Trader Jack 2017

Keith Langlois

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with his addition via trade of Vinnie Johnson. Up next in Part III: Trading for Bill Laimbeer.)

Dick Vitale ran two drafts for the Pistons and, all things considered, his draft record was the highlight of Vitale’s 94-game tenure. His coaching record was 34-60 and his trade record is blotted by the botched acquisition of Bob McAdoo that crippled the Pistons while simultaneously restoring the luster to one of the NBA’s flagship franchises, Boston.

Vitale didn’t have a No. 1 pick in 1978, yet managed to pluck two players out of the second round who would go on to long and productive careers – both Vitale recruits from the University of Detroit, Terry Tyler and John Long.

One year later, armed with three of the top 15 picks … well, did we tell you how well Vitale did with his two second-rounders in 1978?

The Pistons had the fifth, 10th and 15th picks going into the 1979 draft. Vitale had a strong affinity for Michigan State’s Greg Kelser – he’d recruited him coming out of Detroit Henry Ford High – and wanted him badly enough that he paid the Milwaukee Bucks $50,000 of Bill Davidson’s money to take anybody else. The Bucks happily obliged; they had their heart set on Arkansas’ dynamic Sidney Moncrief, anyway.

With the 10th and 15th picks, Vitale took two flawed college players, point guard Roy Hamilton out of UCLA and Michigan forward Phil Hubbard. Hubbard might well have become a great NBA player, but a devastating knee injury he suffered after a brilliant sophomore season at Michigan scared off most teams.

It was the Hamilton pick that would really haunt the Pistons. He averaged 4.6 points and shot 40 percent in a rookie season so uninspiring they didn’t ask him back for a second year. Hamilton would play one more NBA game – five minutes for Portland the following season.

Leave it to Jack McCloskey to salvage something from a draft in which he didn’t participate. McCloskey was an Indiana Pacers assistant coach at the time Vitale drafted Kelser, Hamilton and Hubbard.

McCloskey knew vaguely of Vinnie Johnson from his days at Baylor, where he was good enough in two seasons after arriving from junior college to be the No. 7 pick in that 1979 draft, taken by Seattle. But in his first year as GM, he became intrigued by Johnson.

“I saw him play a few games and I thought he had strength,” McCloskey said. “I thought he could come off the bench and create something. And I thought he was a hell of a shooter.”

McCloskey knew Seattle was interested in Kelser, too – they’d actually agreed to a trade of Kelser for Seattle’s 1981 No. 1 pick in December of 1980. But Kelser, bothered by knee tendinitis, flunked his physical, negating the trade. It was knee trouble that would eventually rob Kelser of the springs that made him the perfect alley-oop complement to Magic Johnson at Michigan State, forcing his NBA retirement after only five seasons.

But those knees were sound enough to pass muster in November 1981, when a second attempt to trade Kelser to Seattle succeeded – this time, bringing Vinnie Johnson back to Detroit.

“I envisioned the fact that he could come off the bench,” McCloskey said. “That was true especially when we had Joe (Dumars) and Isiah (Thomas). Boy, what a third guy. He was a gem. And he was a pleasure to have on the team. He never questioned why he wasn’t starting. He knew that there were two guys there who were great players.”

He wasn’t yet “The Microwave” – that would happen after a 22-point fourth-quarter scoring burst lifted the Pistons past Boston in a 1985 playoff game at Joe Louis Arena. And he hadn’t yet made a game-winning basket to ice a Pistons NBA title – that came about in Game 5 of the 1990 Finals at Portland.

But it didn’t take McCloskey long to feel like he’d hit a home run in acquiring the thick-shouldered Johnson with the sad eyes and the unerring line-drive jump shot. And it didn’t take Pistons fans long to embrace Vinnie Johnson as one of their own for his relentless, fearless play. Johnson would start only 164 of his 798 games as a Piston – most when Thomas or Dumars were injured – but his No. 15 jersey hangs in The Palace rafters, an honor reserved so far for only six other players: Thomas, Dumars, Dave Bing, Bob Lanier, Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman.

Kelser, of course, returned to his Michigan roots after his playing days concluded and embarked on a career in broadcasting. Today, he is the longtime TV analyst and partner of George Blaha on Pistons telecasts. And when Kelser was inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame, McCloskey was there in the front row.

“The guy that introduces Greg says, ‘The man who traded Greg Kelser is here, Jack McCloskey,’ and everybody booed,” McCloskey laughed. “So Greg came up to the microphone, turned and looked at me and said, ‘Jack, you made a great trade.’ ”

He made another great one just three months after landing Johnson. We’ll take a look at that next time in the Trader Jack series.

