Darnell Valentine entered his fourth season in the NBA with a new lease on life and his career. For the second time in three years, Portland had traded a point guard (Kelvin Ransey in 1982 and Fat Lever in 1984) and kept Valentine.
This showed Valentine that Portland coach Jack Ramsay and Blazer management and ownership had faith in this former KU All-American.
“(Ramsay) did believe in me,” Valentine told The Oregonian’s John Canzano on 750 The Game radio show in 2014 after Ramsay died. “After they traded Kelvin Ransey the year after I got here, I was able to start those three years or so but then I kept getting hurt. But he did believe in me, absolutely he did.”
Valentine said Ramsay tried to shape his teams into Portland’s 1977 championship squad.
“The ‘77 team was very successful. It was like a basketball model that the team was trying to recreate. I think in some way shape or form, I was supposed to be Dave Twardzik,” Valentine said with a laugh to Canzano about the gritty point guard and playmaker.
“We had Mychal Thompson, the passing center like Bill Walton. We had Calvin Natt (before he was traded to Denver after last season), he was Maurice Lucas. We had Jim Paxson, he was kind of like Bobby Gross.”
Now, with Lever gone, the question would be: Would Portland draft another point guard in the first round as Valentine’s backup? Portland had drafted point guards in the first round in 1980 (Ransey), 1981 (Valentine) and 1982 with Lever.
With the second pick in the famed 1984 NBA Draft, the Trail Blazers selected 7-foot center Sam Bowie from Kentucky, a choice which would be criticized for decades when a rising young star named Michael Jordan from North Carolina was still on the board. But Portland already had a future star in 6-6 swingman Clyde Drexler, and couldn’t pass up the chance to land a potential franchise big man in Bowie, despite his injury history at UK.
So Bowie went to Portland at No. 2 and Chicago picked Jordan with the next pick, who would become the NBA’s franchise player and later enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame.
With the 19th pick, Portland opted not for a point guard, but a relatively unknown 6-6 small forward from Fresno State named Bernard Thompson. In the second round, with the 33rd overall pick, the Blazers then selected another little known prospect — point guard Steve Colter from New Mexico State, a fast player and good outside shooter, something Valentine was not.
During the 1945-85 season, I became fascinated with KU coach Larry Brown’s Hawk Talk radio show. I listened every week to my idol Brown and taped all the shows. My first question I ever asked him is why he didn’t draft Valentine when he was the New Jersey Nets head coach. I only asked this because I heard reports before the 1981 NBA Draft that the Nets were interested in Valentine.
After I asked Brown this question, host of the show and voice of the Jayhawks Bob Davis said:
“They never let you forget.”
I got a chuckle out of that.
After drafting power forward Buck Williams from Maryland with the third pick in 1981, Brown selected 6-6 forward Albert King at No. 10, also a Maryland product.
“I thought Albert at the time was one of the great college players in the country, and I was thrilled to death that we had the opportunity,” Brown told me. “We didn’t need Darnell Valentine. We had Ray Williams and Otis Birdsong in the backcourt with a kid named Darwin Cook and Foots Walker (as backups). Our needs were up front, and Albert King, to me, was a great player and played great for me and did a heck of a job. Had he not been available there, we had talked about drafting (Rolando, K-State big guard) Blackman as a possibility or Darnell. They were two of the better players.
“I think he’s terrific,” Brown added about Valentine. “I think he’s one of the better young players in the game. The thing that excites me about Darnell is he comes out every night and gives exactly 100 percent. I think he’s one of the better point guards. He doesn’t shoot the ball very well yet, but he’s worked extremely hard on it. He defends extremely well. I think he’s terrific. He’s not a first-team NBA All-Star, but I doubt there’s any team in the league that wouldn’t like to have him, and I think he’s capable of starting for just about anybody.”
Valentine had started the last two years in Portland and played well, always elevating his game in the playoffs when the games mattered most. That had to impress Ramsay and the Blazer brass.
But how would he perform in Year 4 with rookie Steve Colter now pushing him for playing time, just as Lever did the last two years?
