What If Wednesday: The Kareem Coin Flip

The tantalizingly close reality of an NBA Finals pitting the Milwaukee Bucks against the Phoenix Suns continues a cosmic marriage lasting more than a half-century.

Expansion in the latter-half of the 1960s pulled the NBA conclusively away from its barnstorming roots of the old BAA and the absorbed NBL. The league added eight teams in eight cities from 1966 through 1970.

Not every expansion franchise flourished — three of the eight moved cities, two of which in less than a decade — but all eight remain part of the league today at the height of its influence.

Phoenix and Milwaukee joined amid this rapid expansion at the same time, 1968. The two cities could not have been much more different. The cold-weather city of Milwaukee dated back to pre-Civil War times, began to boom during the Gilded Age, and was a stronghold for socialist politics amid nationwide Red Panics after both World War I and World War II.

The desert outpost Phoenix only had the seeds of a metropolis planted following World War II, but sprouted quickly. Mafiosos exerted heavy influence on the local political machine, giving the city a fascinating recent history buried beneath decades of urbanization.

Milwaukee joined the NBA having previously been home to Major League Baseball’s Braves, and in 1969, welcoming the Brewers. The city is less than a hour’s drive from Sheboygan, which hosted an NBL championship-winning franchise in the 1943 Sheboygan Red Skins.

The Suns were Phoenix’s first, and until the perennially losing Cardinals moved from St. Louis two decades later, only foray into pro sports.

But with around three-quarters of million residents in each, and their locations on opposite sides of the Mississippi to give the Eastern and Western Conferences new members, Milwaukee and Phoenix made sense for expansion at the same time.

Thus began the connection of two wholly dissimilar cities, with a bond that became unbreakable in the Basketball Universe a year later.

After struggling mightily in their first season, as expansion franchises are wont to do — the Bucks finished last in the East at 27-55, the Suns were last in the West at 16-66 — the two were in up for the first pick in the 1969 NBA draft.

Though his name doesn’t come up in the conversation of greatest NBA player ever as often as it perhaps should, it can be argued Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) was the most consequential No. 1 draft pick of all-time. Tim Duncan in 1997 may be the only player with a claim approaching that of Kareem’s.

The 1969 draft predated the Lottery, and was almost two decades earlier than the New York Knicks/Patrick Ewing “Frozen Envelope” conspiracy came to life. In ‘69, the most consequential draft pick ever came down to a simple coin flip.

For the uninitiated, check out The Press Break on Patreon where you’ll find a series of newspaper clippings on how the flip played out and the immediate fallout. One of the most illuminating his how important calling tails proved to the history of the NBA.

A personal aside: I grew up in Arizona, where my dad was a successful high-school basketball coach from the late ‘70s into the early ‘00s. He won a state championship one year with a team that had just six lettermen. He credits the Mayer Wildcats’ improbable run to gutty and unselfish players, and the mantra “Tails Never Fails.”

At that time, home games in the State Tournament were played up until the championship at Arizona State University’s home arena. Hosts were determined through a coin flip akin to the 1969 NBA draft No. 1 pick. My dad was Tails for every coin toss that tournament, and his team drew each game up to the championship at home, sparing his undermanned roster long bus rides on top of playing full, 32-minute rotations.

He credits his strategy to the Bucks-Suns coin toss.

Of course, the 1969 coin toss had impacts on basketball of far greater significance than an Arizona Class-A tournament. The difference in heads and tails was the difference in adding Kareem, then Lew Alcindor, the greatest college basketball player of all-time, and Neal Walk.

Walk, a standout at Florida, had a great 1972-73 with the Suns: 20.2 points, 12.4 rebounds while playing in 81-of-82 games. But it was the peak of an eight-season career that fizzled two years later after a trade to the New Orleans Jazz.

The Bucks, meanwhile, ascended from the second-worst record in the NBA in their inaugural season, to the second-best record in their first year with Kareem. He strolled to Rookie of the Year with averages of 28.4 points, 14.5 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game, earning the first of 15 All-NBA selections.

