeding bus, taking the path that led to the clearing and not the cliff, calling heads when you know you should have been calling tails.

"Any time I had ever called anything myself with a coin, I always called tails," Rod Thorn was musing the other day. "That was the ironic part of it."

Thorn, the longtime NBA and New Jersey Nets executive who was an elite collegiate star before an eight-year NBA playing career, will be enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Friday in an illustrious class that includes Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Ray Allen, Charlie Scott, Lefty Driesell and Maurice Cheeks. Thorn's seven-year tenure as Bulls general manager would barely be an asterisk on his impressive resume if not for in his final season with the Bulls drafting Michael Jordan.

But if not for the way a coin landed, Thorn would likely be entering the Hall of Fame, if not long before this, as probably the most accomplished general manager in Bulls and perhaps NBA history. While likely having done so for the world's wealthiest ownership group with names like Wirtz, Steinbrenner, Crown, Klutznick and Hunt and in the midst of likely the greatest individual conference rivalry ever featuring the Boston Celtics' Larry Bird and the Bulls' Magic Johnson.

"Yes, we would have been a high level contender," says Thorn. "The Bird and Magic rivalry would have been intense with more regular season games. Ownership definitely would have kept the team, definitely. There's a distinct possibility Rod Thorn would have been a more celebrated general manager.

"Yes, there are instances when you think of things you do and why you did them; that one was not in my control," Thorn acknowledged. "But it changed a lot of peoples' lives; no doubt about it."

It's the simple story of the coin flip for the first pick in the 1979 draft, a footnote in Bulls history that could have been NBA headlines for years. The Reinsdorf group likely never would have gotten a chance to purchase the Bulls, the Los Angeles Lakers, like they were in the 1960s and 1970s, would have been more contender than dynasty, Jerry Krause would have monitored baseballs for 20 more years and Michael Jordan probably would been a Dallas Maverick or Philadelphia 76er.

"Life is full of ironies and so if we had won the coin flip and gotten Magic, we never would have gotten Michael. So the Bulls had to delay being good for a few years," said Thorn. "Obviously, it worked out great for both teams."

Could it have worked out better for the Bulls?

The Bulls of the late 1970s were an underrated team with a Hall of Fame center and future All-Star shooting guard. Led by Artis Gilmore, they barely lost in the 1977 playoffs to the eventual champion Portland Trailblazers. Bill Walton and coach Jack Ramsey called the Bulls their toughest opponent in those playoffs. But with injuries and a coaching change in the 1978-79 season, the Bulls collapsed to a 31-51 record and last in the Eastern Conference.

In that era, there was a coin flip for the No. 1 draft selection between the teams with the poorest record in each conference. In the Western Conference, it was the New Orleans Jazz. But from a prior transaction, the signing of free agent Gail Goodrich, the Lakers held the Jazz pick.

It wasn't a great Lakers team at the time. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had forced his way out of Milwaukee to the Lakers, but the trade stripped the Lakers of their depth. They averaged fewer than 50 wins in Abdul-Jabbar's first three seasons and he seemed to be tiring of the load and expectations, even hinting at retirement. The Lakers were third in their division and fifth in the conference, nowhere close to title contention. They had Abdul-Jabbar and future Hall of Famer Jamaal Wilkes, but a mish mash of older veterans like Adrian Dantley and Lou Hudson. Norm Nixon was their point guard.

The Bulls roster led by Gilmore and Theus arguably was close in talent, almost comparable.

Johnson was the missing piece for the Bulls as well.

In subsequent years, Johnson has been quoted, including in one of his several autobiographies, saying he would have returned to Michigan State if the Bulls won the coin flip, that he wanted to play for the Lakers. But that seems more about loyalty to his longtime employer.

Thorn and longtime Bulls executive Irwin Mandel said they always were confident Johnson would play for the Bulls. "Magic had said he wanted to go into the pros, that there was nothing more he could do in college as he already won a national championship; I did not remember the Bulls being worried," recalled Mandel, now retired.

Johnson's Chicago attorney at the time, George Andrews, said Magic actually seemed to prefer the Bulls.

"He thought at the time Artis was comparable to Kareem," said Andrews. "He thought he could win with Artis. Magic was very positive about Chicago because it was close to home as a Lansing, Michigan guy. It would have been an interesting situation. Reggie would have played fine with him. Artis, those were his prime years, and Reggie became an All-Star. If the Bulls had Magic, Reggie and Artis and with Jerry Sloan becoming coach that season, they would have been very good. That would have been a tough team to match up with."

"We needed a point guard," agreed Thorn. "That's what Magic obviously did, one of the best ever in setting other people up. I think it might have taken us a few years as Magic wasn't a very good shooter when he came in. But we would have been very good within a couple of years."