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part II

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with his February 1982 trade-deadline deal for Bill Laimbeer. Up next: Hiring Chuck Daly.)

Long before “Moneyball” and its basketball equivalent flooded the sport with statistical analysis, Jack McCloskey devised his own numbers-based system for player evaluation. He rated them on a 10-point basis across 10 different categories. After a while, he discovered that players who merited a composite score of 80 or above, almost invariably, turned into good NBA players.

And his numbers told him that Bill Laimbeer was going to be a very good NBA player.

The rest of the world thought that Kenny Carr was the object of McCloskey’s desire when he engineered a multiplayer deal with Cleveland at the trade deadline in February 1982. Carr, 26 and in his prime, was averaging 15.2 points and 10.3 rebounds when McCloskey sent his first- and second-round picks that year, plus journeyman center Paul Mokeski and 1979 first-rounder Phil Hubbard to the Cavs for Carr and a throw-in, Bill Laimbeer.

“I saw him play when we played Cleveland,” McCloskey recalls of his initial interest in Laimbeer. “We beat them pretty good that night, but I saw him compete until the last whistle goes. We didn’t have too many big guys then. I said, ‘I’ve got to try to get him. He doesn’t have fancy footwork or anything like that, but he wants to win.’ ”

When you were dealing with Cleveland back then, you went straight to owner Ted Stepien. The NBA rule that prohibits teams from trading away first-round draft picks in consecutive years today is unofficially dubbed “The Stepien Rule” for the many ruinous trades the Cavs made in that era, including sending a No. 1 pick to the Lakers for a modestly talented forward named Don Ford, averaging 6.7 points and 3.4 rebounds at the time of the deal. With the draft pick the Lakers took back, they added James Worthy four months later.

Stepien at first rebuffed McCloskey’s trade proposal – one that didn’t include Mokeski. When somebody pointed out to McCloskey that Stepien, of Polish descent, had an affinity for Polish players, he called Stepien back to make one final pitch for Laimbeer using Mokeski as the bait.

“I said, ‘Ted, you ought to have a Polish guy on your team.’ He asked me who I meant and I told him Paul Mokeski, so we put him in that trade.”

They just beat the midnight deadline of the time for agreeing to the trade and phoning it in to the league.

“People thought we made that trade because of Kenny Carr – and I thought he was a good player – but Laimbeer was the guy,” McCloskey said. “As soon as I got Carr, Portland called and offered their first-round pick for him.”

McCloskey held on to Carr for the rest of that season, then dealt him to the Trail Blazers on draft day for Portland’s first-rounder. McCloskey spent that pick wisely, too, drafting Rickey Pierce with the No. 18 pick. But after a rookie season in which Pierce barely played, stuck behind Vinnie Johnson as a scoring guard off the bench, McCloskey traded Pierce to the Clippers for two second-round choices. Pierce would go on to a 16-year NBA career whose best seasons were spent with Milwaukee. He averaged 23 points a game in the 1989-90 season when the Pistons would win the second of two straight NBA titles.

That was the year they beat Portland in the Finals, the team to which McCloskey sent Carr. Carr retired after averaging 10 points and 10 boards a game in the 1986-87 season; Laimbeer, meanwhile – the guy McCloskey had targeted in that trade all along – always will be remembered for the way he willed the Pistons to three straight wins at Portland, a place they’d lost 20 straight games over 16 years.

In Steve Addy’s 1997 book, “Four Decades of Motor City Memories,” Laimbeer’s role in setting the tone for their sweep in Portland was defined.

“Getting set to fly West that afternoon,” Addy wrote, “the Pistons and their coaches were meeting in the locker room when someone pointed out that they had to win at least once at Portland to bring the series back to Detroit. Laimbeer sprang to his feet and his angry voice sliced the stale air.

“ ‘Dammit,’ he yelled, slamming his first into his palm. ‘I’m going out there to win three games! And anybody who doesn’t think we can sweep can get the hell out of the locker room!’ No one stirred. The challenge had been made. ‘It wasn’t that we didn’t think we could win all three, but we were waiting for someone to say it,’ Vinnie Johnson said. ‘Bill stepped up and said it in such a forceful way, we believed it.’ Assistant coach Brendan Suhr said, ‘That told me all I ever needed to know about Bill Laimbeer. He has an iron will.’ ”

McCloskey saw those traits at the end of a blowout loss Laimbeer endured in Cleveland. And his numbers told him Laimbeer would blossom into a highly effective player, above and beyond what he thought about his emotional fire. The ability to see the whole picture of a player set McCloskey apart. Next time, we’ll look at his ability to spot the coach who could bring it all together – and, in that, there’s another link to Ted Stepien and Cleveland.

