Dream Team by Jack McCallum Page A

Daly provided, though, was his wish list, which included the names of the players he felt were most essential for success. I never saw that list, and as far as I know Chuck never showed it publicly before he died from cancer in May 2009. Perhaps he never even wrote down the names. Or perhaps somewhere in Chuck’s files there is a scrap of paper still to be unearthed. The memories of the committee members do not completely coalesce on the names, but, after some investigation, I stand behind the names I wrote in
Sports Illustrated
at the time: Jordan, Magic, Pippen, Robinson, Mullin, Malone, and Ewing.
    The order is deliberate. Michael and Magic are the obvious one-two. Daly wanted Pippen for his long-armed, cover-the-court defensive abilities and his offensive versatility. True, he had seen his own team turn Pippen into a shell of a player many times, but the Bulls sideman had upped his game considerably during the Bulls’ ’91 championship run. Players are often damned with the faint praise of being “complementary,” but Pippen was perhaps unique in this respect: he was a superstar complementary player.
    Daly loved Robinson’s shot blocking and Mullin’s shot making. Reggie Miller’s name came up early, but Daly saw Mullin as more of a classic zone breaker. The coach wasn’t completely enamored of Malone but considered the Mailman a dependable low-block scorer and a shot-clock bailout. Ditto for Ewing, though Daly had far more affection for Robinson’s game than he did for Ewing’s.
    The name of Isiah Thomas was not on Daly’s list. Exactly why not is a subject for later ( Chapter 14 ), but Daly constantly sold the idea that he was only the coach. “The committee picks the players,” he said, comparing it to the situation in the NBA—general managers get the players, and coaches coach them. That was technically true but pragmatically hogwash. Had Daly walked into the room and said, “I want Isiah Thomas on this team,” the committee would’ve had a much tougher time with the selection process. I didn’t express that opinion at the time, and neither, as far as I know, did anyone else. In part I excuse myself for not writing about it because there was no Internet and no SI.com and therefore no great volume of stories about the selection of the Olympic team. But another part of the reason I didn’t write it was my respect for the tough position that Daly was in.
    “Chuck’s the one who really skated on the Isiah issue,” says Jan Hubbard, who did the most aggressive reporting about the Olympic selection process for
Newsday
.
    Isiah had another supposed ally on the committee in Detroit general manager Jack McCloskey, a respected voice in the NBA. If Isiah felt uncomfortable lobbying Daly for a spot on the team—and he did—he certainly could tell McCloskey that he wanted in on the Barcelona festivities. “Isiah felt that he couldn’t put pressure on Chuck,” says Dave Gavitt, “but he put big-time pressure on Jack.”
    Thomas once had political capital around the league, back when he was a kid whose killer crossover was matched only by his killer smile. But that capital was diminishing—the Jordan freeze-out, the Bird insult, the Pistons’ physical play. As Gavitt puts it, “It quickly became obvious that Isiah was not the most popular dude.”
    “At that particular time, we were the past,” says Laimbeer, Isiah’s best friend on the team and the Bad Boy least likely to mince words. “It would’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if the Olympics had come along two years earlier, when we were in the middle of our run. The Olympic team was a political battle, and if there was one team and one player that wasn’t going to win a political battle, it was the Detroit Pistons and Isiah Thomas.”
    Two notable names that were not on Daly’s wish list were those of Larry Bird and Charles Barkley. Bird had already made noises about being too old and too beset by back problems. And