[On this Memorial Day, we harken back to Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium and the final days of the NBA Braves. The Braves’ sad NBA tale has been recounted many times. But this article, published in the Winter 1977 issue of the magazine Buffalo Fan, offers a real-time view of the dismantling and eventual relocation of the franchise to Los Angeles (or, was it Boston?) in 1978. The byline reads Geoffrey N. Betz.]
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As Tates Locke quietly packed up his gear to head back to North Carolina after being fired as coach of the Buffalo Braves, there was one simple question which went unanswered. Could any coach have taken this club and built it into a competitive, respectable basketball team in the NBA?
Only time, Bob MacKinnon (general manager and interim coach), and the players themselves can provide the answer between now and April. Locke made mistakes, yet there is the lingering suspicion that no coach could have survived in the swirling tumult which engulfed the team during his brief tenure.
Coaching the Buffalo Braves has always been an assignment that guarantees freedom from boredom. But the events of the last eight months placed an enormous additional pressure on Locke in his first NBA head coaching job.
Between last spring and late January, when the axe fell, Locke witnessed a player turnover of about 70 percent, an abortive attempt at a franchise shift, a change in ownership, and prolonged contractual disputes with two all-star players.
He no doubt hastened his own departure by some of his outspokenly honest assessments of the situation; they contributed to a complete deterioration of his relations with the players. Among the gems:
“Being a coach in the NBA is like telling a bunch of millionaires to run their business.”
“The players on this club have a short attention span.”
“When a guard on another NBA team sees Ernie [DiGregorio] in the lineup, his eyes light up.”
In other words, no one will ever accuse Tates Locke of failing to be candid while coaching in Buffalo. The players resented his casual, blunt appraisals of the talent and his unpredictable lineup juggling and his decisions on substitutions.
Coaching aside, however, it seems obvious that the Braves have been shorn of two ingredients necessary to make a contender. Those winning essentials are quality and continuity. The Braves have neither. Even when they play up to their capabilities, there just isn’t enough talent and stability on the club to win many ballgames. They appear destined to drift through a long, desperate, frustrating period for the remainder of the season.
During the first week of 1977, Braves fans got a taste of the kind of bleak nights which lie ahead. In quick succession, the Braves lost to the Spurs in San Antonio by 33 points; watched homecourt leads of nearly 20 points vanish in losses to Golden State and the Celtics; and staged an embarrassingly inept performance in a televised loss to a Milwaukee team, which to be charitable, can best be described as “rebuilding.”
Speaking of rebuilding, it might be instructive to dwell briefly on how the Braves were razed and/or disassembled in such a short time. It is somewhat disconcerting to note that there are exactly two players—count ‘em, two—remaining from the team, which opened league play a season ago, in the autumn of 1975: Randy Smith and Ernie DiGregorio.
(How much longer even they will remain here is a matter open for discussion. Randy still hasn’t signed a new contract, and the Knicks want him badly to repair the aging Frazier-Monroe backcourt. The Braves have tried to peddle Ernie D without success on a couple of occasions. But the future of Randy and Ernie is another story.)
Furthermore, of the team which went to the playoff semifinals in the Eastern Conference in 1976, only two others are still lacing up their sneakers in Memorial Auditorium: John Shumate and Don Adams.
Simple arithmetic shows that since a season ago, the Braves one way or another have disposed of nine familiar faces. In return for those nine, who, for better or worse, had played together well enough to take the Braves to the playoffs, the team acquired three players, a draft choice, and a suitcase full of cash, more than $3 million.
Part of the trouble is that the Braves now have more cash than they do rebounders. And despite owner Paul Snyder’s apparently sincere pledge to spend some of that money for “a superstar type of player . . . a big, tough, rebounding player,” there seems little hope such a major deal can be consummated this season.
Thus, the Braves have been sentenced to several months of hard labor, playing out the season with a conglomeration consisting of two holdovers from 1975-76 (Randy and Ernie), one rookie of great promise (Adrian Dantley), one “veteran” acquired in a trade a year ago (Shumate), four players obtained in trades this year (John Gianelli, Gus Gerard, Chuckie Williams, and George Johnson), an ABA draftee under personal contract to co-owner John Y. Brown (Bird Averitt), and three players plucked at various times from basketball’s bargain basement, the free-agent list (Don Adams, Fred Foster, and Claude Terry).
Still others traipsed into Buffalo for brief periods this season, tarried momentarily, then were shuttled off elsewhere. Johnny Neumann, a Brown legacy, played in four games, was released and now labors for the Lakers. Clyde Mayes barely inspected the Aud, met his would-be teammates, and was released.
Zaid Abdul-Aziz played in 22 games after being signed as a free agent and was released. Jim Price came from Milwaukee, for a first-round draft choice in November, saw action as the third backcourtman, then in December was handed a plane ticket for Denver, traded for Gerard and Williams.
Then there was 6-feet-10 Moses Malone. Here today, gone tomorrow. Almost. He joined the Braves after they sent a first-round draft choice to Portland for him, played a total of six minutes in two games, and failed to score before being dispatched to Houston for a first-round choice and a reported $100,000. He will ever remain a footnote in the history of the Braves, however long that may be.
