Jack McCloskey

Keith Langlois

(EDITOR’S NOTE: While the NBA season is in limbo amid the coronavirus pandemic, Pistons.com will periodically look back at some of the great “what if” moments in franchise history. Next up: The shocking trade midway through the 1988-89 season.)

To an outsider’s eye, there was nothing amiss about the Pistons in early 1989. They were on pace for 60 wins, battling Cleveland for the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference and looking very much as if they’d get their chance to avenge the bitter Game 7 loss to the Lakers in the 1988 NBA Finals.

But Jack McCloskey’s perspective told him otherwise. The body language of the Bad Boys was worrisome. Chuck Daly tipped him off that Adrian Dantley had become sullen and both men were concerned his mood threatened to make for a toxic locker room.

McCloskey pulled Dantley aside one day after a Pistons practice. They met in the tiny officials locker room at The Palace, off the tunnel entrance, and McCloskey pressed for an explanation. Dantley demurred.

McCloskey finally told him bluntly: “Adrian, if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m going to trade you, and I’m not kidding you. I’m going to trade you. I’m not going to have you break up this team. I’m not saying you’re at fault, but you know something that I don’t know. I told him, flat out, ‘I’m going to trade you,’ and I think it was just two days later we flew down to Dallas and made the trade.”

The Feb. 15 deal stunned the NBA. There had been no rumblings that the Pistons were shopping Dantley or intent on doing anything to alter the mix of a deep and versatile roster that came within one outrageous call – the phantom foul on Bill Laimbeer in Game 6 of the ’88 Finals – of winning its first league title the previous spring. Speculation centered on a rift between Dantley and Isiah Thomas. When Dallas – to which Dantley was traded in exchange for Mark Aguirre – visited The Palace the month following the trade, Dantley spent several fraught seconds before the opening tip whispering something into Thomas’ ear as a full house watched, transfixed.

It later was reported that Dantley admitted to saying, “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me.”

But McCloskey flatly rejected the notion that Thomas pushed for a Dantley trade.

“No. God no,” McCloskey told me in 2011. “If a player ever said that to me … no. No.”

And Thomas also doused rumors of his involvement, telling reporters at the time, “People didn’t give me credit for trading Paul Mokeski for (Bill) Laimbeer and I’m not the one who traded A.D., either.”

Pistons fans reacted angrily to the deal. Dantley had come to the Pistons prior to the 1986-87 season and helped them take the next step. After being eliminated in the first round by Atlanta in 1986, the Pistons pushed Boston to seven games in the 1987 Eastern Conference finals. He led the Pistons in scoring that season (21.5 points a game), again in 1987-88 (20.0) and was leading them again (18.4) at the time of the trade.

If McCloskey doubted how fondly Dantley was viewed by Pistons fans, he got a stark reminder as he was driving near The Palace with his wife, Leslie, one day soon after the deal went down.

“We stop at a red light and there were two guys in the other car. They both looked and saw me, then they pointed their finger toward me with their thumb up – like they were going to shoot me for making the trade. I told Leslie, ‘You made that trade; I didn’t.’ ”

It’s fair to assume the collective temperature of Pistons fans cooled as the results of the trade played out. The Pistons closed the regular season on a 30-4 run and blew through the playoffs with a 15-2 record, sweeping the Lakers to win the first NBA title in franchise history. With Aguirre in the starting lineup, the Pistons went 44-6 that season.

There’s no definitive way to know how it would have played out if the Dantley-Aguirre trade hadn’t been made, but McCloskey doesn’t equivocate.

“It was going to get worse,” he said. “It was not a risk. I went to Chuck and said, ‘He didn’t communicate with me; he’s not communicating with you. I’m going to trade him.’ We just had to move Adrian. And I really liked Adrian. But something happened there. And I still don’t know.”

what-if-the-pistons-shocked-the-nba-with-a-blockbuster-trade-would-they-have-won-back-to-back-titles-if-theyd-kept-adrian-dantley

What If: The Pistons shocked the NBA with a blockbuster trade; would they have won back-to-back titles if they’d kept Adrian Dantley?

The 2020 Naismith Hall of Fame draft class is being touted as one of the greatest ever. No arguments here. Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant head the list and that’s about as good a trio as you’ll get.

Extraordinary at the top, the 2020 Hall class is nevertheless incomplete. It joins all the other draft classes that exclude Jack McCloskey, the architect of the Bad Boys. Not only did McCloskey acquire every single building block of the 1989 and ’90 championship Pistons, masterfully working the draft and trade avenues in the era that preceded meaningful free agency, he drafted the man who succeeded him and built the 2004 championship team, Joe Dumars.

McCloskey died in June 2017 at 91 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. A basketball lifer who was a Navy hero of World War II, he came to the Pistons after a long career in coaching at both the college and NBA levels in 1979.

Here’s a story posted on Pistons.com earlier that year, when McCloskey’s battle with Alzheimer’s became public, that remains relevant today.

a-stellar-2020-hall-of-fame-class-and-one-made-incomplete-by-jack-mccloskeys-absence

A stellar 2020 Hall of Fame class – and one made incomplete by Jack McCloskey’s absence

AUBURN HILLS – There are plenty of people without whom the first two of three NBA championship banners that will be packed up for the move from The Palace to Little Caesars Arena would not exist.