In Year 2, Kareem led Milwaukee to its first NBA championship in a sweep of the Baltimore Bullets. Kareem asserted himself as the league’s best center with an outstanding performance against Hall of Famer Wes Unseld en route to claiming Finals MVP.

Milwaukee’s championship also capped the first of Kareem’s six Most Valuable Player awards. Half were won during his time with the Bucks.

The other half of Abdul-Jabbar’s MVPs, and five of his Larry O’Brien Trophies, came as a member of the Lakers. He’s best remembered as a Laker, with his likeness immortalized in a statue outside of Staples Center.

Oh — and he both fought Bruce Lee and captained an airplane as a member of the Lakers.

Had Phoenix called heads instead of tails in 1969, Kareem’s move to Los Angeles would not have stopped. This isn’t a butterfly-effect What If so profound as to completely alter the complexion of the NBA for generations.

A product of New York and a star in Los Angeles at UCLA, Abdul-Jabbar had big-city personality and roots. His destiny was with the Lakers, not as a proto-Tim Duncan around which a small-market franchise would build for decades.

But with the Bucks winning the 1971 championship, it’s fascinating to ponder how the early years for the Suns might have unfolded with Kareem in the middle.

Phoenix reached the first of just two Finals in club history in 1976 — coincidentally, Kareem’s first year as a Laker. Abdul-Jabbar played alongside two of the greatest college players ever on that Los Angeles team, fellow UCLA Bruin Gail Goodrich and Michigan legend Cazzie Russell.

Both were also on the downslide of their careers, and the Lakers lacked young stars who were later the pillars of the Showtime dynasty’s early phase: Jamaal Wilkes, Norm Nixon, and a point guard from Michigan State called Magic.

The Lakers finished below .500, while an overachieving Suns team, steadily built from that brutal first season, grinded its way into a six-game series with the Celtics, notable for one of the greatest games in Finals history.

As what would have been the case had Phoenix drafted No. 1, its 1969 draftee was gone for this Finals run. None of the acquisitions from the Walk trade to New Orleans were too consequential to making the ‘76 Finals, though Curtis Perry was a solid rotational player on that scrappy, superstar-less team.

Brian Winters, who Milwaukee acquired in the Kareem trade, spent a good half-decade stretch as the Bucks’ top complementary piece to another former UCLA legend, Marques Johnson.

Perhaps he would have been similarly useful to the Suns, but Phoenix was a well-run organization from its inception until Robert Sarver took over in the latter-half of the 2000s. The franchise wouldn’t necessarily have come out better from having Kareem in a trade than how reality played out.

The bigger question mark is if Phoenix could have claimed that elusive NBA championship. My opinion is an undeniable, emphatic YES.

In ‘71, when he teamed with Oscar Robertson to win it all in Milwaukee, Kareem would have been on a Suns roster alongside Connie Hawkins in our alternate universe.

While not the same level of impact player as Big O, who ranks among the 10 best NBA performers ever, Hawkins was a transformative forward ahead of his time. His versatility and length would fit in well with today’s game, and in 1971, it translated to 21 points and nine boards game.

The Hawk played a game comparable to Bob McAdoo, a key contributor on the first of the Showtime Laker title teams. Also in that Phoenix frontcourt was Paul Silas, an aggressive enforcer whose physicality and board work would have complemented Kareem nicely.

A legend in Phoenix but criminally under-appreciated in the general NBA punditry, Dick Van Arsdale was a prolific scoring in the backcourt alongside capable combo guard Clem Haskins.

Walk was solid as the center for that team, but in no way measurable against Kareem. Not only would the 1971 Suns have won a championship, but they would have dominated.

What’s more, while the ‘71 Bucks were built on the tandem of a young Kareem and Oscar Robertson in the twilight of his career, the ‘71 Suns core was made of players in their 20s. Phoenix would have contended for championships every season Abdul-Jabbar spent in the Valley of the Sun before leaving for the Lakers.

Would that have been an aberration, a footnote in an era of the NBA that’s unfairly maligned (thanks, Bill Simmons)? Or might have the fledgling Phoenix franchise parlayed championships in its infancy into a dynasty commensurate with the city’s population boom of the 1980s?