Tomjanovich, Rudy

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    He Thought He Made N.B.A. History. All He Got Was 3 Points.

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    The N.B.A. introduced the 3-point shot in the 1979-80 season. Six players made 3s opening night, and for a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he’d made the first.For more than a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he was the first player in N.B.A. history to make a 3-pointer.“It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t make the first one,” Grevey, 68, said recently. “Because I think the first time I touched the ball I caught it in the corner and toed behind the line, shot it and made it.”It was Oct. 12, 1979, and Grevey’s Washington Bullets were opening their season against the Philadelphia 76ers. After the game, a reporter told him he’d “just set a record that would never be broken.”All these years later he still isn’t totally sure he didn’t.The league produced a news release, but only three days later to recap the first weekend of N.B.A. 3-pointers. It said Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics made the first 3-pointer in league history, by virtue of playing against the Houston Rockets in “the first games according to start time” that season. While it’s unclear exactly at what time each 3-pointer occurred, Ford’s game started 35 minutes before Grevey’s.It would be a while before the news reached Grevey.The 3-pointer was a novelty at the time. No one knew it would someday change the game. Decades later, Golden State guard Stephen Curry turned it into magic. This week he became the N.B.A.’s career leader in 3-pointers made, eclipsing Ray Allen, who had been the record-holder since 2011.“It’s an event, just watching him,” said Mike Dunleavy Sr., who took his grandchildren to watch Curry shoot 3s before a game this fall.The shot’s history in the N.B.A., though, began unceremoniously.“At one point I was on the rules and competition committee and everybody had different thoughts about it,” Dunleavy said. “But the very beginning, I think people were leery of it.”The 1979-80 season was intended to be a one-year trial for the 3-pointer in the N.B.A. The American Basketball Association had used it from its inception in 1967 until its merger with the N.B.A. in 1976.In the book “Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association” by Terry Pluto, Pat Boone, a part owner of the Oakland Oaks, recalled the team’s introductory news conference.“We had a demonstration of the 3-point shot and introduced a couple of the players we had signed, although I can’t recall who,” Boone said. “We then had a shooting contest and I won, which I guess should have told me we were in real trouble. Actually, the players weren’t used to shooting from 25 feet.”Boone liked 3s, he said, because he was too short to go inside. Curry recently told USA Today that he, too, initially began working on 3s because of his smaller stature.The A.B.A.’s adoption of the shot, though, wasn’t motivating for the N.B.A. The A.B.A. had all sorts of trappings then considered too absurd for the N.B.A. In addition to the 3-point shot, the A.B.A. had musical effects, a red, white and blue basketball, and cheerleaders.“The N.B.A. for years frowned on the 3-point shot because it was going to tell guys to go outside as opposed to historically it was, ‘Get as close to the basket as fast as you can for the easy shot,’ ” said M.L. Carr, a former Celtics forward. “That was what they did in that funny league called the A.B.A.”An article in The New York Times from June 21, 1979, about the N.B.A. instituting the 3-point shot.The New York TimesCarr started his career in the A.B.A., and felt proud when the N.B.A. finally accepted the 3-pointer. He played for the Celtics from 1979 to 1985 and remembered resistance, including from Red Auerbach, then a Celtics executive.Grevey said he remembered that some coaches were “appalled about it.”“They were like, ‘Well, the next thing they’re going to do is we’re going to be playing with that red, white and blue basketball,” he said.In some arenas, Grevey said, the 3-point line was taped onto the court, making it temporary. Sometimes, that tape was in the wrong place.“Somebody would say that looks farther,” said Rudy Tomjanovich, who played for the Houston Rockets throughout the 1970s and is now in the Hall of Fame. “They’d tell the coach or somebody. They’d look into it, have a measure and say, ‘Sure enough, it’s a foot longer than it used to be.’”It took a while before players became proficient at the shot; it took eight years before the league average improved to 30 percent. By contrast, today’s players make about a third of their 3s, with the best shooters converting better than 40 percent of their attempts.That meant rarely did teams run plays designed to end with a 3. Only in cases of double-digit deficits — desperate times — were 3-pointers acceptable to some coaches.