The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Ray Patterson didn’t much care about Malone’s speech patterns. He saw a young player who would fit in perfectly with his team. As solid as Kunnert was on the boards and on defense, he was never going to be a low-post scorer. In fact, he was at his best on offense roaming the perimeter, shooting his funny-looking but effective (it looked more like he was launching a rocket than shooting a basketball) jump shot. The Rockets had all the perimeter scoring a team could want. They needed a force in the low post. Patterson believed Malone could become that force. He was willing to gamble his first-round draft picks because he saw Malone as someone who would have been taken with the first pick in the draft if he were coming out of college at age twenty-one or twenty-two.

  The Malone trade was as big a success as the Hayes-Marin trade had been a bust. Malone gave the Rockets the inside presence they had lacked, averaging 13.5 points and 13.4 rebounds a night that first season in Houston, even though he was still learning how to play the low post. What’s more, he freed up other players to do other things. Tomjanovich didn’t have to worry about rebounding as much, and Lucas and Murphy both felt they could release on the fast break earlier because Malone was likely to come up with most defensive rebounds.

  When Nissalke began playing Malone and Kunnert together, the big lineup proved effective. Kunnert could now play the perimeter, since Malone was camped inside, and the Rockets became an excellent rebounding team with Malone, Kunnert, and Tomjanovich up front. They went from 23–19 halfway through the season to 49–33 and won the Central Division, the first division title in the history of the franchise.

  At last the team was starting to catch on in Houston. Attendance kept improving throughout the regular season, and it took off in the playoffs, with the 16,000-seat Summit finally playing to sellout crowds. By now the Tomjanovich family had become full-fledged Houstonians. Their first child, Nichole, had been born in 1973, and Melissa had followed in December of the 1976–77 season. They had moved into a house in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. Rudy had gone from wondering if he was good enough to play to being the team’s leading scorer, a perennial All-Star, and, along with his pal Murphy, the symbol of what the Rockets had become.

  “That was a great ride that spring in the playoffs,” he remembered. “Even though we’d been there in ’75 and had gotten a taste of it, this was different, because we really thought we belonged. In ’75, winning that series against the Knicks was almost enough. It was as if we proved we were a legitimate team, and when we lost to the Celtics, even though it was disappointing, heck, it was the Celtics. How bad could you feel about losing to the Celtics?

  “In ’77, every loss hurt. And every win felt great. What hurt the most about losing the series to the 76ers was we were convinced if we got to the finals we could beat the Blazers. We were a lot like them in that we had kept improving during the season [and finished with an identical record] and were peaking in the playoffs.”

  If there was any doubt that the Rockets were coming into their own, it was wiped out during the conference semifinals against the Washington Bullets. Washington was a deep, experienced team led by the great Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes, who was still a scoring force. The Bullets had reached the finals in 1975, the start of a run that would see them get that far three times in five seasons and win their only NBA title in 1978. When they went up two games to one in the series with game four to be played in Washington, it looked as if the Rockets might exit early.

  But with Malone holding his own against Unseld and Tomjanovich and Murphy bombing from outside, the Rockets pulled out game four 107–103 and proceeded to shock the Bullets by winning the next two games to take the series 4–2. That put them into the conference finals against Philadelphia, a team that had all but been awarded the NBA title in October when it had acquired Dr. J, Julius Erving, to go with George McGinnis, Doug Collins, and Darryl Dawkins.

  “Me and Doc together,” McGinnis had said at the time. “Lights out.”

  The Sixers hadn’t been lights out in the regular season, finishing a solid but hardly overwhelming 50–32—one game better than the Rockets. Still, everyone believed that when the time came to turn it on in the playoffs, they would. That had not proven to be the case in the conference semis, when they had to go seven games to beat an aging Boston team. Now they were facing the young and supremely confident Rockets.

