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In April, 2013, Micah Sharon, a Celtics fan from Connecticut and a high school student at the time, found himself at Rich Altman’s Hollywood Collectibles show at the Aleppo Shriners Auditorium in Wilmington, Massachusetts. His dad was a Celtics fan dating back to the Russell era, and this was the family’s third consecutive “mini-vacation” trip to the sports show. “The Name Game” — An inside look at trades that never were A collection of memos from 1990 gives a behind the scenes look at how NBA trades unfold. It was more than just an opportunity to buy memorabilia, it was a chance to shake hands and engage in a bit of chit-chat with Celtics legends like Bill Russell and Sam Jones. Having collected a 2007/08 signed basketball, a basketball signed by Bill Russell, and a third basketball signed by various other Celtics luminaries, as well as some other memorabilia, Micah was invited by a vendor to come behind his table to inspect the contents of a filing cabinet. The cabinet contained documents from the Celtics front office that the vendor had obtained when they were on the verge of being thrown out. Among the documents were a series of memos from Jan Volk discussing trades that never happened during the 1990 season. These memos were likely used in meetings with the Celtics front office staff to discuss these trades. As part of History Month, Micah’s generously shared scans of the memos with CelticsBlog. The Background Jan Volk was the Celtics’ general manager from the summer of 1984 to 1997, when he was bumped out by M.L. Carr. In 1990 the Celtics were a team in transition. They had acquired a stable of solid players, and one budding star in Reggie Lewis to go along with the old guard of Bird, Parish, McHale and DJ, but that wasn’t enough to meet the expectations that Red Auerbach had. The one goal he always had was to field a championship caliber team, and the Celtics were not that in 1990. Although Bird and McHale were still good for better than 20 points per game (Bird’s stat line was 24.8/9.5/7.5 while McHale averaged 20.9 points and 8.3 boards per game for the season), and the team finished with a 52-30 record, they were no longer the class of the East. The Pistons had won the championship the year before, and the Bulls were on the rise. In fact, the team was bounced in the first round of the playoffs that season. The memos show a willingness by Boston to discuss moves with a view to improving the team, although there was only one definite trade proposal from Boston in these memos. The Memos Sharon’s six memos provide an insight into how trades develop in the NBA. Two memos show a preliminary “name game” phase of negotiations. In conversations with the Hawks and Bulls, each team provided a list of players on the other team that they had interest in. No notes were made about any given player being ‘off-limits,’ although one may safely assume that Michael Jordan was off-limits if trade talks with the Bulls had advanced. In Volk’s conversation with Jerry Krause of the Bulls, a note shows that another team has offered two second round picks for Craig Hodges, which sets a floor for any offers the Celtics might consider for him. This preliminary conversation would likely form the basis for future trade proposals, as each team evaluated the players they wanted against the players that the other team had interest in. This method of starting a trade conversation is, perhaps, foreign to the typical fan’s notion of how trades are pitched. The first of two memos from the Mavericks contains interesting details on conversations that were occurring regarding Roy Tarpley, including the framework of a failed deal with Golden State. They also show a GM whose strategy seems to have been inviting offers from the Celtics rather than overtly making them. The Mavericks provided details of an offer to Golden State that was apparently rejected by the Warriors, likely as a means of setting a negotiating stance for the Mavericks if further conversations occurred with Boston. Tarpley was a very talented power forward who struggled with substance abuse issues throughout his career, culminating in a lifetime ban from the NBA in 1995. He had just been reinstated by the NBA in 1990 when the Mavs began shopping him to other teams. The deal Dallas was working on with Golden State had contingencies in it related to Tarpley. The rough framework was a straight up trade of Tarpley for future Hall-of-Famer Tim Hardaway. However, if Tarpley failed a drug test at any point during the rest of the season, the Warriors would get the middle of the Mavericks’ three 1990 first round picks. On the other hand, if Tarpley played two full seasons with Golden State, Dallas would get a first round pick from the Warriors. This deal basically rated a sober Tarpley as being more valuable than Tim Hardaway. Hardaway was just a rookie, but had shown a great deal of promise, including notching a triple double earlier that month. Additionally, there were strong reasons to doubt that Tarpley would be able to remain clean based on his history of relapses. Rick Sund, the Dallas GM, claimed that talks with the Warriors stalled out because the NBA had made a ruling on Tarpley’s contract, determining that