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part III

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with his hiring of Chuck Daly following the 1982-83 season. Up next: Solving the hole at power forward.)

First things first. Jack McCloskey did not fire Scotty Robertson because of anything Isiah Thomas said or didn’t say to him. And he didn’t hire Chuck Daly because he thought his personality would mesh better with Isiah than Robertson’s did.

“It wasn’t that (Daly) had to get along with Isiah,” McCloskey scoffed. “Isiah had to get along with him.”

The NBA of that era was turning more and more into a player’s league. It was widely speculated that Magic Johnson was behind the firing of Paul Westhead early in the 1981-82 season, though it was later divulged that Jerry Buss pushed for the firing days before it happened and that the anti-Westhead sentiment was universal in the locker room.

But perception, once it cements, is difficult to alter. To this day, Johnson is cited for causing Westhead’s ouster. In Detroit, it was widely believed that Isiah’s dissatisfaction with Robertson’s style forced McCloskey’s hand when he jettisoned Robertson three years after hiring him and two years after drafting Thomas with the No. 2 pick.

“Absolutely not,” McCloskey said when I asked him recently if Isiah had gone to him to suggest a coaching change. “There was never a mention – not one word – from Isiah about Scotty to me. I really liked Scotty and I hated to do that. I really hated to do that. We got along so well. But I just felt like he’s taken it this far (and) I don’t know if we can go any farther.”

McCloskey knew the Pistons would have to become a more proficient defensive team if they were going to take the next step, having gone from 21 wins the season before drafting Thomas and Kelly Tripucka to 39 to 37.

McCloskey had a deep respect for Daly that stretched to their shared roots at the University of Pennsylvania. McCloskey had coached the Quakers from 1956-66 and Daly from 1971-77. (The man who bridged the gap between McCloskey and Daly at Penn was Dick Harter, who would become Daly’s first assistant coach with the Pistons.) McCloskey tried to get Daly to coach the Pistons the first time around, but Daly turned the job down at the time to remain a 76ers assistant coach under Billy Cunningham.

When Cleveland owner Ted Stepien offered Daly a three-year contract for $500,000 18 games into the 1981-82 season, he accepted. But it wasn’t long after Daly took over for Don Delaney (4-11) and interim coach Bob Kloppenburg (0-3) that he understood the enormity of the challenge. With Stepien meddling and a roster with precious little NBA-level talent, Daly – who spent all 93 days of his Cavs tenure renting a room at the Holiday Inn – lasted just 41 games, going 9-32 before Stepien fired him, too.

Ironically, the tipping point for Daly was Stepien doing an end run around him to trade Bill Laimbeer to the Pistons, shortly after Daly told him he thought the combination of Laimbeer in the high post and James Edwards – another important piece of the two Bad Boys champions – in the low post would be the key to Cleveland’s turnaround chances.

So Daly was available when McCloskey went looking for a head coach after the 1982-83 season.

“I know the record wasn’t good in Cleveland, but I knew he could coach,” McCloskey said. “(Cleveland) didn’t have anything. When I saw him in his college days, I knew he was a good motivator. I knew he had good communication skills.”

And McCloskey also knew Daly would coax a better defensive effort out of the Pistons, though the corner only really got turned in that respect when McCloskey made several dramatic moves after the 1985-86 season, trading Tripucka to Utah for Adrian Dantley and drafting John Salley and Dennis Rodman most prominently.

McCloskey and Daly were both fiery competitors, and they had their share of spirited debates over the years, but McCloskey recalls their relationship as highly respectful and collaborative.

“It was excellent,” he said. “It was, ‘OK, I’m going to get players for you and you’re going to coach.’ We had a lot of conversations, but Chuck was an excellent coach and that’s what he did – he coached the team and I gave him the players.”

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part IV

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with his quest to plug a big hole in the Pistons’ lineup at power forward. Up next: Striking gold in the 1985 draft.)

When Jack McCloskey came to Detroit in December 1979, free agency was the least likely implement in a general manager’s toolbox to spur a turnaround. So unless the draft coughed up a lineup solution, trades were the avenue to pursue to plug holes.

The Pistons had many holes when McCloskey took over for Dick Vitale. But in his first few years on the job, McCloskey performed yeoman’s work in plugging a few big ones. He drafted Isiah Thomas with the No. 2 pick in 1981 to play point guard and Kelly Tripucka at No. 12 as his small forward, swung a trade for sixth man extraordinaire Vinnie Johnson a few months later and went to the wire at the February 1982 trade deadline to snare Bill Laimbeer to play center.