  Home court ruled for three games, the 76ers winning twice in Philadelphia, the Rockets once in Houston, before Collins came up with a monster night in game four, pouring in 36 points to lead his team to a 107–95 win that gave Philadelphia a 3–1 lead with game five in Philadelphia. That appeared to be the end of Houston’s dream season. But the Rockets went into the Spectrum on a Sunday afternoon and with Lucas playing his best game of the season—21 points and 12 assists—and Tomjanovich making key shot after key shot, they stunned the 76ers and their fans, who were already preparing to start the finals against the Blazers (who had swept the Lakers) two nights later.

  Instead, the two teams went back to Houston for game six. By now Erving had taken over on offense for Philadelphia. He had scored 37 in the loss on Sunday and in game six he had 34 more. But the Rockets kept answering and the game went to the wire, just as the game on Sunday had.

  In the waning seconds, the 76ers had the lead, 111–109. Lucas, brilliant again throughout the night, drove the lane and went up for what would be a game-tying shot with one second left. The ball banked in and the whistle blew. Collins, famous throughout his career for taking charges, had put himself between Lucas and the basket and the two had collided. If the call was a block, the shot would count and Lucas could win the game with a free throw. But one man’s block in basketball is another man’s charge.

  Jake O’Donnell called charge: no basket. Suddenly, stunningly, the series was over. Instead of going back to Philadelphia for a game seven in which all the pressure would have been squarely on the shoulders of the 76ers, the Rockets were going home.

  “Maybe the single most disappointing game of my life,” Tomjanovich said years later. “We were absolutely convinced we were going to win that series.” He smiled. “I guess you have to say Doug made a great play, because he got away with it.”

  Twenty-four years later, Ray Patterson still wasn’t quite over it. “You know, I’ve been asked a lot through the years if I hold a grudge against Kermit Washington for what he did to Rudy,” he said. “My answer has always been that it was a terrible, terrible act but I don’t think there was real malice involved. He made a horrible, horrible mistake. But Doug Collins I’m still upset with. He took a dive and got away with it. I really felt as if he and the officials took a potential title away from us.”

  Murphy, who always sees things a little differently from most, will force a laugh when the subject comes up. “Doug had nothing to lose,” he said. “He couldn’t stop Luke, so he did the only thing he could do, hope to get a call. And he did.”

  As much as the loss hurt, the Rockets didn’t see it as an ending but a beginning. They were a young team just coming into their own. None of the key players was thirty yet, and Malone was emerging as a major force. He had averaged better than 20 points per game in the playoffs and looked ready to take his place as one of the league’s stars. Lucas had also made it clear during the playoffs that he was a star on the rise. Even though Collins had gotten the call on the critical play, the fact that Lucas had been willing to take the shot at that moment—and in the eyes of the Rockets had made it—was another piece of evidence that he was going to be the team’s point guard for years to come. For the season, he had averaged 11.1 points and just under 6 assists a game. Like Malone’s, his numbers had gone up in the playoffs.

  Tomjanovich-Malone-Murphy-Lucas was about as good a core group as anyone in the league could put on the floor. Kunnert had adjusted well to his new role, and the team had responded well to Nissalke’s coaching. The only person who wasn’t terribly happy with the way the team had evolved was Newlin, who had lost his starting spot to
Lucas and seen all his numbers drop precipitously: minutes per night had gone from 39 to 25, shooting percentage from 51 to 45, and points per game from 18.6 to 12.7. There had been rumors during the season that the team was trying to trade him, which didn’t please Newlin at all. To his credit, he had hung in, not pouted, and had played well when called upon in the playoffs.

  “I always admired the way Mike handled that situation,” Tomjanovich said later. “A lot of guys would have become a real problem because of what had happened. Mike never let that happen. He was as good a guy to be around when he was coming off the bench as when he was our second leading scorer.”

  “I wanted to play—badly,” Newlin said. “But there was no way I was going to let any of those guys down by being a whiner or a baby about it. They weren’t doing it to me anyway. Nissalke was.”

