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About "The 84 Draft" Documentary
The shots are a reminder of just how different things were 30 years ago, well before the onslaught of mock drafts and scouting websites. Former commissioner David Stern — not yet grayed and sporting the thin, Inspector Clousseau moustache — was conducting his first draft, and recalled that there was so little interest at the time that the league actually paid USA to put it on the air. On a Tuesday afternoon.But, ultimately, Blake was right — the 1984 NBA draft class was very unusual. Not only did it produce four Hall of Famers (Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and John Stockton), it produced a whopping 10 players who finished with at least 10,000 career points.
And maybe more interesting, it produced some fascinating storylines, some well-known and some seldom-told. Those storylines are the focus of, "The 84 Draft," and make the hour-long program as interesting for casual fans as it would be for serious hoopheads. The documentary, narrated by Steve Nash of the Lakers, will debut Monday night.
The film’s producer, Dion Cocoros, (whose other NBATV credits include "The Doctor" and "The Dream Team" told Sporting News, "We love telling a great basketball story. … That is our goal—give our fans great basketball stories and make them think a little bit more about some things that maybe on the surface don’t come to life until you put the archive and the storytelling together."
Of course, that draft is probably best known for the decision of the Trail Blazers to choose Kentucky big man Sam Bowie over Jordan, and while the film does not spend excessive time on the Bowie pick, there is great video of Bowie that shows just how much athleticism and finesse he had, and why the Blazers thought he would be a good pick.
And that shows how, no matter how certain the right and wrong of these picks seems to us 30 years later, there was just no way to know for sure how good these players would be at the time.
"The obvious point was, 'Oh, the Blazers passed on Michael Jordan and took Sam Bowie,' " Cocoros said. "But that story has been told a lot over the years—what I learned mostly is that hindsight is not possible when you are making picks. Michael Jordan went No. 3, but when you talk to the people who were involved in it, it wasn’t such a clear-cut choice. Like anything else, you have to take these things with hindsight into consideration. It wasn’t such a no-brainer decision."
The film shines when it brings to light some storylines that have not gotten so much exposure. There is actually a fifth Hall of Famer selected in this draft—Brazilian superstar Oscar Schmidt, who scored 46 points against Team USA in the 1987 Pan-Am Games, a memorable performance that highlights what a star he might have been in the NBA. But if Schmidt had joined the NBA, he would not have been allowed to play for his national team, and he says that was too important to him to give up.
Besides, he was taken in the sixth round by New Jersey, and though the Nets offered a no-cut contract, Schmidt viewed his sixth-round selection as an insult. "Come on," he says. "Sixth round?"
The stories of Jordan, Stockton, Barkley and Olajuwon, are also highlighted in the documentary, as well as that of Leon Wood, a guard who had been compared to Isaiah Thomas but who was never able to get his footing in the NBA and fizzled out—only to turn around and become a referee in the league, a spot he still holds.
The tale of the final pick in that draft, Dan Trant from Clark University, provides a great deal of emotion, as Trant was a universally well-liked player and family man who died in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.
If the film is lacking, it is in the behind-the-scenes details leading up to the draft—the Bulls got multiple trade offers for the third pick, for example, and the Blazers only had the No. 2 pick because of a trade they had made in 1981 with Indiana (for one lackluster season of forward Tom Owens). The Rockets tanked so badly that year to get Olajuwon that the NBA put in a draft lottery for the first time the following year.
None of that gets a mention here, which is understandable given the time constraint, but the film would better suit hardcore basketball fans with those kinds of insider details.
"The 84 Draft" does a great job of tying together all the pieces of that remarkable draft, showing how that bunch of players were the foundation of the NBA’s transition from the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird era into the 1990s, when the league hit heights of popularity.
"It is interesting how the careers crossed," Cocoros said. "There is one point in the film where, it is 1997. Barkley gets teamed up with Hakeem in Houston, and Hakeem has already won two titles, he is a champion. Jordan is a champion. Barkley’s looking for the title, he teams up with Hakeem and they lose in dramatic fashion in the conference finals—to who? To the Jazz, on John Stockton’s famous shot. Then Stockton takes the Jazz to the Finals and he loses to, of course, Michael Jordan.
"It is interesting that all four of those guys, in one playoff run, they were all tied together."
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Aired : Monday June 9, 2014
Quality : WEB-DL HD
Video Format : MKV
Video : H.264, 1280x720, 30.000 fps, 2328 kbps
Audio : AAC, 44.1 KHz, 2ch stereo, 128 kbps
Size: 1.13 GB
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