But power forward? That position haunted the Pistons as they tried to inch closer to the top in the East. McCloskey inherited Bob McAdoo, whose disinterest in playing for the Pistons was so apparent that the media and fans quickly dubbed him “McAdon’t.”

Phil Hubbard manned the position for most of the next two seasons, a game but undersized player who never fully recovered from a college knee injury. Terry Tyler, more suited to small forward, did his best when called upon to start 56 games in 1982-83. After Laimbeer was acquired, the Pistons tried to milk minutes out of Kent Benson at power forward, but Benson was clearly better suited to playing center.

McCloskey spent No. 1 picks in consecutive drafts on Wichita State teammates Cliff Levingston and Antoine Carr, both athletic tweeners. Levingston started 24 games in his second season, sharing power forward with Benson, but Carr never suited up for the Pistons, signing to play in Italy when he and McCloskey couldn’t agree on a contract.

McCloskey thought he’d hit his home run after the 1983-84 season, packaging Levingston and Carr to Atlanta in exchange for Dan Roundfield, who’d played at Detroit Chadsey and Central Michigan and came to the Pistons as a three-time All-Star who had been voted to the All-Defense first or second team six times. He’d put up six straight seasons of double-double numbers in points and rebounds for the Hawks, and his most recent averages of 18.9 points and 9.9 rebounds a game nearly made it seven.

“It seemed like the perfect fit,” McCloskey says to this day.

The teams the Pistons had to beat in the East – Boston, Philadelphia and New York – were all bigger and more physical than they were. Boston’s Kevin McHale, in particular, bedeviled the Pistons. Roundfield appeared the perfect McHale antidote. Instead, he struggled from day one with the Pistons. In an early-season game at Boston, fittingly enough, allergies – the circus had recently come through Boston Garden – shut him down, then a calf injury cost him six games, and later still knee surgery knocked Roundfield out of the lineup for 20 games.

He wound up averaging 10.9 points and 8.1 rebounds, but more than the steep decline in numbers, Roundfield simply didn’t supply the defensive presence the Pistons felt they would be getting – nor the low-post scoring presence Roundfield had always represented.

“For some season, he didn’t complement the rest of the team,” McCloskey said. “There was something lacking there. I didn’t anticipate that. You put somebody in with a team and either the team is holding him back or he’s holding the team back. We had a lot of pretty good players then and maybe the fact that he was an exceptional player … maybe we had too many players.”

Instead of sticking stubbornly to what his vision for what Roundfield could provide, McCloskey acted swiftly. One day short of a year after acquiring Roundfield, McCloskey shipped him to Washington for Rick Mahorn.

Mahorn wasn’t an immediate panacea. He would start 12 games in 1985-86 – a season that ended with the Pistons deeply frustrated after getting overpowered by Atlanta in the first round of the playoffs – and only six the following season. McCloskey was so underwhelmed by Mahorn’s first season with the Pistons that he sent yet another spare power forward, Earl Cureton, plus a 1987 second-rounder to Chicago for Sidney Green, who started 69 regular-season games in 1986-87.

But by the time that season ended with the Pistons losing to Boston in an incredibly intense seven-game series that ended with Vinnie Johnson and Adrian Dantley banging heads and spilled over into Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas’ postgame suggestion that Larry Bird was overrated, Mahorn had convinced Chuck Daly and McCloskey that he could be the answer.

“I thought I was getting a tough guy,” McCloskey said of the Mahorn he remembers with Washington early in his career, when he and Jeff Ruland were dubbed “McFilthy” and “McNasty” by Boston radio voice Johnny Most. “He and Laimbeer, I don’t know if there have been two tougher guys on one team in all of basketball.”

Except Mahorn wasn’t thrilled to come to the Pistons at the time – he was an East Coast kid who’d played his college basketball near Washington at Hampton University – and showed up out of shape.

“He comes in my office and he said, ‘I don’t understand why I don’t get any time,’ ” McCloskey recalled. “I told him, ‘If I were coaching, you wouldn’t get 20 seconds.’ ”

“Hell, you’re too heavy,” McCloskey answered. “I know you can do things around the boards but you’ve got to be able to play a little defense and you can’t do it. You’re not going to play until you look like you’re ready to play.”

McCloskey found a weight-loss program for Mahorn, he got himself whipped into playing shape, and locked down the power forward spot for the 1987-88 season. Mahorn averaged 10.7 points and 8.4 rebounds that year, but his contributions went deeper than the numbers. Mahorn was an intimidating presence, but his reputation as a bully overshadowed his keen basketball IQ. Mahorn didn’t mute McHale, but he frustrated McHale often enough – Mahorn’s trademark “pull the chair” maneuver victimized McHale more than anyone – to win his share of battles and allow the Pistons to exploit matchup advantages elsewhere.