Of course, the Lakers didn't have much shooting, either, in 1979-80 and then won the championship even with Abdul-Jabbar sitting out the clinching game.

"The Lakers were just OK without Magic," Thorn pointed out. "Magic is one of the 10 best players ever. I do think we would have been terrific."

It was April 19, 1979, about 10 days after the end of the season. There were no draft TV shows then.

The Bulls had plummeted after the heady 1976-77 season that had become known as the Miracle on Madison Street. In 13 of the last 15 home games in 1978-79, the Bulls failed to draw 10,000. So in trying to engage the fans, the Bulls promoted a contest for fans to vote whether the team should call heads or tails.

"Bill Sharman and I were on the call with the league," Thorn recalled. "He was representing the Lakers at the time. The people in New York were asking us who wanted to call it. I immediately said we had this fan vote and, ‘Bill. if it's OK with you, let me call it.' Bill said fine. So I called it heads. It came out tails."

Not quite like the stillness back then in the Bulls offices at 333 North Michigan Avenue. There wasn't much Bulls staff then. Brian McIntyre, who went on to work with Thorn in the league office, was there as was Bulls broadcaster Johnny Kerr. Perhaps Kerr was the bad luck. He was a witness in the previous most famous draft coin flip when the Suns Jerry Colangelo first came up with the idea of the fan vote. The Bulls should have learned. The Phoenix fans voted for heads; Colangelo called heads. It was tails. The Milwaukee Bucks in 1969 selected Abdul-Jabbar and had a title, their only one, by 1971. The Suns got Neal Walk.

"Hey," Kerr brightened at the time, trying to cheer up Colangelo, "maybe they'll talk Neal Walk."

"Johnny was trying to make Rod feel better," recalled McIntyre. "But Rod's way south of morose. So Johnny says, 'The same thing happened to us in Phoenix. We polled the fans and they wanted to go one way. The fans won and we lost.' So Johnny says, ‘Rod, there's a moral to this story. That is if you listen to the fans too much you'll wind up sitting with them.'"

The Bulls selected David Greenwood No. 2. The Knicks picked Bill Cartwright No. 3, but with Gilmore, the Bulls didn't need another center. Greenwood had a 12-year NBA career, six with the Bulls before being traded for George Gervin in 1985. Greenwood came off the bench for the Pistons 1990 champions.

The Bulls would go on a nice run under Sloan, winning 45 games in 1980-81 and sweeping the Knicks in the playoffs before losing to the eventual champion Celtics.

"We got Ricky Sobers (for point guard) and with Theus we had a nice team," said Thorn. "Ricky and Reggie were  a heck of a backcourt and with Artis it looked like we were  ready to go."

But it wouldn't be much of anywhere with coaching changes, personnel problems with players using drugs and a collapse in the 1983-84 season. Bulls managing partner Jerry Reinsdorf likes to tell the story of his baseball owning colleague George Steinbrenner approaching him one day in 1984 about getting rid of this albatross of a franchise that was losing games and money and embarrassing the so called "Magnificent Seven" of owners of Steinbrenner, Lester Crown, Lamar Hunt, Jonathan Kovler, Arthur Wirtz, Walter Shorenstein and Phil Klutznick. They'd drafted Jordan, but they had top 10 draft picks for years and still embarrassment. So Reinsdorf cobbled together a group of investors to take the Bulls—perhaps some symmetry with the Chicago White Sox—and Jordan off their hands. Before the end of the 1984-85 season with the Reinsdorf group assuming control, Reinsdorf fired Thorn and replaced him with a baseball scout, Jerry Krause.

Thorn went on to a prominent role with the NBA and then resurrecting the Nets to a pair of Finals appearances after trading for Jason Kidd.

"I'm very humbled, very proud (to be going into the Hall of Fame)," Thorn acknowledged. "I feel great about it and particularly for me getting in the same time as Jason Kidd, who had a lot to do with me getting in. And Rick Welts, who I worked with in the NBA office and is a good friend. So I feel great about it."

And the Bulls ending up doing OK, as well.

"All's well," agreed Thorn, "that ends well."

the-coin-flip-that-could-have-changed-bulls-history

The coin flip that could have changed Bulls history

The Chicago Bulls congratulate Rod Thorn on being named to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2018.  From 1978 to 1985, Rod served as our General Manager.  While more than 30 years have passed since he last worked for our organization, his imprint on the Bulls remains to this day.

