Not a highlight reel but check out the clips from this game against NC and MJ. He's like a Clyde Drexler level of athleticism with a deadly jump shot.
It's one of those moments for sure. And that year had several. Bias, Game 6, Challenger. All moments I can still picture to this day where I was and what I was doing.
Actually, "The Bias Curse" is also a good name for the reason the Sox never won when the name Yawkey was attached to the team in some capacity.
This. I was 15 years old living in Northern Virginia, still floating with happiness on cloud nine over the draft two days prior. At that point in my life I was such a Celtic fanatic that I'd record all of their big games on the family betamax and rewatch them over and over again. So I was in the car with my mom mid-day on a Monday, I think, when all of a sudden out of nowhere on the radio was Red of all people expressing his sadness over the death of Bias. Such a gut-punch. I hade a good friend that lived down the street who was a huge Sixer fan, and I can still remember us sitting there together in stunned sadness and silence later that day. We didn't even know what to say about it. Looking back it was a bit of a coming-of-age moment.
I was 11 years old living in ACC country and can still remember coming out of my seat watching him play. He stood out to me by far in a league full of great players. Helped that he didn’t play for Carolina. And then my Celtics drafted him.
There was a pump-the-brakes analysis (I can't remember where-- maybe that Bias podcast that came out a few years ago) that proposed James Worthy as a likely comp. Which makes a lot of sense. Top 50-ish all time player, but a far cry from Jordan.
I was 13 years old and volunteering for George Bachrach's congressional campaign in Watertown Sq, if that rings a bell with anyone. Someone said, "he's dead" and everyone sat in stunned silence, licking envelopes and so forth.
It’s his mid-range jump shot that made/makes me believe he was can’t miss. Even if his size and athleticism didn’t hold up in the pros, that jumper would have. Apologies for adding to the highlight videos, but this is a good one.
He has a lot of Bernard King also, with the unstoppable baseline turnaround jumper. God damn it...
I’d combine it with Reggie not dying. Add those two back to back in ‘86 and ‘87 would have redrawn the NBA landscape for 12-15 years.
Is this necessarily true? Lots of athletes have competed at championship levels while doing coke.
Wasn’t Bird more or less what we’d consider a functional alcoholic by today’s standards?
Cocaine usage was common across the NBA and the other professional sports leagues in that period. Recall the 1986 Mets and the cocaine dealing scandal that plagued multiple members of the 1985 Pats Super Bowl team.
Daugherty was a pretty good center in an era where that was often the most important position (Moses, Kareem, Sikma, Ewing, and Sampson were all in the top 10 of league salaries).
Brad Daugherty was a very good NBA center whose career was shortened/ended by injuries.
Think of it as the OG version of Oden/Durant. Bowie over Jordan says hi as well. "You can't teach height" was an opinion held in high regard in most, if not all, draft rooms.
Assuming the stuff in Shank's latest book is true, definitely. Dude basically immediately got hammered after every game.
100%. That's been my takeaway for a long time. I think a healthy young superstar in Bias gets them an additional banner or two in the late 80s.
Want a list of great athletes whose careers were ruined by coke? I don't have the psychic energy to do this but I bet you it's a lot longer than the few examples in here.