One of those matchup advantages came by virtue of a draft choice McCloskey couldn’t believe he was fortunate enough to make. We’ll look at that in Part VI of the Best of Trader Jack.

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part V

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with a gold strike in the 1985 draft. Up next: Taking the next step.)

It was one of those file-it-away moments. Jack McCloskey was scouting the UNLV Holiday Classic in December 1984 where the two headliner teams were the host Runnin’ Rebels and San Diego State, being coached by Smokey Gaines – the guy who took over at the University of Detroit for Dick Vitale when Vitale left for the Pistons.

McCloskey might have been there expecting to scout the talent on those two NCAA tournament-bound teams – as fate would have it, they would be first-round opponents three months later, UNLV winning 85-80 to improve to 28-3, ending the Aztecs’ season at 23-8 – but it was a guard at McNeese State that wound up catching Trader Jack’s eye.

“I remember seeing him play in Nevada and in the first two minutes, he made a great move,” McCloskey told me last month. “I said, ‘Hell, this kid can play.’ ”

McCloskey had devised his own numerical evaluation system for players. In his scoring system for guards, quickness and speed were among the attributes he rated. When he added up Joe D’s scores across 10 categories at the end of the tournament – McNeese would lose by six to San Diego State and by 11 to UNLV, margins McCloskey knew would have been tripled without Dumars keeping the Cowboys close – he went back to Detroit and kept his mouth shut, hoping for a miracle on draft night.

But he never believed it would come to fruition. The Pistons had come a long way in McCloskey’s five-plus years as general manager. He’d added Isiah Thomas and Kelly Tripucka via the draft and Bill Laimbeer and Vinnie Johnson in trade. The Pistons had just played Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics tough in a first-round playoff series, losing in six games, and their 46-36 record under Chuck Daly meant McCloskey wouldn’t pick until No. 18.

Pistons owner Bill Davidson and minority partner Oscar Feldman, not so long removed from his own duties as general manager, would sit in the draft room with McCloskey and his trusted scouts, Will Robinson and Stan Novak. McCloskey would brief Davidson and Feldman in the days leading to the draft on the handful of players he figured would be in his range.

“The owners would come in and they’d always want to know who were the potential people we would pick,” McCloskey recalled. “I gave them names. Now the draft starts off and we get down to Dallas, which had two picks in front of us. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Do we really have a chance to get this guy?’

“Sure enough, Dallas takes two big guys” – the Mavs picked 7-footers Bill Wennington of St. John’s and Uwe Blab of Indiana – “and I grab the phone right away and say to the NBA, ‘the Pistons take Joe Dumars.’ And both owners jumped off their seats and said, ‘Who the hell is Joe Dumars? You never told us about him!’ ”

One of the players still on the board at the time was Sam Vincent, a local hero who’d been Michigan’s first Mr. Basketball in 1981, was the younger brother of proven NBA scorer Jay Vincent, had broken Magic Johnson’s city scoring record with a 61-point game and had been an All-American at Michigan State. It wasn’t like Vincent wasn’t projected to be a good NBA player, either. In fact, he would go two picks after McCloskey selected Dumars, his selection given greater credibility by the fact it was Boston and Red Auerbach’s front office that made the pick.

It was enormously risky, in other words, for McCloskey to spend the pick on a player his owners – and Pistons fans – had never heard of when a local star with name recognition was on the board. Especially when the Pistons already appeared loaded in the backcourt with Thomas at point guard, steady John Long at shooting guard and Johnson – freshly dubbed “The Microwave” by Danny Ainge for a 22-point fourth quarter in a Game 5 win over the Celtics – coming off the bench.

“How could you pass up a guy that I thought was in the top two or three of the draft?” McCloskey says today. “I had him for sure in the top five. I don’t know how you could pass him up.”

The first five picks in the 1985 draft were Patrick Ewing, Wayman Tisdale, Benoit Benjamin, Xavier McDaniel and Jon Koncak. Ewing went on to a Hall of Fame career, as did three others from that class: Chris Mullin, the No. 7 pick; Karl Malone, picked 13th; and Dumars, who was privately hoping to go to either Dallas, picking 16 and 17, or Houston, picking right behind the Pistons at 19th, so he could stay close to his Louisiana roots.

Turned out pretty well for all sides. McCloskey’s teams would go on to win two NBA titles, play in five straight conference finals and three straight NBA Finals. Dumars would enjoy his own Hall of Fame career and slide into the seat McCloskey occupied, going on to build his own NBA title winner and one that played in a remarkable six straight conference finals. It might have been one of the most profitable trips to Las Vegas ever taken, all without dropping a dime into the slot machines.

