Every week, John Salley, onetime Bad Boy and currently the arachnoid half of the Spider and the Henchman podcast, will regale us with an amusing and occasionally salacious story from his playing days. Today: Rick Mahorn got expansion-drafted by the Timberwolves.
So I win a championship in 1989 and we're The Bad Boys. And it's the shit. We fly back into town, the next week is the parade. But it's also the day of the first expansion draft when the NBA gave Minnesota and Charlotte their own franchises.
So we're on the parade route and we stop. And former Pistons' general manager Jack McCloskey's on the phone. And we're all, like, "Yeah, yay, yeah!"
He puts phone away and Jack's acting normally. We're on a bus; we did the parade all the way downtown and we're headed back to the Palace so all the rich folks can now see us and not wait outside. After we did the inner-city, we went to the outer-city. Went to the suburbs. And we had this stage.
So Rick Mahorn's out there and he's like, "I just want to say to the Baddest of all The Bad Boys: Gimme some eyeball."
He went around, looking all mean and whatever.
We go in the locker room and they hold everybody out, they go, "Everybody, everybody in the locker room, you have to sign these balls."
And Bill Laimbeer is like, "I'm not signing." And they're like, "No, you have to sign them now."
They hold us in the locker room and we're going around and signing all these balls and I'm thinking "What's so important about having all these balls signed?"
We sign all the balls, all the posters, everything that was hanging around. Just then they call Rick Mahorn into the locker room office to let him know he is now a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
That's when he found out, but Jack had found out on the bus. Remember, the Lakers put up Kareem for the draft. Kareem said to both Charlotte and Minnesota, "If you pick me, I'm going to retire." So no one picked him. We could've protected Rick had we known about it earlier.
But Mahorn was like playing it off, like it was just another day. In February, I'm crying because AD [Adrian Dantley] gets traded, and now Rick is gone.
Think about it: Rick being loyal. He's all about this loyalty thing. Two weeks ago he filed bankruptcy while he' still working for the Pistons and not one of the Pistons organization has helped him even get an extra amount of money.
The above is adapted from the "Spider Stories" segment on the Spider and the Henchman podcast. Follow John and his podcast on Twitter - @thejohnsalley and @spiderandhench. Subscribe on iTunes.