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Chicago Bulls statement on Rod Thorn's Hall of Fame selection

There are those who have played the game with distinction, collegiate all-Americans, top NBA draft picks who became NBA starters. There are those who have coached and seen their teams challenge for titles. Some have done so as team executives, designing the strategies to propel their teams to the top of the basketball world. And there are those who have sat at the highest levels in the executive suites in the league office who have made the decisions that have impacted the many and the few.

There is one man, however, probably just one, who has done all of those things, arguably the only so called five-tool star in NBA history. Who, by the way, also kick started the Bulls 1990s dynasty by drafting Michael Jordan out of the U. of North Carolina.

It’s Rod Thorn, the kid from rural West Virginia who went on to a 50-year career in the NBA and who Thursday at a dinner in Springfield at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame will be presented with the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the Hall of Fame’s highest recognitions.

“I’m not sure there are any others who have the hard earned understanding of the game,” former NBA commissioner David Stern said about Thorn. “People forget he drafted Michael Jordan, forget the Nets (under Thorn) were in the Finals two years in a row (after he pulled off the Jason Kidd trade), forget he was with the 76ers when they beat the Bulls in the playoffs as an eighth seed. And to have the experience at the league, the referee supervision level with a deep understanding of every aspect of the game. He has a unique background and a unique personal approach.”

Thorn became perhaps most known for two tenures in the league office lasting more than 15 years as the vice president of basketball operations czar of discipline during the period of the NBA’s greatest growth.

In that delicate role, Thorn was the final arbiter regarding NBA discipline and rules, a potentially controversial position that Thorn handled with particular grace and elegance. He became one of the most popular and outgoing figures in the game, even to media as Thorn gained a following and reputation as perhaps the most communicative league official no matter the sensitivity of the issue.

“He has a great way with people,” said former deputy commissioner Russ Granik, like Stern a Hall of Famer. “Most remarkable to me was (how) long he held the job in the league office. Nobody has been able to last very long in that job. After a few years, you pretty much have every single team upset about something they consider really critical. But Rod always had a way of earning everybody’s respect. When he had to give them really bad news they seemed to accept he was trying to do the right thing and knew what he was talking about. They didn’t hold it against him, which in that particular role is pretty remarkable.”

It earned Thorn the blue ridge mountains of good will that was unprecedented along this particular country road known as the NBA headquarters.

Though what most didn’t know about the humble West Virginia native was that he once was one of the nation’s greatest athletes, literally a natural resource. When he was choosing a college, the West Virginia state legislature literally designated him a state natural resource to persuade him to follow his buddy Jerry West to West Virginia University. Thorn did.

“He was a terrific athlete, a great baseball player, which a lot of people don’t know,” said West, the unofficial logo for the NBA and now a consultant with the Golden State Warriors. “An incredible student, very bright, a very together person. Going to West Virginia, he did something that may not have been the best for him at that point in his life (following Rod Hundley and West). But he was a terrific representative for the state, dedicated to the academic side of life. His career has been very distinguished. He’s done a terrific job wherever he’s been.”

Thorn was a multi-sport star in high school who went on to be drafted No. 2 overall in the 1963 NBA draft and in high school (before that sport’s draft era) was pursued my several major league teams.

“I always thought I was a better baseball player than basketball player,” says Thorn, who was considered a prospect to play both professional baseball and basketball, as players like Dave DeBusschere did in that era.

But Thorn suffered a head injury playing baseball at the end of his junior year of high school and wasn’t able to get back to baseball. Though being all-American and the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft isn’t that much of a sacrifice.

Thorn was burdened by knee injuries in an eight-year NBA playing career that had All-Star possibilities after averaging 14.4 points as a rookie and making the all-rookie team. He moved around some and was the ultimate team player, volunteering at times as a shooting guard to come off the bench to give his team the dimension Boston had become famous for using players like John Havlicek. After averaging 15.2 points for Seattle in about 25 minutes per game in 1967-68, he hurt his knee and his career was shortened.

Thorn’s family back in West Virginia was involved in politics and law and he’d decided to attend law school with the idea of eventually returning to West Virginia to run for political office. He earned a degree in political science from the U. of Washington when finishing his career with the Supersonics.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything but law school,” Thorn recalls.

But an old teammate buddy from Baltimore, Kevin Loughery, was having a good time coaching in the ABA with a pretty good team led by a kid named Julius Erving. He needed an assistant and called Rod. “It was $15,000 for one year and I told him I didn’t think so,” says Thorn. “But a couple of days later I told my wife I was thinking about doing it. She said, ‘Are you crazy? We have a nice life.’ But we ended up driving across country to Long Island (where the Nets then played in cavernous, mostly empty arenas) and the first year we win a championship.”