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part VI

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with a major trade made in the summer of 1986. Up next: A jolt of athleticism.)

For practically every championship celebration, there is a near-miss story of a player who did much of the heavy lifting but wasn’t around to feel the sweet sting of champagne in the eye.

Kelly Tripucka was twice removed from Detroit by the time the Pistons he helped make respectable through the mid-’80s had been dubbed Bad Boys and won their two NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. It was almost cruel that Tripucka, the 12th pick in the same 1981 draft that saw Jack McCloskey pluck Isiah Thomas with the No. 2 pick, spent those two Detroit championship seasons toiling for the expansion Charlotte Hornets, winning a total of 39 games.

There were a handful of reasons the Pistons went from a 46-win team in 1985-86 and an easy first-round knockout for Atlanta in the playoffs to a 52-win team a season later that would push Boston to the final seconds of an excruciating seven-game series in the conference finals.

Among them were the maturation of Joe Dumars, the continuing evolution of Isiah Thomas, the emergence of Rick Mahorn as the answer at power forward and the contributions of athletic rookies Dennis Rodman and John Salley. But nothing got more attention at the time, at least, than the high-profile swap of small forwards McCloskey executed in August 1986, less than two weeks before the opening of training camp, when the Pistons shipped Tripucka and Kent Benson to Utah for Adrian Dantley.

It’s often overlooked just how much Tripucka meant to the Pistons. When he arrived in 1981, they were verging on irrelevance. The team had experienced scant success since relocating from Fort Wayne, Ind., 24 years earlier, advancing past the first round of the playoffs just three times and never past the second. The Pistons had won 21 games the previous season and it was a constant struggle to put fans in the seats in the cavernous Silverdome.

Even in his rookie class, Tripucka was second banana to Thomas. But it was Tripucka who gave the Pistons the scoring punch that enabled them to win their share of games. His 21.6 points per game as a rookie – when Tripucka, like Thomas, was named to the Eastern Conference All-Star team – was just three-tenths of a point behind John Long for the team scoring lead, and the next season Tripucka averaged 26.5 points a game to finish No. 4 in the league.

Yet after the Pistons went from 37 wins to 49 in 1983-84 – Chuck Daly’s first after McCloskey hired him to replace Scotty Robertson – they seemed to plateau, winning 46 in each of the next two seasons. And when Atlanta crushed them in four games of the best-of-five first-round series, Isiah led the call for change.

Defense was the Pistons’ Achilles heel. Everyone knew as much. It was a significant reason behind McCloskey’s change from Robertson to Daly. But when Atlanta averaged 130 points in its three wins in the series, it was clear that it was more than just mind-set that undermined the Pistons’ defensive efforts; it was also personnel. And nobody did more damage to the Pistons in that ’86 playoff series than Dominique Wilkins, who averaged 37 points in Atlanta’s three wins.

“We needed to get better defensively, no doubt about it,” McCloskey said. “We traded Kelly to Utah for Dantley because we needed a little bit more inside scoring. We had Laimbeer, but we needed more scoring inside. Kelly was a very good player, but he really did most of his scoring from the perimeter.”

It wasn’t an easy call for McCloskey to make. For one thing, Tripucka was just 27 and Dantley 30 – about the same age as Dan Roundfield was when McCloskey thought he’d solved his longstanding problem at power forward by acquiring the Detroit native from Atlanta in 1984. Roundfield had little left in the tank when he came to the Pistons. For another, well … McCloskey had a soft spot for Tripucka, who played himself to the point of exhaustion and had meant so much to the Pistons when they most needed a jolt.

“I hated trading Kelly,” McCloskey said. “I really did.”

But there is no disputing that the trade was a huge success for the Pistons. Dantley would play in 81 games in his first season in Detroit and lead them in scoring for all of his 2½ seasons as a Piston. Tripucka, meanwhile, would struggle in his two seasons in Utah, averaging 10.1 and 7.5 points and clashing with Jazz coach Frank Layden.

He was then chosen by Charlotte in the expansion draft and coached there for two seasons by Dick Harter, who had been Daly’s assistant in Detroit. With minutes and shots plentiful on a thin expansion roster, Tripucka rallied to score 22.6 points a game in 1988-89 with Charlotte, then dropped to 15.6 the following year and to a career-worst 7.0 in 1990-91, which would be Tripucka’s last season in the NBA.

Ironically, or perhaps merely coincidentally, that also was the year the Bad Boys ceased to exist, losing to Chicago in the conference finals in a four-game sweep. The big difference: the Bad Boys had two championships to their names.