Valentine started the first 59 games before becoming injured once again and missing two weeks. Colter replaced him in the starting lineup the remainder of the regular season and played very well, scoring in double figures in 12 of his first 13 starts. The rookie scored 25 points against Utah on March 3, 1985, 35 points versus Washington on March 6, and 25 points against Chicago on March 26.
Then Colter might have hit the rookie wall, scoring in double digits just once in his last nine games.
Valentine started 59 of 75 contests and had another solid season with a career-high 30.4 minutes per game, averaging 11.6 points (second highest of his career), a career-best 7.0 assists and 1.9 steals (No. 2 best of career) per contest, while shooting a career-high 47.3 percent from the field and 79.3 percent at the free throw line (tied for second best of his career).
He scored a season-high 26 points in a Blazers 110-99 win over the Clippers on Feb. 26, 1985, shooting a sizzling 13 of 15 from the field. On Nov. 1, 1984, he played a season-high 50 minutes in a 139-131 triple overtime loss to the Suns.
Portland, whose depth was diminished by trading Natt, Lever and Wayne Cooper to Denver last offseason for Kiki Vandeweghe (team-high 22.4 ppg), finished just 42-40, a six-game slide from last year and 20 games behind the Lakers for second place in the Pacific Division.
In the playoffs, Valentine replaced Colter in the lineup and started all nine games but failed to match his postseason performance of last season, when he averaged 18.4 points and 8.7 assists in a five-game series loss against Phoenix. However, Valentine played very well, averaging 12.8 points, 6.4 assists and 1.8 steals in 27.1 minutes per contest, while shooting 48.9 percent from the field and a scorching 93.5 percent (29-31 FT) at the charity stripe. In Portland’s first game with Dallas (139-131 loss in double overtime), Valentine posted 24 points and 13 assists in 46 minutes. The Trail Blazers won that series 3-1, but were overmatched by the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, losing 4-1.
Valentine shined in the Game 5 139-120 loss to L.A., scoring 15 points and posting 10 assists. D.V. scored in double figures in seven of nine games in the playoffs.
Ramsay, who favored Valentine over Colter, appeared to feel pressure from ownership to play the rookie more during the latter part of the regular season. In Ramsay’s 2004 book, Dr. Jack’s Leadership Lessons Learned From A Lifetime In Basketball, the Portland coach wrote that (Larry) "Weinberg, the owner...had an assistant in his Beverly Hills office, Harley Frankel, who was a real ‘Basketball Benny,’ (a fanatical follower of the game). Frankel liked to dabble with computerized player statistics for minutes played in a game, comparing the team’s point production with various combination of players.
“He had taken a liking to a young Blazer point guard, Steve Colter, who as a rookie got in the game late or with a pressing team when the team needed a different look. I liked Steve, too. He was a free spirit who hustled on defense and had long-range shooting ability. I put him in some games when the Blazers were trailing, and he knocked down some three-pointers and sometimes he scored pretty well with the pressing group. But Colter lacked the playmaking and defensive skills of the starting point guard, Darnell Valentine. Frankel had compiled numbers that showed that the team was more productive with Colter in the game than with Valentine, and sent me dispatches by mail and called on the phone to talk with me about the matter.
“I didn’t have the time to explain to him that the numbers were deceptive. Colter played a lot of minutes in ‘garbage time,’ when games were already decided and opposing defenses loosened up, and he also benefited from playing with the pressing team, whose job it was to force the action for short segments of the game. When I turned Frankel off, he pursued the matter with Rick Adelman, my assistant. I assumed that all of this was done with Weinberg’s approval.”
Ramsay, who admitted to feeling heat and “discontent” from Weinberg, wrote that “the winds of change were blowing (Stu Inman, Blazers’ outstanding director of player personnel since the team’s “inception,” was forced to resign) and I sensed that my name was next on the list (to be fired).”
With Ramsay’s future in Portland uncertain heading into the offseason, so was Valentine. With the emergence and potential of Colter, along with Valentine entering the fifth and final year of his contract next season and pressure on Ramsay to play Colter, D.V’s future in Portland remained in question.
It would be an intriguing summer in Portland.
No comments:
Post a Comment