The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [27]
Oh, but there would. All Van Gundy would have to do is set the “Way-Back” machine to May of 1985, when seven teams entered the first draft lottery and all had equal shots at a coveted first prize, to see why.
The seven teams in the 1985 lottery were the Sacramento Kings, the Atlanta Hawks, the Seattle Sonics, the Indiana Pacers, the Golden State Warriors, the Los Angeles Clippers, and the New York Knicks. From the NBA′s perspective, there was a lot less money to be made all around if Ewing was delivered to any city other than New York, but it would be especially bad for the League if he went to one of the four west coast teams (the Clippers, the Sonics, the Kings, or the Warriors) in the running.
The lottery was held on Mother’s Day, 1985, with the general managers from each of the seven teams gathered like contestants on a game show. Commissioner David Stern drew envelopes for the drafting order, starting with the seventh pick. The late Dave DeBusschere, then the General Manager of the Knicks, made like a winning game show contestant when it became apparent that New York had won the first pick. Rumors immediately began to fly that the proceedings were “fixed.” One theory was that there was dry ice in the Knicks’ envelope, so the commissioner would know which one to pick. Another theory claimed that it held rocks. Still others talked about a crease in the Knicks envelope which marked it for the commissioner.
The day after the lottery, Sportswriter Randy Galloway offered the following opinion in the Dallas Morning News:
The NBA lottery delivers Patrick Ewing to New York and your nose immediately detects a smell of a rat. . . . The whispers said the right strings would be pulled by league fathers to ensure the right envelope ended up under No. 1 on the lottery board. Why? Got to have a big winner in the Big Apple—it’s for the good of the league, don’t you know? Hopefully, this is all a coincidence, surely that is the case. But the NBA has put itself in a position where suspicion clouds the lottery situation. Ewing to the Knicks—there’s just something too convenient about that arrangement, and there were also too many people inside the NBA privately predicting it was going to happen.
On March 5, 2007, the entire 1985 NBA Draft Lottery—originally broadcast by CBS Sports and hosted by Pat O′Brien—wound up on the website youtube.com. Count me among millions who had not seen the tape of Stern pulling out those envelopes in more than twenty years. On April 19 of that year, popular sports columnist Bill Simmons wrote about the conspiracy in his column for espn.com. He said, “After twenty-two years, we now have indisputable video evidence that something fishy happened.” That spurred hundreds of thousands to look for themselves. Within weeks, there were nearly a quarter-million views of the nine-minute, fifty-eight-second video. The clip also generated a ton of comments, some claiming that Simmons was reaching for something, others claiming proof positive of what had been whispered for years. “At 5:28 you can see an upturned corner while they are laying at rest in the globe and at 5:31 you can see that same bent corner for a split second while in David Stern’s hand, but that bend could have happened while rotating the globe six turns,” wrote one viewer of the youtube clip.
After viewing the video many times, a friend of mine who is an avid conspiracy theorist wrote this:
Watching that video pretty much cements the theory that the lottery was rigged. Watch how the “impartial” accountant tosses in that fourth envelope—slamming it against the side of the drum. That fourth envelope gets dog-eared with that toss against the drum wall, making it all the easier for Stern to find it. It begs the question, if the envelopes are going to get spun in the drum, why put it ’em in one at a time? To count and make sure all seven are there? Plus, watch Stern. He takes his time with the “lock,” then takes that