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part VII

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with the 1986 draft that saw McCloskey add John Salley and Dennis Rodman. Up next: The most overlooked move of all.)

There is no such thing as a sleeper in today’s NBA, where even players with roots in Africa and obscure professional leagues in Asia and the Middle East are known commodities by the time June’s draft rolls around.

But a generation ago – before the explosion of sports on cable TV and the advent of the Internet and the information gusher it spawned – it was still possible to uncover hidden basketball gems, even those who spent four years at American universities.

Such was the case with Dennis Rodman, who played at a tiny NAIA school in the rural plains, Southeastern Oklahoma State. The Pistons’ scouting staff caught wind of him during the season, then was wowed by him at the Portsmouth Invitational in April 1986, where Rodman was the best player.

He wasn’t quite the same player, though, at the next two major scouting opportunities. In that day, about 50 college prospects were split into four teams to compete over a weekend in Hawaii, then came the Chicago predraft camp. Portsmouth wasn’t as loaded with first-round prospects as the other two, so conventional wisdom held that when the talent level went up, Rodman was no longer capable of dominating.

Most front offices wrote him off as a small-college wonder.

Jack McCloskey dug deeper. It didn’t make sense to him that the Rodman whose athleticism was off the charts in Portsmouth looked so lethargic in Chicago.

“Everybody saw him in Portsmouth – he was MVP for the whole tournament,” McCloskey recalled. “But his playing went down when he went out to Hawaii and then when he went to Chicago. I said, ‘Geez, this isn’t the same guy.’ But I always had (Pistons trainer) Mike Abdenour checking the locker rooms when we saw all of these guys. He told me, ‘This guy is full of allergies.’ I asked, ‘Can we get it fixed?’ He said we could, so I said, ‘OK, that’s all I need to know.’ ”

McCloskey wasn’t sure who else around the NBA knew what about Rodman. But he gave his scouts, Will Robinson and Stan Novak, explicit instructions as they conducted their due diligence leading to the draft in talking with their peers around the league.

“I told them, ‘Make sure you do not mention Rodman and let’s find out if anyone else is mentioning him,’ ” McCloskey said.

McCloskey was prepared to take Rodman with the Pistons’ first-round pick at No. 11 if he thought there was serious danger that he would go before their pick at No. 27. His dream scenario was getting John Salley with the No. 11 pick and Rodman in the second round. But McCloskey was also clear that he thought Rodman would have the greater impact. He just knew that there was no way Salley would slip to 27th.

“I wanted to be greedy,” he said. “I wanted Salley, too. But if the health issue comes up and it doesn’t work, we’re passing up a good pick in the draft. I wanted Salley, also. I said, ‘OK, we’re going to take a calculated risk.’ And that’s what it was. But we really talked to everybody in the league. And he was not mentioned. So I said we’re going to take the chance. And it worked out.”

Did it ever. Before their rookie years were out, Rodman and Salley had been dubbed the X-factor for the Pistons around the league, a moniker they embraced; Salley even turned it into their own personal greeting, Rodman and Salley clasping hands with arms crossed – forming an X. Their athleticism and length transformed the Pistons defensively and breathed life into their transition offense.

Their relationship actually began at the Hawaii scouting event, when Salley and Rodman were not only assigned to the same team but to the same hotel room. Rodman arrived first. When Salley got there, he found the room frigid and Rodman shivering under the sheets.

“I get there and he has the sliding door open, the air conditioning on and he has asthma and he’s under the covers, watching cartoons, shivering. And I’m going, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

“What kind of sick? I ain’t got time to be sick.”

Salley suggested they turn the air conditioning down a notch or two, but Rodman refused. To make it up to Salley, he told him that since they were teammates, Rodman promised to grab every rebound and let Salley do the scoring so he could impress scouts.

“And I literally went on to get the MVP,” Salley grinned.

Rodman soon displayed the same rebounding and defensive prowess in the NBA, which ultimately led to his 2011 induction in the Naismith Hall of Fame. At the ceremony in April when the Pistons retired his No. 10, McCloskey told The Palace crowd that in all his years in basketball, Rodman was both the greatest rebounder and defender he had ever seen.

“And I mean that,” McCloskey told me. “I have seen every player – and I’m playing in the old Eastern League, before the NBA exists. Then the NBA comes in. I’ve seen every guy that has played. I stick to that.”

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The Best of Trader Jack: Part VIII

(Editor’s note: Jack McCloskey made every move in building the Bad Boys from his hiring in December 1979 to their winning consecutive NBA titles in 1989 and ’90. Pistons.com looks at the 10 biggest moves he engineered, continuing with the 1988 trade-deadline deal that brought James Edwards to Detroit. Up next: The final piece.)