After another season with the Nets, Thorn was hired to coach the ABA’s insolent and irreverant Spirits of St. Louis and the irrepressible Marvin Barnes. Thorn lasted until the All-Star break.

“Marvin would come late for everything,” Thorn recalled. “You couldn’t depend on him. He’d say, ‘I’m giving you 24 and 12 every night. You better talk to the others.’ He’d come late on purpose to show, ‘You don’t control me. I’m in charge.’”

Thorn went back to the Nets as an assistant just in time for the ABA merger with the NBA. Thorn said the Nets had a deal for Tiny Archibald to team with Erving in the NBA. But to get into the NBA, the Nets had to sell Erving to the 76ers. “We would have been pretty darned good,” Thorn says with a sigh.

Thorn was then hired to run the Bulls, who were trying to recoup from the collapse after the erratic executive reign of Dick Motta and the aging of the great players from the early 1970s.

The Bulls had a strong run when Thorn hired former Bulls great Jerry Sloan. The 1980-81 team with starting All-Stars Artis Gilmore and Reggie Theus swept the Knicks in a first round playoff series and then lost to eventual champion Boston. But it fell apart quickly the next season and Sloan was fired. Thorn was interim coach the last 30 games. Oh, what could have been. Like when the Bulls lost the draft coin flip in 1979 for the rights to draft Magic Johnson, who then wanted to stay close to his Michigan home and wanted to play with Bulls center Artis Gilmore. Magic wanted to be a Bull, which was one reason he even decided to leave college when he did knowing the Bulls had a high draft pick. The Bulls with the No. 2 pick selected David Greenwood. Bill Cartwright was No. 3 and went to the Knicks.

Thorn hired old buddy Loughery to coach in 1983. And though they both were fired in 1985 after current Bull managing partner Jerry Reinsdorf took control of the team, Jordan often credits Thorn and Loughery for the confidence he developed to have success in the NBA.

Though every NBA executive including Thorn was hoping to draft Hakeem (nee Akeem) Olajuwon in 1984 with the top pick, Thorn quickly recognized Jordan’s potential. The Bulls were fortunate the Portland Trailblazers with the No. 2 pick selected center Sam Bowie. Thorn headed off numerous trade offers for the No. 3 pick. In fact, North Carolina coach Dean Smith was lobbying behind the scenes for Jordan to go to Philadelphia to join former North Carolina star Billy Cunningham, who was coaching the team.

There also was speculation Thorn would select North Carolina’s Sam Perkins, who went No. 4 in that draft, because the Bulls had previously selected shooting guards in the draft. Thorn had just traded All-Star Bulls shooting guard Reggie Theus. Thorn got Jordan, and the Bulls foundation was in place.

“Rod’s done everything in the NBA, more so than any one individual, from assistant to head coach, player, general manager, team president,” noted Loughery. “I think he’s had more jobs involved in the NBA than anyone ever. Outstanding athlete, great tennis player and golfer, too. Great intelligence, fantastic people skills, knows the game top to bottom. Like we say in coaching, ‘It’s not the Xs and Os, but the Jims and Joes.’ So he could make the transitions he did, and they’re not easy.”

Granik said Thorn was a unanimous choice to take over the league basketball operations job after his Bulls tenure ended.

Thorn’s league stint lasted until 2000, during which he helped lead the USA Basketball committee that named the 1992 Dream Team. When he joined the Nets he helped direct the woebegone NBA version of the franchise to consecutive Finals after pulling off the trade of Kidd for Stephon Marbury. Thorn was named Executive of the Year. In 2010, he left the Nets to go to the 76ers and oversaw their last playoff run before the current rebuilding. He returned to the league office in 2013 and announced his retirement earlier this year after more than 50 years in the NBA.

“I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be in the right place so many times,” says Thorn. “To come from a place with 7,000 people sometimes you pinch yourself and think, ‘Wow, how fortunate I’ve been.’ When I played we got $8 in meal money. We were like a barnstorming league. I can remember playing 16 straight days in preseason in one little high school after the next. You couldn’t tell me the NBA would end up where it is and I would be a first hand witness to so many great things. That’s one of the things I’m proudest of, just being on the scene and sometimes having a little something to do with what transpired. It’s been a lot of fun.”

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Rod Thorn to be presented with Basketball Hall of Fame lifetime achievement award

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The contents of this page have not been reviewed or endorsed by the Chicago Bulls. All opinions expressed by Sam Smith are solely his own and do not reflect the opinions of the Chicago Bulls or its Basketball Operations staff, parent company, partners, or sponsors. His sources are not known to the Bulls and he has no special access to information beyond the access and privileges that go along with being an NBA accredited member of the media.