  Nissalke and Newlin were oil and water, a problem that would continue in the future. But the team was a young close-knit group that got along well. They were a classic melting-pot team: Tomjanovich had grown up poor in the Midwest; Kunnert had grown up well-to-do in the Midwest. Murphy was from Connecticut, Malone was from southern Virginia, Lucas from North Carolina, and Newlin from the West Coast. Lucas and Murphy, the guards, were the extroverts, the other starters were quieter, though Tomjanovich, now the team captain, had become more assertive with each passing year. They were the core of a team on the rise.

  They couldn’t wait for the 1977–78 season to start.

  14

  The Punch

  As the new NBA season began in the fall of 1977, most experts were predicting that the finals at season’s end would be a rematch of the series that had concluded in June with the Portland Trail Blazers beating the Philadelphia 76ers for the title. The Blazers were clearly a team destined to do big things for a long time, with Bill Walton now a star on the same level as Abdul-Jabbar. The 76ers were so certain that their loss in the finals had been a fluke that their season-ticket pitch to fans for the new season included the slogan “We Owe You One.”

  In both Los Angeles and Houston, they had different ideas. People seemed to have forgotten that the Lakers had finished the previous season with the league’s best record, one that would have been even better if Kermit Washington hadn’t missed the last 27 games of the regular season. The Rockets had won as many games as the Blazers and had been one questionable call from playing a game seven with the Sixers. If they had won that game, one can only imagine what Philadelphia’s slogan for the new season might have been. Perhaps “We Owe You An Apology.”

  No one was more eager to get to training camp that fall than Washington. He had been through another long, difficult summer with Newell. “It was actually tougher than the previous summer, because now he wasn’t just working on technique, he was making me get back into shape,” Washington said. “There were days I thought I’d die out there.”

  Washington finally decided midway through the summer that his misery needed company. He had played some summer ball in the past with Kiki Vandeweghe, who had just finished his freshman season at UCLA. He convinced Vandeweghe to come work with him and Newell, telling him how much Newell had helped him the previous summer. “I kept telling him to look at how much I’d improved,” he said, laughing. “What I didn’t tell him was that the man almost killed me.”

  Vandeweghe became a regular in the early mornings, and occasionally Jerome Whitehead or Kenny Carr, two more young players, would also show up. But the focus for Newell was still on Washington, who had now become a project for him. “I felt as if letting him work less hard would be letting him down,” Newell said. “Because it was hard work that had gotten him that far.”

  By the end of the summer, Washington’s knee felt strong and he thought he was ready to step back into the lineup. In spite of his injury, the Lakers had picked up the fifth-year option on his contract after the doctors had told them he should be able to make a complete recovery. That meant he would make $120,000 for the season while auditioning for a potentially huge contract when he became a free agent at the end of the season.

  The team had made some changes. Cazzie Russell and Lucius Allen, who had been a big part of the success the Lakers had enjoyed the previous season, were gone. Ernie DiGregorio, who had been the rookie of the year in Washington’s rookie season, had been acquired from Buffalo. Norm Nixon, a rookie from Duquesne, was the team’s number one draft pick and West’s choice to run the team at point guard over DiGregorio. Lou Hudson, a veteran shooter, had also been acquired, as had Jamaal Wilkes.

  “I wasn’t sure why they had made so many changes to a team that won fifty-three games,” Washington said. “Cazzie had a great season the year before and he was gone. They traded for Ernie, then Jerry didn’t want to play him. They brought in all these big names. The year before, every guy knew his role and had been happy with it. Kareem was the star and then there were the rest of us, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. No one whined or complained. We just played. With all the new players, it just seemed as if we were never on the same page as a team the way we had been the year before. Of course, if Kareem hadn’t gotten hurt, maybe we wouldn’t have even noticed any of that.”

  Abdul-Jabbar’s injury occurred on opening night when, frustrated by the physical play of Milwaukee rookie Kent Benson, he went after the Bucks center and ended up breaking his right hand on Benson’s jaw. It was another example, as the L.A. Times’s Ted Green would later think, of Abdul-Jabbar not being willing to tolerate someone he thought to be an inferior player trying to stand up to him.