The wise man takes advantage of every opportunity to nourish his curiosity, filing away seemingly random bits of information for the day they need to be accessed and applied. So it was in the fall of 1977 that an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers couldn’t help but think that the third-round rookie center out of Washington was doing a pretty fair impersonation of the NBA’s most dominant center, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, while the superstar missed the first several weeks of the season due to injury.

More than a decade later, that assistant coach was well down the road toward building an NBA championship contender when that kid center, now 32, became available in trade after the Phoenix Suns, struggling through a 28-54 season, opted for a rebuild.

And that’s how Jack McCloskey made the most overlooked move in the construction of the Bad Boys, who over the next three postseasons would win two NBA titles and come within a horrendous foul call on Bill Laimbeer and a cruelly timed injury to Isiah Thomas of winning all three championships in that span.

James Edwards – “Buddha” for his ever-present Fu Manchu mustache to any Pistons fan old enough to remember that era – came to Detroit at the perfect time for him and for them.

Still fully capable of logging starter’s minutes, content to come off the bench and possessed of both an amiable personality that was a fit in their locker room and a low-post scoring presence that suited their needs, Edwards not only was ideally suited for the Pistons but came at preposterously little cost.

All it took for McCloskey to get the Suns to bite on his request for Edwards was a little-used, little-known 7-foot project, Ron Moore, and a 1991 No. 2 pick. Acquired by McCloskey the previous June from the Knicks, who’d drafted him, for Sidney Green, Moore wouldn’t play in the NBA after that rookie season and wound up with nearly as many personal fouls (34) as career points (38).

“That, to me, was a no-brainer,” McCloskey says today of the Edwards trade. “When I was an assistant coach with the Lakers, we drafted (Edwards) and Kareem was hurt in the early part of the season. You could see, boy, he could score. And he had a great personality – terrific personality, just the nicest guy. So I grabbed him.”

In the first 25 games of his rookie season, Edwards averaged 14.8 points and 7.2 rebounds for the Lakers, who promptly traded him to Indiana upon Abdul-Jabbar’s return as the key piece in a deal that fetched a young Adrian Dantley, coming off a season in which he was Rookie of the Year for Buffalo before being swapped to the Pacers before his second season.

Edwards was more of a luxury, not a necessity, when the Pistons traded for him. They had both Rick Mahorn and John Salley at power forward – and Dennis Rodman to play there when matchups called for it – and the ironman Bill Laimbeer, in his prime, holding down the fort at center.

So Edwards, over the final 26 games that season, played less than 13 minutes a game, averaging 5.4 points and 3.0 rebounds.

His role was expanded the following season, partly because Mahorn was periodically hampered by a nagging back injury and partly because Edwards gave them something nobody else could provide. Blessed with extraordinary length – he was listed at 7-foot-0, but appeared to tower over the next-tallest Pistons, Laimbeer and Salley – Edwards had terrific footwork and a release point on his jump shot that made it unblockable. Edwards, still coming off the bench in 1988-89 when the Pistons won their first title, averaged 7.3 points and 3.0 rebounds in nearly 17 minutes a game.

But when Minnesota grabbed Mahorn in the 1989 expansion draft Edwards was required to start the next season. (The news of Mahorn’s loss was delivered to McCloskey as the Pistons were riding in their victory parade after sweeping the Lakers. McCloskey kept the news to himself until the celebration later that afternoon at The Palace, leaving Mahorn and his teammates devastated.) At 34, Edwards logged 28 minutes a game and scored 14.5 points – third on the team, behind Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars – to go with 4.2 rebounds.

McCloskey wasn’t the only key component of the Bad Boys to have a history with Edwards. When Chuck Daly spent 41 games coaching the 1981-82 Cleveland Cavaliers, he tried to sell owner Ted Stepien on the viability of a Laimbeer-Edwards high- and low-post tandem, only to have Stepien break up the duo by dealing Laimbeer away – to Trader Jack McCloskey.

Daly knew how to draw the best out of Edwards. He would go to him early and often to start the first and third quarters of games, while Edwards was fresh, to soften the defensive interior and give the dynamic Thomas-Dumars backcourt room to flourish, then he would come off the bench with the more athletic Salley.

Edwards would wind up playing 19 NBA seasons, finally retiring at 40 after winning another title with the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. He played with eight franchises, including two stops with the Lakers. But the 3½ seasons he spent with the Pistons were the crowning glory of his NBA run. And about that trade that saw Edwards and Dantley swap uniforms in 1977? It wouldn’t be the last time they would be linked. More on that in the final installment of our Trader Jack series.