“If you had taken it under normal circumstances, most coaches would put you on the bench,” said Rick Barry, who spent four seasons in the A.B.A. and attempted 237 3-pointers in 1971-72, his final year in that league.Barry, a Hall of Famer who was playing for the Rockets in 1979-80, said he remembered “nothing” about the first official 3-pointer, even though he played in that game against Ford’s Celtics. He hardly remembered his own 3-pointer that day. He was one of six players to make one on Oct. 12, 1979.Tomjanovich, when told recently that he was on the court for the first-ever N.B.A. 3-pointer, was delighted to learn that bit of trivia.Dunleavy knew.“For the guys that could shoot, it was kind of cool,” said Dunleavy, who led the league in 3-point percentage in the 1982-83 season, at 34.5 percent. “Like, OK, you’re going to come into the game and be the first guy to make the shot.”When Tomjanovich was told recently about Dunleavy’s plans, he quipped: “That ambitious son of a gun.”Dunleavy was guarding Boston’s Tiny Archibald, who passed the ball to Ford behind the arc. Ford elevated above the outstretched hand of Robert Reid and sank a 3-pointer with 3 minutes 48 seconds left in the first quarter.Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics shooting from the 3-point line in its first season in the N.B.A.Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images“The team was pretty excited that Chris opened a new era,” Carr said. “I guarantee if you interviewed Chris now he would say, ‘I didn’t realize what I was starting.’”The game, better known for Larry Bird’s N.B.A. debut, didn’t stop. Newspaper accounts barely mentioned the first 3. There weren’t daily N.B.A. shows or podcasts to debate the rule change.The Boston Globe noted the shot in a parenthetical, saying that “the Celtics led from 19-17 until the final buzzer (the lead coming on Ford’s history-making three-point bomb, the first ever for the Celtics).”Willie Smith also made one for the Cleveland Cavaliers against the New Jersey Nets, and Paul Westphal and Don Buse made two each for the Phoenix Suns against Golden State. The reports of their feats by The Associated Press and The Daily News made no mention of their historic nature.Grevey’s 3-pointer was described as “the first three-point play” by The Evening Sun, a Baltimore paper.Grevey said he didn’t think about his first N.B.A. 3-pointer again until more than a decade later when he ran into the reporter who had told him he’d made history in 1979. The reporter shared that Ford was being credited with the first N.B.A. 3-pointer and that he planned to investigate.Grevey shrugged.“I swear I don’t care,” Grevey said in a recent phone interview.He laughed, and then he marveled at how, at the time, few others cared much either. More

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      What Rudy Tomjanovich Learned by Coaching the Greats

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      Tomjanovich led the Houston Rockets to two championships (Hakeem Olajuwon), briefly coached the Lakers (Kobe Bryant) and oversaw an Olympic team (Kevin Garnett).Even as a noted players’ coach, Rudy Tomjanovich had a hunch Kobe Bryant would need some time to embrace their new partnership.After five years and three N.B.A. championships under Phil Jackson, and having thrived in the read-and-react triangle offense Jackson championed, Bryant was suddenly playing for a lifelong Houston Rocket with different sideline sensibilities.“It was an adjustment for him because I was a play caller,” Tomjanovich said.What Tomjanovich shared with Jackson, if not an offensive philosophy, was a gift for reading superstars and ultimately connecting with them. His time with Bryant was short during the 2004-5 season, when Tomjanovich quickly deduced that the stress of coaching had become damaging to his health, but at least one Laker urged him not to walk away.“Kobe tried to talk me out of it,” Tomjanovich said in a telephone interview, reflecting on his resignation, as well as how he meshed with Bryant, after just 43 games.In the buildup to this weekend’s pandemic-delayed inductions for the Basketball Hall of Fame’s class of 2020, Tomjanovich, 72, has been telling old stories often — most of them, naturally, from his 32-year run as a player, scout and coach in Houston. The class is headlined by Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Bryant, who will be presented by Michael Jordan and inducted posthumously. Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, 2020, that grief-stricken fans and peers, all of the honorees included, are still struggling to process.Tomjanovich coached Bryant and the Lakers for 43 games before stepping down for health reasons.Brian Bahr/Getty ImagesTomjanovich, after twice being named a finalist but not in 2019, earned his place among the 2020 inductees for his coaching achievements in Houston — particularly his championship partnership with Hakeem Olajuwon. The Rockets won back-to-back titles in 1993-94 and 1994-95, first with Olajuwon as the lone All-Star, then as a lowly No. 6 seed after a midseason trade reunited Olajuwon with Clyde Drexler, his college teammate from the University of Houston’s men’s basketball teams known as Phi Slama Jama.Those Rockets teams were routinely dismissed as champions of circumstance, branded as beneficiaries of Jordan’s 18-month hiatus from the N.B.A. to try to transform himself into a Chicago White Sox outfielder. We’ve since learned, through “The Last Dance” documentary series, that Jordan’s iconic Chicago Bulls were not a lock to handle Houston without a big man anywhere near Olajuwon’s level.“I heard it from the horse’s mouth — and that’s Michael,” Tomjanovich said.He said that Charles Barkley, in his first season as a Rocket in 1996-97, arranged a dinner at his home in Phoenix for the Rockets’ coaching staff. There were two very special invited guests: Tiger Woods and Jordan.“It was the first time I really got a chance to talk to Michael,” Tomjanovich said. “Nobody can ever know who would have won, but he said they were concerned that they couldn’t stop Hakeem. It was great to hear it from him.”Bladder cancer brought a cruel halt to Tomjanovich’s three decades in Houston after the 2002-3 season. Yet the way he managed an array of big personalities across 12 seasons as the Rockets’ coach helped Tomjanovich emerge as the Lakers’ choice to replace Jackson — after some flirtations with Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and an attempt to lure Miami’s Pat Riley back to Hollywood. Tomjanovich, then 56, signed a five-year, $30 million contract to coach the Lakers, who traded Shaquille O’Neal to Riley’s Heat four days later.Hakeem Olajuwon was the cornerstone of Houston’s back-to-back title teams in the 1990s under Tomjanovich.Noren Trotman/NBAE via Getty Images“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” Tomjanovich said. “First of all, I was excited that the cancer was gone. I thought, ‘I can’t pass this thing up,’ but then I just felt like I was hurting myself and I had to let it go. I love to coach good players, and Kobe was great. I thought I could do it, health-wise and body-wise, but I couldn’t. People said it was a lot of money to give up, but what good is money if you’re going to make yourself sick?”It was the rare Tomjanovich comeback story without a happy ending. As a player, he survived a vicious on-court punch from Kermit Washington in December 1977 and recovered to reach his fifth All-Star Game in 1978-79. As a coach, Tomjanovich steered the Rockets to playoff upsets of the teams with the league’s top four records (Utah, Phoenix, San Antonio and Orlando) in the 1995 playoffs to win title No. 2, including a second-round rally against the Suns after Houston fell into a 3-1 series deficit.“That’s how we got one of the greatest quotes ever in basketball,” Robert Horry, one of Tomjanovich’s Houston stalwarts, said on Monday. “Don’t ever underestimate the heart of a champion.”That defiant rebuttal to Rockets skeptics, from a beaming Tomjanovich after Houston completed a 4-0 N.B.A. finals sweep of O’Neal’s Orlando Magic, became his signature line.He is still working in the league, hired in December by the Minnesota Timberwolves as a front-office consultant. He referred to his induction as “the cherry on top of it all” and said that coaching gave him what he craved most other than championships in his final years as a player.A new identity.“I heard that for a while and it was getting old — ‘Oh, you’re the guy who got punched,’” Tomjanovich said. “It was really good to push that in the background.”Tomjanovich didn’t coach Duncan, but said he would never forget the dread he felt upon seeing him as a rookie in San Antonio, teaming with David Robinson. “The first time they threw him the ball, I watched how he caught it and where he positioned it under his chin and how he looked to the middle,” Tomjanovich said. “I got sick to my stomach.”He did briefly coach Garnett and, not surprisingly, clicked with another star. Tomjanovich coached the United States at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Garnett was one of his loudest leaders. Two scares against Lithuania, including a semifinal that the Americans easily could have lost, will surely stay with members of that team, since U.S.A. Basketball, to that point, had not lost with N.B.A. players.