Harold Katz presided over the last Sixers’ championship largely thanks to his pursuit of league MVP Moses Malone.
The first signal of an inflection point in Sixers history was the ringing telephone in the suburban Philadelphia home of assistant general manager John Nash on Sunday night, Aug. 29, 1982. Harold Katz, the team owner, was on the other end of the line, calling from either Las Vegas or Reno. All these years later, Nash can’t remember which.
What Nash does remember is that Katz, barely a year into his stewardship of the team, was very clear about what he wanted.
He wanted Moses Malone, the NBA’s most-coveted free agent.
Pat Williams, the team’s general manager, was out of the country, so it was left to Nash to arrange a meeting between the Sixers and Malone’s representatives. And he would have to act quickly, since Moses was scheduled to fly to Europe three days later for a barnstorming tour.
Long story short, Nash got it done. He reached coach Billy Cunningham on a golf course in North Carolina — Pinehurst No. 2 — and summoned the team’s attorney. Katz returned, and everyone huddled on Tuesday with Moses and his agents, David Falk and Lee Fentress, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.
The meeting began at 7 p.m. — an hour late because Cunningham took the bus from the Newark airport, having balked at a cab fare he considered exorbitant. Seven hours later, at 2 a.m., the two sides had come to an accord: Moses, twice the MVP in six years with the Houston Rockets, would sign a six-year, $13.2 million contract, monstrous in that day and age, pending the Rockets’ right of first refusal.
That meant Houston would have 15 days to match the offer and keep their star center, match the offer and trade him or let him walk. It never came to that. The Sixers eventually traded Caldwell Jones and a first-round pick (which became Rodney McCray) for Moses. It’s not entirely clear why, since the Rockets, amid an ownership change, were prepared to let Malone depart.
But Harold had gotten his man. And several months later, on May 31, 1983, Moses delivered to the Sixers a championship.
To Nash and some others, this is how Katz should be remembered upon his death Saturday at the age of 87. Not as the guy who would in time trade not only Moses but Charles Barkley (and explore dealing Julius Erving — twice). Not as the guy who drafted Shawn Bradley.
Rather, as the guy who knew exactly what the Sixers needed to get over the top, after losing in the Finals three of the previous six years.
As another former Sixers executive, Dave Coskey, said Sunday, “You’ve got to give him credit for doing something nobody else has been able to do.”
And indeed, the Sixers have only reached the Finals once since then, when the Allen Iverson-led 2000-01 team fell to the Lakers in five games. Another barometer of the water-treading the franchise has done would be this: In 41 seasons since the title run, they have finished above .500 22 times and at the break-even point or worse on 19 occasions (with another losing season apparently on the horizon).
Katz was not without his faults. He was hard-driving — “a taskmaster,” as Nash said. He feuded publicly with some of his own players, notably Andrew Toney. And he presided over not only the title run but the beginning of the team’s decline. By the time he sold it to Comcast in 1996, they were amid a stretch of seven straight losing seasons.
But Nash believes that Katz mellowed in his later years. He and Toney mended fences at the championship team’s reunions, after clashing over the severity of the foot injuries that cut short Toney’s career.
Nash, now 78, spent five years as the Sixers’ assistant GM under Katz, and another four as the general manager. He would also serve as the GM in Portland, Washington and New Jersey, and is fully capable of seeing the good in his former boss.
“I think he caused me to be as good as I could be during the nine years I worked for him,” he said. “I learned a lot from him, because he was an outstanding businessman. … Harold was a driven individual, both in business and basketball. He knew basketball.”
In fact, Nash said, Katz “had a wonderful business sense, better than any owner I worked for, and I worked for four of them. And he was the most knowledgeable owner about basketball I ever worked for.”
Besides acquiring Malone, Katz was “the loudest voice in the room” in advocating for the use of the fifth overall pick on Barkley in 1984, according to Nash. That same year Katz had explored trading Erving to Chicago for the No. 3 selection, which would become Michael Jordan — a proposal the Bulls quickly rebuffed. Katz also talked to the Clippers about an Erving-Terry Cummings trade that year, but Dr. J killed it.
Two years later came one of the most ruinous days in franchise history — June 16, 1986 — when the Sixers traded Malone to Washington for Jeff Ruland and Cliff Robinson and sent the first overall selection (which became Brad Daugherty) to Cleveland for Roy Hinson. The nosedive commenced from there, hastened by decisions like the Barkley trade to Phoenix in 1992 and Bradley’s selection at No. 2 overall a year later.
Katz would later say he erred in letting Barkley talk his way out of town. But picking Bradley, with Penny Hardaway and Jamal Mashburn still on the board, is indefensible.
“He did make a mistake drafting Shawn Bradley, but it’s a league full of mistakes,” Nash said. “Did Portland make a mistake drafting Sam Bowie (at No. 2 in ‘84)? It happens. I would say by and large Harold’s ownership was as good as it gets, in many ways. … He was aware of everything. He was a very, very smart man. He made us all better at what we did.”
Coskey, the Sixers’ chief publicist from 1987-89 (and again from ‘96 to 2005), recalled that he often saw Katz heading toward the Sixers’ locker room after home games and would think to himself, “Thank God I’m not a coach.” There the owner would convene with Cunningham and his assistants in a literal smoke-filled room — Billy and Harold both liked their cigars — and hash out every matter under the sun.
In one such meeting, Nash recalled, Katz looked over at Jack McMahon, who in addition to serving as an assistant was the team’s superscout. He told McMahon he had been watching a college game from Hawaii on TV, and saw Jack seated in the front row, right under the basket. He wondered why McMahon had planted himself there.
“Why do you think I sat there?” McMahon told him, by Nash’s recollection. “So you knew I was at the game.”
That was Katz, in a nutshell.
“Harold had his finger on the pulse of the team, business-wise and basketball-wise,” Nash said. “He was deeply involved.”
Too deeply, it might be argued, on some occasions. But on one very significant one, just the right amount.