Hall of Famers Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman, of course. Bad Boys Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. Vinnie Johnson and James Edwards and John Salley and Mark Aguirre. The Hall of Fame coach who managed that dizzying collection of outsized egos and fill-up-the-room personalities, Chuck Daly.

But if they ever dust those banners for fingerprints, Jack McCloskey’s will be all over them.

It was McCloskey, after all, who was responsible for bringing all of them to town. Every single one.

There was an outpouring of emotions a few months ago when McCloskey’s rival from the other side of Lake Michigan, Jerry Krause, died in March and a few weeks later was announced as part of the Naismith Hall of Fame’s 2017 class. Krause built the Chicago Bulls, who would go on to win six titles – after being eliminated from the playoffs in three straight seasons by the Pistons. Today’s news that McCloskey, 91, is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, as reported in today's Free Press, evokes similar feelings.

There is surely room for both Krause and McCloskey in Springfield and, yes, Krause belongs. Basketball’s Hall of Fame is a strange place where many deserving players keep coming up short but every active college coach who wins one national title in a single-elimination crap shoot tournament is virtually assured of enshrinement well before he begins cashing pension checks.

But McCloskey belongs every bit as much as Krause. In fact, stack up their resumes and remember one salient fact: Krause inherited Michael Jordan in Chicago. As building blocks go, that’s a pretty good one.

Look at the mess McCloskey inherited when Pistons owner Bill Davidson hired him in 1979. His best player was an aging Bob Lanier. The roster otherwise was a collection of castoffs and young players with ties to Michigan. Dick Vitale – another Hall of Famer, no less – built the Pistons as if he were still recruiting to the University of Detroit.

In fact, after Vitale was fired and assistant Richie Adubato stepped in as interim coach, he forlornly looked out at the mishmash one night and said to no one in particular, “We’d have a hell of a team – if we were playing in the Big Ten.”

Trader Jack had to start from scratch. One of his first moves was calling his former employer, the Lakers, and offering his entire roster for Magic Johnson.

Rebuffed, he launched his rebuild by drafting Isiah Thomas in 1981. The following February, he beat the trade deadline by convincing Cleveland owner Ted Stepien to deal Bill Laimbeer by selling the appeal of Paul Mokeski to the Polish population of Cleveland. Later, McCloskey delighted in the fact that Mokeski, in fact, was not of Polish descent.

He drafted Dumars from tiny McNeese State and found Rodman in an even dustier bin, Southeastern Oklahoma State. McCloskey knew Rodman performed poorly at the forerunner to the NBA draft combine in Chicago because only he had brought his trainer, a young Mike Abdenour, along with him and only the Pistons discovered Rodman’s lethargic performance was due to allergy issues.

Yeah, if Jack McCloskey were dropped into today’s NBA, he’d be ahead of the curve in the era of analytics. In fact, the trade for Laimbeer? The one in which the Pistons also got Kenny Carr, a more heralded player that everyone assumed was the key to the trade for the Pistons? No. It was Laimbeer. And it was because McCloskey had a rudimentary analytics formula, devised by him and shared with no one outside the organization, that told him Laimbeer was a much better player than his Cleveland experience revealed.

He traded for Vinnie Johnson, swapping out local hero Greg Kelser – Magic’s Michigan State sidekick and a Vitale draft pick, now sidekick to George Blaha on Pistons telecasts. He drafted Kelly Tripucka and traded Lanier for Kent Benson, then packaged Tripucka and Benson to get Adrian Dantley.

He brought in Mahorn for his toughness and drafted Salley for his athleticism. He got Edwards on the cheap to back up Laimbeer and eventually to start alongside him in the 1989-90 title season after the painful loss of Mahorn to Minnesota in the expansion draft.

McCloskey shocked the NBA by trading Dantley for Aguirre amid the 1988-89 season with the Pistons already poised to get back to the Finals. To this day, McCloskey swears he has no idea what had turned Dantley sullen, but felt in his bones that Dantley’s dark mood would undermine a championship drive.

It was as thorough a floor-to-ceiling rebuild to result in a championship as the NBA has ever seen. And it came amid an era of NBA super teams with Magic’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics at the peak of their dynasties and Jordan’s Bulls restlessly flexing their muscles.

The Alzheimer’s gut punch rekindles the sense of injustice at his exclusion from the Hall of Fame. His resume was full and rich even before he built the Bad Boys. McCloskey, a Navy war hero, played in the NBA and coached in college – a decade at Penn before Daly took a turn, then at Wake Forest – and the NBA before Davidson made the best move of his long and acclaimed stewardship of the Pistons.

Davidson left a huge mark on the NBA for his early backing of David Stern as commissioner and for the way he revolutionized arena financing and construction in everything The Palace represented.

But chances are he wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, a 2008 inductee, either without the three championship banners the Pistons won. You even have to give McCloskey an assist for the third Pistons title, 2004’s. He drafted Dumars, after all, who brought all of the Goin’ to Work mainstays to the Pistons. But those first two, the titles that forever changed the way the NBA looked at the Pistons, they were all Trader Jack. A Hall of Fame without him has credibility issues.

Jack McCloskey

What If: The Pistons shocked the NBA with a blockbuster trade; would they have won back-to-back titles if they’d kept Adrian Dantley?

A stellar 2020 Hall of Fame class – and one made incomplete by Jack McCloskey’s absence

A Hall of Fame without Trader Jack McCloskey has credibility issues