  “Kareem never liked it physical, and it infuriated him when someone pushed and shoved him who he didn’t think could play,” Green said. “Benson was in his first game ever in the NBA. He was probably scared to death, holding on for dear life, and then Kareem turned around and nailed him.”

  Abdul-Jabbar contends that physical play didn’t bother him, but dirty play did. “I never played against a more physical player than Wes Unseld,” he said. “He was strong and he would push you, and getting around him for a rebound was almost impossible. But he never tried to hurt you. He never crossed the line between physical play and dirty play. He had athletic skills in addition to being strong and tough. There were other guys who crossed the line, some more than others. Benson crossed the line. If I thought someone was trying to hurt me, I took that personally. I thought he was trying to hurt me and I reacted.”

  That reaction was heard around the NBA. O’Brien wasn’t the least bit happy that on the first night of the new, get-tough-onfighting regime, the league’s best player had started a fight. He fined Abdul-Jabbar $5,000 and said he would have suspended him if he hadn’t been injured. Nowadays Abdul-Jabbar would have faced a suspension after he recovered from his injury. Back then it was all new in terms of suspensions. When O’Brien heard that Abdul-Jabbar would be out a month to six weeks because of the broken hand, he decided to let that be his suspension.

  With Abdul-Jabbar out, Washington’s importance to the team was greater than it had ever been. New starting center James Edwards wasn’t nearly the force on offense or on the boards that Abdul-Jabbar was, and Washington was asked to do more than he ever had in the past. He responded well. By the time Abdul-Jabbar returned after missing 20 games, Washington was averaging 11.5 points per game and was fourth in the league in rebounding, at 11.2 per game.

  Not surprisingly, the team struggled without Abdul-Jabbar. Everything the Lakers did at the offensive end was built around him, and he was a defensive and rebounding presence at the other end. Without him, teams were able to focus their defenses on the Lakers’ perimeter shooters, since neither Edwards nor Washington was close to being the kind of threat Abdul-Jabbar was. Additionally, Norm Nixon was learning to play in the NBA at the point guard position, and even though he was talented, a rookie was still a rookie.

  “It wasn’t a lot of fun those twenty games,” Washington said. “It was frustrating. But I think we all tried to take the attitude that once Kareem came back, we could be the team we
were last year before I got hurt. We certainly weren’t happy with where we were when he got back, but we had only played twenty-one games. We had three-quarters of the season still left.”

  The Rockets hadn’t lost any of their star players to injury at the start of the season, but they had also gotten off to a disappointing start. The nucleus of the team that had come so close to making the finals was still intact, but the league had adjusted to playing against the Rockets’ big lineup—Malone, Kunnert, Tomjanovich, Murphy, and Lucas. John Johnson, a quiet veteran presence off the bench, had been traded, and his place had been taken by Robert Reid, a rookie learning the NBA ropes. The dislike between Newlin and Nissalke continued to simmer, but it wasn’t as if the two were ripping each other publicly.

  For whatever reason, the team was losing almost every close game. Playing at home on opening night, they lost a lead and the game to the Chicago Bulls, 107–103. Two nights later they lost in Kansas City by one. There was a 2-point loss at Milwaukee, a 4-pointer to Buffalo, followed by another 2-pointer three nights later against the New Orleans Jazz. The losses to the Braves and Jazz, both at home, started a six-game losing streak that culminated in a rout (finally) at the hands of the Knicks in New York, 106–84.

  “I think we were more baffled than anything else,” Tomjanovich said. “Most nights, it wasn’t as if we were getting killed or had no chance. We just weren’t making plays at the end of games. We weren’t as confident as we had been in the spring.”

  Nissalke made some changes. He put Reid into the starting lineup, upped his minutes, and sat Kunnert down. He used Kunnert to spell all three starters up front and didn’t play him as much with Malone, because the lack of speed in that lineup was causing defensive problems. He put in some new plays on offense designed to get the ball to Tomjanovich more often.