“I’m telling you, that was a big, big boulder that you’re carrying around,” Tomjanovich said. “You don’t want to be the first.”Perhaps he and Garnett will have a chance to share a relieved laugh about it at some point during Saturday’s festivities. Every moment of levity is bound to be relished on what figures to be, at various points, an unavoidably somber evening.From left, Robert Horry, Clyde Drexler and Tomjanovich won a championship with the Houston Rockets in the 1994-95 season as the No. 6 seed.Scott Halleran/Getty ImagesHorry, the role player supreme, has as much reason to watch as anyone. He won two of his seven championships alongside Duncan in San Antonio and regards Tomjanovich as “the best coach to play for.” He also played for Jackson and Gregg Popovich, but rates Tomjanovich at the top “because he had a feel for the players and a feel for the game.”“I only still talk to one of them,” Horry said, referring to Tomjanovich.Yet Horry added that he was unlikely to tune in, as much as he wanted to celebrate Rudy T’s big moment, and it was clear why. For all we anticipate with this starry class — what sort of speech we get from the spotlight-shy Duncan is one prime example — it’s still so hard to get past the unjust and unfillable hole in the whole occasion without Bryant able to take his rightful turn on the podium.Bryant joined the Lakers at 17, grew up over the course of 20 seasons in Los Angeles on the biggest of N.B.A. stages and, after such a long and prosperous career, had his life cut tragically short. As a regular analyst on Lakers broadcasts, Horry said he feels that sting every time the team’s network runs what it calls “Mamba Moment” highlight tributes to Bryant, his teammate on the Lakers’ three-peat championship teams from 1999-2000 to 2001-2.Horry’s daughter, Ashlyn, had a rare genetic condition and died at 17 in 2011. He said he thinks often about Vanessa Bryant, Kobe’s wife, and “having to talk about not just losing a daughter but a husband, too.”“It’s too sad,” Horry said.The plan here is to revel as much as possible in Saturday’s joys, like the overdue recognition for a decorated coach like Tomjanovich, while bracing for the sadness we will all understand.The Scoop @TheSteinLineCorner ThreeThe Miami Heat had a shorter off-season than any other Eastern Conference team after their run to the 2020 finals stretched into October.Steven Senne/Associated PressYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be condensed or lightly edited for clarity.)Q: In last week’s newsletter, you wrote that no one foresaw that three of last season’s final four teams would be in danger of landing in the playoff play-in tournament. That is demonstrably untrue. I am no N.B.A. prophet, but I was published in your newsletter before the season started saying that it was tremendously unfair to ask the four best teams from the season before to return to play after as little as 71 days off. I can only assume that many other voices expressed similar concerns. — Avary Mitchell (McKinney, Texas)Stein: I have never disagreed for one second with what you wrote in December. The truncated turnaround from last season to this season was always going to be roughest on the Lakers, Heat, Celtics and Nuggets — and, yes, unfair in a lot of ways.But I don’t remember anyone saying that they expected any of those teams to slip all the way to No. 7 in its conference.I reread your letter, and the same holds for you. There’s a difference between denouncing the disparity in teams’ off-seasons and predicting that the defending champion Lakers would finish seventh in the West.Injuries and Covid-19 disruptions have been a major factor for the Lakers, Heat and Celtics, on top of the unfairness, but all have still managed to slip further in the standings than any of the worst-case-scenario pundits were projecting when the season began.Q: You have been writing a lot about the Nets’ recent signing of the former CSKA Moscow guard Mike James. I want to ask you about the guard from my country who recently joined CSKA: Gabriel Lundberg. He does not have a Luka Doncic pedigree, but he was the driving force behind Denmark’s upset of Lithuania in November. Does he have an N.B.A. future? — Martin Ronnow Lund (Denmark)Stein: Thank you, Martin, for what (I think) will be recorded as our first question from Denmark.I’ve done some checking on Lundberg, since I admittedly don’t have much of a file on him, and it’s fair to say that N.B.A. teams are well aware of him now. At 26, he has made a storybook