NBA Reddit meets Rockwell
It gets magical up there in Denver.
“I always feel like, somebody’s watching me…tell me is it just a dream?”
The NBA world is a bit sadder this afternoon, the loss of legend Bill Walton compounded by the passing of ex-NBA player Drew Gordon, older brother to Aaron, the Nuggets’ lob-finishing dynamo. Many on NBA Reddit shared kind thoughts and condolences in Gordon’s memory. One tidbit came from alliedvirtue, who offered the following:
“Remember him [Drew Gordon] when he [had] a short (but impactful) stint playing in Partizan (a Serbian team) 10 years ago. Great player and a great guy.
Still super young, terrible news.”
To this, internallylinked responded with a brilliant piece of NBA history involving the Denver Nuggets, Serbia, and gambling, and pointed out how much deeper the ties between Serbia, redemption, and Denver run than just between Jokic and his beloved horses. Deeper than even that brief period of Drew Gordon’s journey that drew him to the grassy slopes of Serbia, where he played in games that may very well have been intently tracked by a local teenager who would one day grow to dish lobs back and forth with Drew’s younger brother, high above the mountains, halfway around the world.
It starts, says internallylinked, with Doug Moe, a standout basketball player back in the day at North Carolina. In 1961, the echelon of elite college basketball players Moe resided in was breached by the tantalizing prospect of influencing the outcomes of games for monetary reward. A tempting offer, reminiscent of a similar scheme spearheaded a few years back by a basketball player at Columbia named Jack Molinas, a genius with an IQ allegedly over 160, whose exploits read like something out of a Coen Brothers film: a scintillating Ivy League basketball career, followed by a prison stint (for involvement in said scheme), then, admission to the New York State Bar, disbarment, before ventures into peddling adult-films and furs.
In the early 1950s, Molinas dazzled fans at Columbia en route to capturing All-American honors, all the while shamelessly gambling on basketball. He began to associate with big time mobsters, including Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. A few years later, North Carolina’s Doug Moe would accept $75 from a man named Aaron Wagman to simply fly to New Jersey for a meeting, where he ultimately refused to fix games for Wagman, or anyone. But still, damage through association had been done, and even though he never fixed games, Doug Moe, the 22nd selection of the 1961 draft by the NBA’s first ever expansion team, the Chicago Packers, was permanently banned from the league. The first team All-American would never play a minute of NBA basketball.
Suspended from college and banned from the NBA by the age of 25, Moe was forced to channel a special vein of perseverance at this stage of his life, and he found one, moving along to Elon College, where he resurrected his academic career (which had languished at UNC), and, for the first, time, tried his hand at coaching. After finishing at Elon, Moe played professionally in the ABA, making three All-Star teams and capturing the 1969 ABA championship with the Oakland Oaks, but not before spending a few seasons in an up-and-coming basketball league in Padua, Italy. Additionally, around this time, Doug Moe sued, and settled with, the National Basketball Association.
While in Padua, Doug Moe was coached by Aleksandar Nikolic, “a patriarch and forefather of Yugoslav basketball,” says internallylinked. In later years, Nikolic would even hail Moe as his favorite player. After Moe moved back to the ABA to continue his career, the league merged with the NBA, and suddenly, one day, Doug Moe found himself a respected head coach in a league that once wanted nothing to do with him.
Doug Moe coached the Denver Nuggets in several stints, most notably from 1980 to 1990, a period of Nuggets basketball synonymous with high octane offense and monsoons of field goals. Moe’s style was free-flowing, internallylinked notes, predicated on a “run and gun style featuring few plays, rather, following [in] the principles of how the game should be played. To this effect, Moe cited the “two-seconds-or-less” mantra, in which players look to spread the ball around the court, and it netted success: Moe won Coach of the Year in 1988, and remains the winningest coach in Denver history win 432 wins (won’t be for long, Mike Malone’s nipping at his heels), and in 2002, the Nuggets ceremonially retired number 432 in his honor.
Why bring this all up? Because sitting around a campfire, evoking tales of Doug Moe, offensive wizardry, and sports gambling isn’t to just nostalgically saunter down memory lane. Rather, it is to emphasize the degree to which the Nuggets’ recent successes are attestations to the dizzying array of core Moe principles still alive and well in the Nuggets’ current interpretation of the game. Denver loves to distribute the ball, and as internallylinked’s comment points out, Coach Malone’s adjustments are few (and mainly predicated on what the defense is up to). And while Jokic receives the lion’s share of touches, the ball rarely dies with him, instead being rapidly doled out around a deft squad on the perpetual hunt for the perfect look.
As far as $75 goes, there’s a reality in which Doug Moe leaves that meeting thinking, almost innocently enough, that the idea of shaving a few points off of a basketball game, and pocketing some easy cash for it, wasn’t all that bad of an enterprise. But Moe refused. Apparently he didn’t think too highly of the concept then, and I’d be surprised if he’s changed his tune all these decades later. Of course, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished - see Doug Moe’s nonexistent NBA playing career - but, of punishment, there’s certainly enough to go around.
Jack Molinas, the Columbia genius who enjoyed flying close to the sun, eventually soared too high. One night in 1975, the forty-three year old disbarred lawyer was shot to death in the darkness of his backyard. Vincent Gigante pled insanity to avoid unrelated charges of his own, then died in prison. Tommie Eboli, another mobster, was murdered in a 1972 case that remains unsolved to this day. There’s no doubt that he was wronged, but Doug Moe has fared considerably better than these gentlemen, and today, the ex-Tar-Heel/Elonite now enjoys his 80s, retired in San Antonio, the site of his first head coaching gig. His impact on the Denver Nuggets extends and remains to this day, the impact of a “banned” man, lingering on, years and years later.
A few months ago, when news broke that Nuggets’ forward Michael Porter Jr.’s older brother, Jontay Porter, was permanently banned for life for gambling on NBA games, the ex-Raptor became the first NBA player banned for gambling in 70 years, when back in 1954, an All-Star forward just 32 games into his career named Jack Molinas forged off the beaten path, the same road that would one day bring Doug Moe back home.