the value of his extension had to be averaged over the remaining years of his current contract, which meant that for cap purposes, Tarpley’s $640,000 contract was worth $2,000,000. Volk noted that this decision “chills any talks we would have.” Volk ended the conversation by asking Sund to “think about what he’d want” from Boston. While these talks were going on, possibly on the same day that he discussed the Tarpley deal with Boston, Rick Sund was all but denying trade talks to the press. Mid-season trades, Sund told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an article that ran the day after his call with Jan Volk, were the sort of things that contending teams did, and the Mavs were definitely not a contending team that year. This memo is a reminder that trade package details are often shared between teams, although not necessarily with perfect accuracy. While it’s true that there were cap considerations, even then, involved in trades, it is difficult to imagine that the Warriors were chomping at the bit to send Hardaway to the Mavs in exchange for a player with significant question marks about his availability, and that cap issues alone had “stalled” the negotiations. Before the draft, the Mavericks again reached out to the Celtics, with Jan Volk’s memo suggesting that Dallas had ongoing interest in Kevin McHale. The Celtics indicated that they had interest in Rolando Blackmon, Derek Harper and Herb Williams. Dallas was prepared to offer a player plus two first round picks for McHale, but apparently the Celtics weren’t sufficiently interested in the Dallas offer, with Volk writing, “I didn’t dissuade him, but said it’s still unlikely.” The picks that Boston would have had interest in, Dallas and Detroit’s first rounders in 1991, eventually settled at 6 and 19, but the draft was notably weak, justifying Boston’s willingness to pass on the offer. Once again, Rick Sund had approached the Celtics in search of a deal, but without making a concrete offer to open negotiations. If this was a pattern with Sund, his strategy is based on the notion that the party that makes the initial offer is at a disadvantage as negotiations continue. A memo from a conversation with Bernie Bickerstaff at Seattle shows a third way in which trade talks are initiated, with Boston apparently offering the Sonics Robert Parish for the second pick in the 1990 draft. In 1984 the Sonics had traded the eventual number two pick in the 1986 draft to Boston for Gerald Henderson, and they were not going to make the same deal twice. They went on to select future Hall-of-Famer Gary Payton with that pick. The memo from Volk’s conversation with Bernie Bickerstaff in the Seattle front office shows Boston receiving a relatively cool response to an offer. The Sonics expressed interest, but were unwilling to part with any of their best players in order to secure Parish. This third way is, perhaps, the way most fans believe that trade talks begin—that is, with one team approaching the other with a concrete offer. In the Seattle memo, we have a team making certain players untouchable in a trade. This occurs in final memo as well, one in which the Kings and Celtics were in fairly advanced negotiations. In this conversation, Volk’s counterpart, Jerry Reynolds, had just recently been named the Kings’ GM, having been their coach up until January 4th of that year. Volk makes it clear in the memo that Reggie Lewis was off limits in any trade conversation, but the overall tone of the memo suggests that both teams were trying to find a deal that worked. The Kings were interested in getting Ed Pinckney back, and were willing to send Kenny Smith to the Celtics in exchange for Pinckney and a first. Volk indicated, for the file, that he wasn’t sure if the team preferred to land Smith, or get back Ainge, who had been traded to the Kings, along with Brad Lohaus, for Ed Pinckney and Joe Kleine a year earlier. Around this time, rumors were flying in Boston and Sacramento, with Volk denying reports in the Globe that the Celtics were considering an offer to send Pinckney to Golden State, and with the Sacramento Bee’s Don Drysdale covering rumors that the Kings were shopping Ainge. The Sacramento Bee led with a rumor that involved sending Ainge to the Hawks for Antoine Carr—a rumor that proved to be surprisingly close to the truth, as Carr was traded to the Kings as part of a larger deal in which Kenny Smith, not Danny Ainge, was sent to Atlanta. In that report, Kings GM Reynolds played coy with Drysdale saying that he’d had no trade talks with Atlanta in the past week—but he had talked trade with Boston the day before Drysdale interviewed him. Unfortunately for historians of the game, memos and other documents that show the way teams operate are few and far between. These are the only documents I know of that give behind-the-scenes details regarding the Celtics. While there is a dense collection of game-related artifacts in basketball, the paperwork that really tells the story seems to have been lost for the most part. Part of this is a lack of scholarly interest in these items, and part is no doubt an effort to keep the details of trade negotiations that were successful, and perhaps more importantly, those that weren’t, from becoming generally known.