Today’s Pistons got you down? They ain’t got nothing on 1979-80’s debacle
Today’s Pistons got you down? They ain’t got nothing on 1979-80’s debacle
Date: March 27, 2023
Author: thegregger632 Comments
They played in a cavernous building with an inflatable roof that leaked. Half the time, the crowd could be seen bundled up in their seats, because the cavernous building could get awful drafty in Michigan winters.
They gave away tickets for damn near for free—sometimes they were free, especially if you didn’t mind sitting in the high altitude sections.
The halftime entertainment was the Classy Chassis, who were a gaggle of lovelies with pom-pons and skimpy outfits. Think Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, retro fitted for Detroit. Or sometimes a fellow named Crazy George would perform. Crazy George did all sorts of tumbling and other physical gyrations on the hardwood, along with some balancing tricks with basketballs.
If you cared to drive up to the Pontiac Silverdome to watch NBA basketball during the 1979-80 season, you didn’t get much for your trouble, gas or time.
It’s impossible for a geezer like me to not think of the ’79-80 Pistons, for this year’s bunch is likely to be the only other team in franchise history to not attain 20 victories in a season. The 1980 group rode in at 16-66, dropping their final 14 games in the process. Today’s Pistons sit at 16-58, in the throes of a 2-19 wobble. Can they win four of their last eight games to get to 20?
What do you think?
If there’s one thing that spurs optimism, however, about this year’s Pistons, it’s that there does appear to be some young talent that is being cobbled together, which will be added to by one after this summer’s draft, when the team gets another lottery pick. And Cade Cunningham will return, having missed virtually the entire season due to his bad shin.
In 1980, there was no such excitement.
In fact, the Pistons didn’t even have a first round draft pick lined up that summer, until February, when new GM Jack McCloskey got one from the Bucks in the Bob Lanier trade. And the roster? It was filled with CBA-type players, scrubs and a very unhappy “superstar” in Bob McAdoo. Dickie Vitale, who began the ’79-80 season as coach and de facto GM, emptied the Pistons’ draft cupboard in the ill-advised trade with the Celtics for McAdoo the previous September.
And even getting the first round pick from the Bucks wasn’t all that great, because Milwaukee was a title contender and their selection was 17th overall.
But there was a franchise-altering player that McCloskey set his sights on for the Pistons. You can’t say he didn’t try to get him.
Earvin Johnson, whose magic in high school and college was still fresh in the minds of basketball fans in southeast Michigan, was in his rookie NBA season with the Lakers. So McCloskey went for broke.
Jack literally offered his entire Pistons roster—every single player—to LA in exchange for Magic.
“We’d have taken Magic, filled the roster with CBA players and draft picks, and gone from there,” McCloskey explained years later. In an interview with me in 1989, after the Pistons’ first championship, Jack said that he looked at the 1980 Pistons as “basically an expansion team. So what I proposed to the Lakers wasn’t all that crazy from our perspective.”
The Lakers brass, including Jack’s old friend Jerry West, gave the proposal a thought but ultimately passed.
Still, the 1979-80 Pistons are, in their own cockamamie way, a delicious footnote in franchise history.
They lost their last 14 games, as mentioned. They didn’t win a road game after January 25. Vitale was fired in November, replaced by someone named Richie Adubato, who would go on to author quite a career as an NBA assistant and head coach. But in ’79, Richie was a 42 year-old from Vitale’s neck of the woods in New Jersey whose only basketball coaching experience was six years at Upsala College in East Orange. I’ll wait here while you Google that. The ticket discounts were just intriguing enough to encourage the curious to hop onto I-75 and head north. I attended a few games that season in the Dome. Each night, there were maybe 5 or 6,000 others with me who also had nothing better to do, apparently.
It was seriocomic.
As for the roster? Well…let’s talk about that.
Back in the 1960s, the NBA had something called a territorial draft pick, which gave teams exclusive rights over college players in their geographic region. But the rule was sometimes stretched and skewed. The Philadelphia Warriors, for example, were given territorial rights to Wilt Chamberlain—who attended Kansas University.
The NBA did away with the territorial pick in 1965, one year before college sensation Cazzie Russell from Michigan was draft eligible. Pistons owner Fred Zollner pleaded with the league to extend the territorial pick one more year, so his teetering franchise could welcome Russell into the fold and thus possibly save the Pistons as an entity in Detroit.
The NBA told Zollner to stick it.
The Pistons thus “settled” for David Bing from Syracuse, who indeed did save the franchise, essentially.
But when Dickie Vitale ran the show with the Pistons, starting in 1978, the team drafted as if the territorial pick was still a thing.
Vitale drafted John Long and Terry Tyler from U-D in ’78—both in the second round (the Pistons had no 1st round pick). One year later, he grabbed U-D’s Terry Duerod in the third round. Also in ’79, Dickie selected Magic Johnson’s running mate, Gregory Kelser, fourth overall. Later in the first round, Phil Hubbard from Michigan became a Piston. And when Dickie wasn’t drafting Michigan-based players, he was signing them as free agents—like U-D’s Dennis Boyd—or trading for them, like he did with Michigan’s Rickey Green (Golden State) in 1978.
Now, some of the above players ended up having decent NBA careers, but in 1980, they were hardly key cogs of the Pistons. In fact, Green was long gone, waived two months after Vitale traded for him.
Coach Dickie Vitale, looking dapper in his turtleneck circa 1979So in ’79-80 you had names like UNLV’s Jackie Robinson, backup big man Leon Douglas out of Alabama, veteran hustling guard Ronnie Lee, who won over the fans for his propensity for diving into the seats to chase wayward basketballs and—drumroll please—CMU’s Jim McElroy.
And McAdoo. Oh, and there was the strange story of guard Roy Hamilton.
Hamilton was drafted by the Pistons in 1979 out of UCLA, the second of three first rounders the team had, sandwiched between Kelser and Hubbard.
But after two uninspiring seasons with the Pistons, Hamilton chucked his NBA career and pursued his first love, television production, having become enamored with the business by way of playing college ball in Los Angeles.
Hamilton eventually became one of CBS’s top NFL producers in television coverage. When the network lost its NFL contract to Fox Sports in 1993, Hamilton joined Fox along with some other CBS personnel. By 2001, Hamilton was one of the highest-ranking Blacks working on sports television production, as Fox Sports Net’s coordinating producer of college football and regional NBA coverage.
Which did absolutely nothing to help the Pistons.
The 1980 draft netted the Pistons Larry Drew in the first round, a guard from Missouri. Another flop. The team “improved” to 21-61.
It wasn’t until 1981 that the draft finally paid off—with twin first round picks Isiah Thomas and Kelly Tripucka. The Pistons went 39-43 and their ascension to back-to-back titles in ’89-90 was on.
So as bad as the Pistons have been in recent seasons—and they’ve been bad—at least there’s a young core that presumably could mature into a relevant unit in the next few years.
In 1980, the Pistons offered slapstick and overall dysfunction, punctuated by the benching and eventual waiving of McAdoo in March 1981.
New coach Scotty Robertson put it succinctly when interviewed about his team’s prospects during training camp in 1980.
“We’re young and we’re better than we were a year ago,” Scotty said. “But we’re still not very bleeping good.”
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