Titleless in Seattle
Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week your hosts grant super-producer Brandon’s request for the weekend off following his FUCKING COLLEGE GRADUATION(!!!) with another pre-recorded Dollop-inspired bonus presentation. That’s right, tune in as Andrew tells the story of the 1994 NBA Western Conference first-round playoff tilt between the Seattle SuperSonics (Brandon’s childhood NBA team of choice and who can blame him) and Denver Nuggets. One of the great upsets in modern sports history, the 8th seeded Nuggets took the last 3 in a best-of-5 series where the heavily favored Sonics squandered perhaps their clearest window to an NBA championship in a full season where the league was devoid of Michael Jordan. The personas of the primary on-court figures and contexts of both franchises within the window of the spring of 1994 set the table for a conversation about a week in time where a dynamic Seattle trio failed to reach their apex collective outcome, an out-sized star made it mainstream and parlayed what began in this series into a HOF career as player and insurance pitchman, and a coach “successful” in many locales; fired in all the same locales; with enough self-believe to think none of these terminations are any fault of his own achieved his grandest failing. The discussion shifts to the political end for the homestretch, as the collegiate and social legacy of one of the Nuggets’ stars of 1994 are dissected. His sublime collegian scoring record on an LSU team that never was, a conversion to the Nation of Islam, and an ill-received national anthem boycott made Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf a sports cautionary tale in his time but perhaps served as a table-setter for Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid and countless others in their similar protests in the interest of social awareness to racial progress. The post-career business partnership of The Glove and The Reign Man provide a much-needed positive chaser to a story otherwise ridden with failure, under-achievement and a buried figure in the history of sports activism.