By Sam Smith | 2.14.2015 | 4:00 p.m. CT

Perhaps there never would have been a Bulls dynasty without Rod Thorn. After all, the longtime NBA executive was running the Bulls when the team drafted Michael Jordan.

Or maybe things would have been even better if during Thorn’s six years as Bulls general manager the Bulls hadn’t messed up chances to draft Magic Johnson, Maurice Cheeks and Sidney Moncrief to join Hall of Famer Artis Gilmore.

“We were in transition,” Thorn said with a laugh Saturday morning after the Basketball Hall of Fame announced Thorn would receive the prestigious John Bunn Lifetime Achievement award at the Hall of Fame enshrinement in September. “I guess the highlight of those early years was we made the playoffs that one year and beat the Knicks in the first round with Jerry (Sloan as coach) and then we lost to Boston in the next round. We were sort of up and down until Michael came along. That changed everybody’s fortune. Great times. I was very young when I became GM of the Bulls. I was sort of learning on the job. Jerry Sloan and I went up to meet with Magic with Jud Heathcote (before the 1979 NBA draft). So we’re sitting in a room and you know Magic’s personality was unbelievable. He indicated that he’d love to play for us. He knew all about us. So we were very fired up that hopefully we would win that coin flip. But, ironically, had we won that coin flip, the Bulls would never have gotten Jordan. I guess it worked out for the Lakers and us.”

Ah, the coin flip, one of the most famous, or infamous, days in Bulls history, the day they lost Magic Johnson. Just another crazy story of perhaps the wildest period in Bulls history, from the end of their first great run with Chet Walker, Bob Love, Sloan, Tom Boerwinkle and Norm Van Lier, until the rebirth and renewal with the Jerry Reinsdorf group and the drafting of Jordan in 1984.

Thorn was fired in that 1984-85 season. But his legacy with the Bulls is a bridge from their first successful era to one of the greatest in NBA history. It’s a part of one of the most accomplished careers in basketball history, a star player, coach, executive and league official as Thorn currently is NBA President of Basketball Operations.

The Hall of Fame at All-Star weekend in New York Saturday revealed its award winners, so called direct elects to the Hall of Fame and finalists who will go to a vote and be announced at the Finals Four in April.

The Bunn award is the highest without official Hall of Fame inclusion. Previous winners include Bulls legend Johnny Kerr, team officials Pat Williams and Brian McIntyre and coaches like Tex Winter and Ray Meyer. The media awards will go to photographer Rich Clarkson and broadcaster Woody Durham. Those elected for direct admission include Louis Dampier of the ABA, Tom Heinsohn among veterans and George Raveling as a contributor. Finalists include referee Dick Bavetta, players JoJo White, Dikembo Mutombo, Kevin Johnson, Spencer Haywood and Tim Hardaway, coaches Bill Fitch, John Calipari and Bo Ryan and WNBA player Lisa Leslie.

But few have as many tales, long and short, or as varied a career as Thorn. The West Virginia native was as an all-American, the No. 2 pick in the 1963 NBA draft ahead of Nate Thurmond. He played eight seasons in the NBA. He was later an assistant coach with buddy Kevin Loughery with the championship Nets in the ABA and head coach of the ABA St. Louis Spirits. In 1978 at age 37, Thorn became Bulls general manager. If not a rousing success, Thorn presided over a wild west era for the Bulls of color and controversy that culminated with his selection of Jordan in the 1984 draft.

“I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be in a lot of good situations,” said Thorn, who was Executive of the Year for his Nets going to the 2002 Finals. “It’s hard to distinguish any one thing, but it’s been a series of things over the course of many years. We were very fortunate that Michael was available at No. 3. I wish I could say I was prescient enough to know he was going to turn out to be as good as he was. I thought he would be a good player, hopefully a really good player, but not like anything like he was. It seemed like every other day there was a story about the team being sold. It was the (Marvin) Fishman litigation that was going on. Is Fishman going to be the owner of the Bulls? It was just always something. We had Artis Gilmore as the fulcrum of that team. We had Mickey Johnson. We drafted Reggie Theus early. But we were in transition. There’s no doubt.”

It might not have been as much charge given that 1979 draft, which could have made Thorn a Chicago star.

It was yet another of the rich stories that have made the Bulls history a tale too incredible for fiction.

First there was Thorn’s 1978 draft, his first. He did well taking Reggie Theus No. 9. The only player selected ahead of Theus who would have a career as long was Larry Bird.

