HIGHS AND LOWS : NBA Had to Take the Bad With the Good in 1986-87

Michael Jordan. Lewis Lloyd.

Magic Johnson. Chris Washburn.

The Los Angeles Lakers. The Phoenix Suns.

The 1986-87 NBA season was wonderful and frustrating, exhilarating and disappointing--a dichotomy broken down along the lines of the product that the league put on the floor and the battles that were fought off of it.

On one day Jordan, the Chicago Bulls’ incandescent superstar, becomes the second man in league history to score 3,000 points in a season. The next, it is announced that three Suns players have been indicted by a grand jury and charged with cocaine trafficking, and the team’s star guard, Walter Davis, enters a drug rehabilitation clinic for the second time in two seasons.

The three indicted players--center James Edwards and guards Jay Humphries and Grant Gondrezick--submitted to urinalysis which proved to be negative.

Had those results been positive, the trio would have been permanently banned from the league, Commissioner David Stern said. Stern also said the league is beginning an investigation into possible gambling involvement by Phoenix players.

Despite attendance records being set and flashes of brilliance by several players on the court, it has been a guarded season for Stern. Normally quick with a quip, Stern often strained to smile this season, as the good things in the game often served only as a means to temporarily forget the bad.

The first rough spot came two days after the league’s draft last June, when the defending champion Boston Celtics’ top pick and the second overall in the draft, Len Bias of Maryland, died of cocaine intoxication. The problems resumed in earnest in January, when Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins, two members of the Houston Rockets, were expelled from the league after failing drug tests.

A short time later, word came from the West Coast that Washburn, the No. 3 pick in last June’s draft but a washout on the floor for the Golden State Warriors, was headed for Van Nuys, Calif., for treatment for drug dependency.

Paradoxically, this happened as the NBA was in the midst of one of its best seasons ever on the court. The off-season, during which 45 players changed teams, generated excitement, with no one being quite sure which teams would do what this year.

The uncertainty ran from the bottom of the league standings, where Cleveland fortified itself with three exciting rookies, to the top, where the Lakers were struggling to regroup after having their budding dynasty soundly crushed by the Rockets in last season’s Western Conference finals.

Houston beat the Lakers in their opening meeting of the season but that seemed to be the only contest that Los Angeles would lose for a while. With Johnson in a new role--scorer--Coach Pat Riley’s team went about compiling the best record in the league.

Their main competitor for the Western Conference crown seemed to be the Dallas Mavericks, who in less than seven years had become one of the league’s best-run franchises and set a team record for victories.

At the same time, the Celtics were hurting. Bias would have provided Boston with quality depth, a commodity that the team lacked throughout the season. Hurt by injury and forced to play their starters for an inordinate amount of minutes, the Celtics were merely human, particularly on the road, where they stumbled to a 20-21 record.

Boston’s problems drew little attention around the league. Besides being the defending champions, they were old school NBA at a time when youth was begging to be served. Making the biggest noise was the Atlanta Hawks, a youthful group that at times seemed more a fraternity than a basketball team.

With supurb athletic ability, the Hawks slashed their way to the top of the Central Division, ending the Milwaukee Bucks’ string of six straight titles.

As Philadelphia’s Julius Erving prepared to retire, it seemed fitting, given the number of young players such as Kevin Willis and Charles Barkley who began to make names for themselves at the expense of older, more established players. High fliers like Jordan, Dominique Wilkins of Atlanta and Ron Harper of Cleveland all could trace their lineage back to Erving.

When Erving made his last appearance in Pontiac, Mich., in February, 52,745 fans turned out to say thanks for the memories. It was an all-time record crowd for an NBA game. The Pistons would go on to set a record for attendance in a season, as did the NBA as a whole.

There were 34,275 in attendance at the Kingdome in Seattle on Feb. 8 for the league’s all-star game, which featured a storybook finish. Tom Chambers of the SuperSonics, added to the team only after Houston’s Ralph Sampson was forced to withdraw because of a knee injury, not only started for the Western Conference but also scored 34 points and won the most valuable player award.

But with the midseason game came meetings by the player representatives from the 23 NBA teams. The topic: A collective bargaining agreement to replace the pact that expires at the conclusion of this season.

When the league announced that the collegiate draft would be held on June 23, the NBA Players Assn. questioned the legality of holding a draft, when potentially there would be no binding contract between labor and management.

In the middle of it all, the NBA turned its attention to expansion. Seven cities spent $100,000 to try to earn entrance to the league, where they would have to ante up another $32 million for a franchise. The big winner was Charlotte, N.C., which will be granted an expansion franchise in 1988-89. Soon to follow will be Minneapolis, Miami and Orlando, Fla.

But even the good news about expansion, often the harbinger of prosperity, didn’t last long. On the heels of that announcement came another: Dallas Coach Dick Motta accused the Rockets of tanking games for the purpose of attempting to manipulate their playoff position.

For his troubles, Motta was fined $5,000 and suspended for a game by Stern. But the NBA’s problems were not as easily dispensed with, as problems in Phoenix revealed.