progression from playing in the Spanish second division as recently as the 2017-18 season to emerging as a force with a European powerhouse like CSKA. The performance (28 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists) you referred to against Lithuania certainly registered in front offices here, even though Lithuania didn’t have access to its N.B.A. players.There will be questions about his size (6-foot-4) as a shooting guard and his one-on-one skills, but I am told he plays with great confidence — to go with his great back story. Perhaps he can be the first Dane to really break through in the N.B.A.; helping a James-less CSKA reach the EuroLeague final four ensures he will be well scouted.Lars Hansen was the first Danish-born player to be drafted and had a brief stint with Seattle in the late 1970s, but he moved to Canada at a young age and represented Canada in the 1976 Olympics. David Andersen, who had a Danish father, had stints with Houston, Toronto and New Orleans in the N.B.A., but he was born in Australia and played internationally as an Australian. The Nets drafted the Copenhagen-born Christian Drejer with the 51st overall pick in 2004, but Drejer never played in the N.B.A.Q: I read your recent newsletter on the play-in games format and, as a fan, I love it. I also love the Knicks. The last several years have been rough, but I want to know: Is Tom Thibodeau going to win the Coach of the Year Award? — (Peter Thurlow, Ridgewood, N.J.)Stein: My official unofficial ballot, which I publish every season just for posterity, will headline next Tuesday’s newsletter. As a reminder: The New York Times does not participate in league award voting in any sport, but I still like going through the exercise of breaking down each race just for discussion purposes.While saving my extended commentary on coach of the year and the other categories until then, I can share that I was indeed leaning toward Thibodeau entering the final week of the regular season because of his unquestioned influence in establishing the Knicks as this season’s foremost overachieving team. To actually win it, though, he’ll have to beat out the league’s only two coaches (Utah’s Quin Snyder and Phoenix’s Monty Williams) likely to wind up in the 50-win club in this 72-game season.Numbers GameCarmelo Anthony keeps climbing the career scoring leaderboard, at a time when many thought he would be out of the league.Steph Chambers/Getty Images5Since Portland’s Carmelo Anthony made his debut in the N.B.A. in 2003-4, five players have moved into the N.B.A.’s top 10 in career scoring: No. 3 LeBron James (35,318), No. 4 Kobe Bryant (33,643), No. 6 Dirk Nowitzki (31,560), No. 8 Shaquille O’Neal (28,596) and No. 10 Anthony (27,337). The five players displaced from the top 10 in that span, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, were John Havlicek, Dominique Wilkins, Oscar Robertson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Elvin Hayes.30Russell Westbrook is the N.B.A.’s new career leader in triple-doubles in the regular season, after surpassing Oscar Robertson’s record 181 on Monday in Atlanta, but he still has some ground to make up to match Magic Johnson’s record of 30 postseason triple-doubles. Westbrook has 10 playoff triple-doubles — two more than Robertson’s eight. LeBron James, with 28, is Johnson’s closest pursuer on the postseason list.2In April 1970, after successfully blocking a trade to Baltimore, Oscar Robertson was dealt to the Milwaukee Bucks from the Cincinnati Royals for the modest return of Flynn Robinson and Charlie Paulk. Robinson and Paulk spent only one season each in Cincinnati, and the Royals, just two seasons after the trade, moved out of Ohio to become the Kings and a team with two home cities: Kansas City, Mo., and Omaha.15Dallas’s Luka Doncic and Philadelphia’s Dwight Howard lead the league with 15 technical fouls each, followed by Russell Westbrook (14). Doncic and Howard each remain one technical away from a one-game suspension, but there would be no carry-over if a 16th tech was accrued in the final game of the regular season. Slates are wiped clean for the playoffs, with seven technicals in the postseason resulting in a one-game suspension.22-9Since Damian Lillard’s debut season in 2012-13, Portland has won 22 of its 31 games against the Los Angeles Lakers, according to Elias. It’s the Lakers’ second-worst record against an opponent in that span, better only than a 7-28 mark against the Los Angeles Clippers. The Trail Blazers’ home win Friday over the Lakers gave them a huge edge in the race to secure the sixth seed in the Western Conference and to avoid the playoff play-in round next week.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. More