NBA teams back then had drafts as public parties to help draw attention and fan interest. The draft was during the day and the Bulls were having that one at the old Bismarck Hotel in the west Loop. Then Bulls scout Gene Tormohlen was touting this Chicago kid from West Texas. But then coach Larry Costello had seen this kid from New Mexico, “Marvelous” Marvin Johnson, have a big game. Tormohlen was lobbying intently for the Texas kid. Thorn went with his coach and Johnson didn’t make it through camp and never played in the NBA. The Texas kid was Chicagoan Maurice Cheeks from DuSable High School.

That day Cheeks’ father and brother were in the audience at the Bismarck. After the Bulls pick, they got up yelling the Bulls had made a mistake, would regret it and would be story. They stormed out.

What a backcourt that could have been with the high scoring Theus and the unselfish Cheeks who went on to an All-Star career setting up Julius Erving and Moses Malone.

“My feeling at that time was that Larry had coached (Kareem Abdul) Jabbar and Larry was great at getting the ball to Jabbar,” said Thorn. “We’ve got Artis. And Larry will concoct all these different ways to get the ball to Artis. It’ll really be good.”

The Bulls remained poor in 1978-79, so they got the top pick in the Eastern Conference. Before the change for the lottery in 1984, the losingest team in each conference if tied flipped a coin for first pick. The Lakers, though good with Kareem but not great, had gotten the No. 1 pick for that season from a previous deal with the Jazz in which then New Orleans signed Gail Goodrich in free agency. The commissioner then would award compensation for free agents. Which was why few players ever moved. The compenation was a future draft pick, which turned out to be No. 1 in 1979.

And Johnson was perhaps even more hopeful of going to the Bulls than the Lakers.

Johnson’s then agent, Chicago attorney George Andrews, said Magic wanted to play with a center.

“He believed the way to win was with a big man,” recalled Andrews. “Kareem was No. 1, but he was getting older. Artis was No. 2. Plus, Chicago was closer to Lansing (Johnson’s Michigan home). He preferred Chicago. He thought Chicago would be a better situation.”

The Bulls still seeking community interest decided to conduct a fan vote for the coin clip. The fans voted for heads.  The coin came up tails.

With Thorn seeing his career flash before his eyes, Kerr, then a Bulls broadcaster, quipped to Thorn, "If you listen to the fans, you end up sitting next to them."

The Bulls could still salvage something in a good draft. They had a center, so they didn’t want Bill Cartwright. Thorn was intrigued by Arkansas’ Sidney Moncrief. But team medical staff warned because of Moncrief’s knee problems in college he might not last three years in the NBA. The Bulls selected David Greenwood. Moncrief went on to become the best perimeter defender in the NBA for a decade, a multiple All-Star and whom Jordan described as the toughest guard to play against early in his career.

And so it went as Thorn plowed through coaches, six in six years including himself for 30 games replacing Sloan. There was the never ending search for a guard to go with Theus, trying Ronnie Lester and Quintin Dailey until Jordan finally in 1984 to replace Theus. Thorn didn’t make the end of that season with the franchise sold to the Reinsdorf group and replaced by Jerry Krause. But Thorn went on to success with the Nets and 76ers and as a league official. But who knows for one heads or tails.

“I might,” said Thorn with a laugh, “still be working there.”

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Rod Thorn’s magical tall and short tales

Sam Smith: 1984 NBA Draft ranks as best ever Also: Rod Thorn drafted Michael Jordan at No. 3 in 1984

Heads or tails? At some point, most of us have taken part in a coin flip for one reason or another.

The outcome is fifty-fifty. Completely arbitrary. Subject to chance. And as the Chicago Bulls know, franchise altering.

For with a different outcome of a few coin flips dating back 35 years ago, Michael Jordan may have never played for the Bulls.

The story of Jordan landing in Chicago would almost certainly not have been possible had Chicago won its coin toss with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979. With the top pick in the draft, Los Angeles selected Magic Johnson, while Chicago took David Greenwood at No. 2.

“Nothing against Greenwood, who was a good player and a good guy,” said Irwin Mandel, a senior vice president for the Bulls in his 42nd season with the team. “But with Magic, we never would have had a bad enough record to draft Jordan five seasons later.”

With “THE84DRAFT" set to premiere on Monday, June 9 at 8 p.m. CT on NBA TV and look back on that historic class that featured four Hall of Famers – top selection Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and John Stockton in addition to Jordan – it brings to mind a few words once spoken by the Dalai Lama:

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

The Bulls closed out the 1983-84 season with a mark of 27-55, third worst in the league and one game behind the Dallas Mavericks. But that almost wasn’t the case.

Mandel recalls a controversial finish to a game that year in which Caldwell Jones of the Houston Rockets connected on a desperation three-pointer with the game tied as time expired. The shot counted and the Rockets won. Mandel and the Bulls filed a formal protest with the league, arguing that there was not enough time for the sequence of plays to have been allowed and that there was a misinterpretation of the rules.