Both Malone’s acquisition and his departure were closely linked to the contractual negotiations between the club and Bob McAdoo. The Braves figured Malone would provide some backup and some leverage in their dealings with McAdoo, which at the time appeared less than promising.
Snyder recalls it this way: “We got McAdoo’s personal agreement around that time that he would sign a contract, and we believed we could sign him to a new contract.” Unfortunately, later events proved that appraisal incorrect; Malone ended up in Houston, and McAdoo is in New York with the Knicks.
An interesting combination of factors contributed to the McAdoo deal. One had been completely overlooked in the daily press reports. It involves McAdoo’s personality and his perception of himself as a superstar, which he most certainly is.
Throughout his years as a pro, McAdoo has been obsessed with the need to be ranked among the very top players in the NBA, if not the single very best. It became a kind of fixation, which has ripened over his career, despite the fact that he was named Rookie of the Year in 1972-73 and won the NBA scoring championship for the next three seasons, only the fourth player ever to do so.
Still, he has always felt he has something to prove to the world of basketball. He wanted more attention from the national media. When, at the end of last season, he wasn’t named to the NBA All-Star team, he wasn’t just upset, he was outraged.
So, he decided he had to play in the Big Apple with the Knicks to demonstrate to all just how good he really is. There, and nowhere else, he felt, could he command the kind of coverage he deserved. Perhaps he reached that conclusion on his own. Perhaps it was his agent, New York lawyer Bill Madden, or Eddie Donovan of the Knicks, who planted the seed.
Snyder says the Knick-McAdoo situation dates back to the fall of 1975, when the Knicks offered—and he rejected—an offer of $3 million, plus other considerations, for McAdoo. “You really can’t sell a player of McAdoo’s caliber, because the fans identify with your star player. And the fan identification is really what makes or breaks a franchise,” explains Snyder.
But he was convinced that the Knicks had tampered with McAdoo, arranging in advance to sign him as a free agent, when his Braves contract expired at the end of the season. He says he complained to NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien and claims it was common knowledge among other owners and executives for months that McAdoo was headed for Madison Square Garden.
Snyder says that his contractual conversations with McAdoo and Madden reached a top offer of $500,000 a year. That is where Snyder stopped. In the NBA, all club owners and all player representatives are privy to the salaries of all other players. Nobody kids anybody. Snyder cites a few other salary figures to substantiate his claim that the Braves made a fair offer. By way of comparison, he says, Julius Erving is paid $450,000, George McGinnis $400,000, and Dave Cowens, $280,000.
Each time an agreement seemed near, Snyder says, either McAdoo or his agent would submit another demand. Meanwhile, trade talks were initiated with other teams but failed because, in Snyder’s words: “We couldn’t trade the player because everybody in the league had become convinced that he had an arrangement with New York.”
The result was that the Braves either had to trade McAdoo to the Knicks this season and get as much as they could in return, or else, allow him to finish the season in Buffalo, at which time he could sign a new contract with the Knicks, or any other team. If that happened, the Braves would have been awarded compensation by O’Brien, and Snyder says he is convinced that it would have been far below McAdoo’s true value.
So the big guy with the impassive expression is gone, and the Garden resounds with the wail of “Dooooo . . . Dooooo . . . Dooooo.” For his former teammates, it has been a difficult adjustment. At times, they seem to move the ball with aplomb, playing better team basketball than before. But you cannot remove a starter who produces 30 or so points and a dozen or so rebounds per game and expect those remaining to take up all the slack.
Contrary to the predictions of many, McAdoo did not bring instant success to the Knicks, who now may be saddled with too many shooters, and no one concentrating on moving the ball. Snyder, who hated to see him go, especially to the Knicks, once reflected on his departed superstar:
“Bob McAdoo may be the greatest individual player in the league. I think he is just a tremendously talented guy. He really isn’t a team-type player. With him, the Braves would have been a winner, but I question whether we would have ever won the championship.”
Meanwhile, calling the roll of ex-Braves, we find that all, but one are gainfully employed in the NBA. Jim McMillian and Tom McMillen, of course, are with McAdoo in New York. Bob Weiss is with Washington, and Jack Marin has returned from surgery to the lineup in Chicago. Ken Charles is with Atlanta. Tom Van Arsdale, who wouldn’t even report to Buffalo after the Hawks traded him to the Braves for Charles and Dick Gibbs, is in Phoenix with Gar Heard and Dale Schlueter. Only Gibbs is out of basketball, reportedly planning to enter business on the West Coast.
Could any of them help the Braves in the current plight? No doubt. But history cannot be rewritten. The emphasis now must be on restoring harmony, on signing Randy and deciding whether Ernie D is an asset or liability. Both Locke and Jack Ramsay apparently decided in the negative, and both ended up getting fired. Now the Braves have hired Joe Mullaney. He’s been closed early since recruiting him for Providence College.
The Braves will have to plan on a growing list of alumni. More players will surely depart. And the fans continue to wait expectantly for Snyder and Brown to spend some of that Knick-gotten cash.
From Way Downtown 