To this day, Mandel believes his case was a compelling one. The NBA disagreed and would not overturn the officials’ ruling. If Chicago had instead been granted another victory, it would have been tied with Dallas and a coin toss would have ensued for the third pick. Given then Dallas general manager Rick Sund, a friend of Mandel’s, attempted to trade up a spot to select Jordan, there is little doubt as to who the Mavericks would have taken at No. 3.

While that coin toss wasn’t necessary, one was required to determine who would select first in the 1984 NBA Draft. The consensus prize was Hakeem Olajuwon, known for his illustrious career at University of Houston.

Shortly after the flip took place, Mandel spoke to former Bulls general manager Rod Thorn.

“He told me, ‘Good news, Irwin. Houston won and they’ll take Olajuwon. Portland, I’m pretty darn sure is taking Sam Bowie,’” said Mandel. “I think that very few other teams would have taken Bowie over Jordan. But Portland did it given they already had Clyde Drexler and Jim Paxson on their team.

“We lucked out in that we lost the protest,” Mandel added. “At the same time, we were lucky that Houston won the coin toss with Portland. If Portland had won, they take Olajuwon and Houston takes Jordan. We absolutely lucked out on a few levels.

“Though it was believed Jordan could be a star, Olajuwon was considered to be a better pro prospect,” Mandel added. “Plus, people thought a player like Olajuwon could have a greater effect on winning.”

Though Thorn was cautiously optimistic Jordan would be there for the Bulls, it was no certainty. So he prepared for the draft with other players such as Sam Perkins and Mel Turpin under consideration, but Jordan was his clear cut favorite.

As for the draft itself, Thorn opted to stay in Chicago with his coaching staff and scout rather than being at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum for the proceedings. So he asked Keith Brown, a 23-year old sales representative in his second year with the Bulls, to go on behalf of the team.

“I was very excited for the opportunity and it was actually the very first time in my life I had been on an airplane,” recalled Brown, now vice president of ticketing and premium seating after 31 years.

After checking in and receiving an explanation from the league staff about what to expect, Brown phoned Thorn and managing partner Jonathan Kovler. It was a call that would not end until the 10-round draft concluded, as Brown would provide the group in Chicago with pick-by-pick updates throughout.

“When we got to the third pick, it was live on television,” said Brown. “I was on the phone with Jonathan who was with Rod. As I was waiting for him to advise me of our pick, the red light of the camera came on. He said, ‘Hey, you’re on TV. Give us a thumbs up.’”

Brown obliged as his 15 minutes of fame took full effect. Then, he made formal a selection that would mark the official beginnings of one of sport’s greatest dynasties: The Bulls were drafting Michael Jordan of North Carolina.

Brown completed the necessary paperwork and handed it to a league runner, who promptly delivered it to David Stern, overseeing his first draft as commissioner, for the announcement.

“Everyone was very excited about the pick,” recalled Brown. “But Mike Thibault, our scout at the time, said he felt Michael was the best player in the draft. While I don’t think Mike could have forecasted he’d be the greatest player ever, he was certain that within a season, Jordan would be a perennial All-Star. So I think Mike had a real sense of how good Jordan was going to be and I suspect that Rod shared that opinion.”

“Mike felt extremely strongly that the Bulls should draft Jordan,” Mandel concurred. “I think Thibault was an influence on Thorn, but either way, Rod was going to take Jordan. Thibault just reinforced that taking him was the right move to make.”

Jordan was on his way to Chicago. And while it’s easy to overlook the details which fell in place along the way to make that happen, none of it would have been possible had heads turned out to be tails instead, or vice versa.

“History would have been rewritten,” said Mandel. “Instead of thinking about the championships, we would look back with regret on how close we came to getting the great Michael Jordan. We’re unbelievably lucky that things turned out the way they did.”

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Flip of a coin helped Bulls land Jordan

In 1984, the prize of the NBA Draft was the University of Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon, not North Carolina product Michael Jordan.

But when Jordan fell to the Bulls at No. 3, it was one heck of a consolation prize for then General Manager Rod Thorn.

The consensus was clear that Jordan would be a good NBA player, said Thorn, having been named the collegiate player of the year following his junior year. But it was the traditional center teams sought, and Olajuwon had the makings of a dominant one.

A coin flip between Houston and Portland determined the Rockets would pick first. The Trail Blazers had Clyde Drexler and Jim Paxson, and felt they didn’t need another wing player. Hence, Jordan was on the board when the Bulls were ready to select.

“I think most people today, given the choice of a quality big player or a quality 6-6 guy, usually you're going to take the quality big guy,” Thorn said in a phone interview from his New Jersey Nets office, where he is currently the team’s president. “But in those days, it was even more so, because virtually everybody who had ever won a championship had a big time center.

“Michael helped change some of that over the course of his career by winning as many championships as he and the Bulls did,” he added. “It kind of changed some of that thinking that you could have a great player who was not a center and still have a dominating team.”

So what was the scouting report on Jordan at the time?

“He was a tremendous athlete with a strong body that looked like it was going to get better,” said Thorn. “He was competitive, and a fair shooter. Good ball handler, though not a great one at that time, but a good one, and a good defensive player. His shooting was what we were concerned with. We didn’t know what kind of shooter he was going to turn out to be.”

As Thorn and the Bulls prepared for the draft, he relied on his relationship with North Carolina coaching legend Dean Smith for assistance in watching tape and acquiring scouting reports on not only his own players, but others in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Thorn made several trips to Smith’s Chapel Hill office as he narrowed his field of draft candidates.

“His feeling was that Michael was as good of an athlete as he had,” Thorn said of his conversations with Smith. “He was an extraordinary competitor, and his feeling was that he would get even better, and be a better pro than he even was a college player. He was very high on him, and felt he would turn out to be a really good pro.”

Smith was a coach who would urge his players to enter the draft if he felt strongly they would be a top-five selection. When it became clear Jordan would be taken off the board quickly, Coach Smith was all for him coming out, said Thorn.

But what if Portland had taken Jordan at No. 2? Or, what if Houston had made a trade with Portland to take Jordan? Portland’s desire for a big man was well-known, and Houston could have sent Ralph Sampson to the Blazers for the second pick. Think a tandem of Jordan and Olajuwon would have fared well?

For the Bulls, Plan B was Sam Perkins, Jordan’s North Carolina teammate. Thorn said they were concerned about Kentucky’s Sam Bowie’s leg, and felt Auburn’s Charles Barkley may have been undersized.

But Jordan, who never came in for a pre-draft workout with the Bulls, was there after Portland selected Bowie, and the rest is history.

That fall, on the first day of training camp, Thorn received a phone call from Bill Blair, one of the team’s assistant coaches at the time.

Thorn recalled the conversation, “He said to the effect, and I'm cleaning this up a little, 'Boy, you didn't make a mistake this year!'”

The next day, it was then Head Coach Kevin Loughery on the line.

“Coaches generally are leery of rookies and jumping to any kind of conclusion about what a guy is going to be, but he felt we had a good one in Michael,” Thorn recalled.

By the first exhibition game, Jordan was clearly the best player the Bulls had, and soon enough, he was drawing crowds. Besides his collegiate career, Jordan’s play with the Olympic team in Los Angeles under Bobby Knight that summer had garnered a lot of publicity, so he had a following.

“When he lived up to that following as he did in that exhibition season, he got even bigger,” Thorn said. “When the season started, in the first two or three weeks, he was phenomenal. Everybody saw that he was a player who had a chance to be special.”

Thorn remembers being particularly blown away when the Bulls and Bucks met in the third game of the 1984-85 season. In a game attended by 9,356 at the Chicago Stadium, Jordan single-handedly dismantled a solid Milwaukee defense. Sidney Moncrief spent the majority of the night on Jordan, and he had been named NBA Defensive Player of the Year the previous two seasons.

“They were double-teaming Michael every time he got the ball,” Thorn said. “In the fourth quarter, Michael had 15 or 16 points and I don’t care if they double or triple-teamed him or whatever they did, he still scored. We ended up beating them and it was like, 'Goodness gracious, I can't believe what I just saw out there.'”

Jordan saw countless double-teams throughout his career. But for an NBA rookie to regularly and consistently beat them, drive to the basket, and score while making it look easy was remarkable.

“He wasn't nearly as accomplished of a jump shooter at that time as he became,” Thorn recalled. “He would just recklessly go to the bucket. What people forget about Michael, I think, is how great of an athlete he was. He had the body control, the ability to take hits in the air and finish, and then obviously go to the foul line. Teams knew he was going to drive, and they couldn't stop him.”

Thorn is among those who believe Jordan is the best player that ever played, and feels his induction into basketball’s Hall of Fame is fitting.

“It is the ultimate honor for any player in any sport because it's the highest honor you can get,” he said. “I think it's very appropriate the first year he became eligible he’s in and obviously I'm sure it was unanimous. I'm looking forward to the evening and to be part of the gathering that welcomes Michael.”

Michael Jordan | Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame | Class of 2009

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Rod Thorn drafted Michael Jordan at No. 3 in 1984

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