Makes me feel lucky/glad I was never given stuff as pure as what Len Bias was given. Didn't sound like they were doing all that much, just stuff too pure to handle while seeming so harmless while actually doing it. Cocaine sure is a sneaky drug. RIP. Len vs MJ battling for the eastern conference every year would have ruled

Was Bias a shoo-in to be a great NBA player? Is basketball like MLB where draft picks are a crapshoot?

Ali/Holmes was really great

Shoo-in, of course not.

But high first round picks in the NBA have a fairly good success rate.

Yea, that's what I figured. But people always make it sound like Bias would have been MJ's equal and I never understood why if he never actaully played.

tuq -- I checked the website and the Ali/Holmes doc plays on Thursday on ESPN 2 at 10:30pm ET.

Thanks essay.

The Bias one was pretty good. Sure the whole political thing was kind of out of nowhere but that doesn't make it less relevant - given the timing, classic situation for politicians on an election year. Mostly I'm just by the whole thing - we all know that athletes party more than is publicized, but coke pretty much peaked in the mid-80s and this sort of thing was inevitable. At least they didn't spend this episode glossing over its use and calling it a fluke. I'll believe that Bias was merely a casual user, that's easy to do (as it was Reggie Lewis), but that doesn't make you wonder "if they didn't **** around with it, would they still be alive?"

Of course the autopsy suggests that by that point high level dealers were close enough to athletes that they were dealing basically uncut product. Overall, just such a shame.

The Bias - Jordan comparison can be viewed as hyperbole, but Bias wasn't chosen where he was (one spot higher than Jordan two years prior) because he was mediocre. Naturally the draft wasn't as strong but he was still a hell of a player. Most NBA #2 picks not named Darko tend to fare pretty well. No doubt he could have been the difference in 1987 and 1988 for the Celtics and extended the Lakers-Celtics rivarly a bit further, to the dismay of the Pistons.

Setting aside the whole NBA impact, it was just sad.

No but Celtics fans have turned him into a mythical being. All you have to do to realize that he was not guaranteed to be great is look at the other players drafted in the top 5 that year, Brad Daugherty, Chris Washburn, Chuck Person, and Kenny Walker. Not exactly a list of NBA greats there.

Citing the failure of other players - or really, the GMs that drafted them - isn't a great case for what he would have achieved. (Not to mention that both Daugherty and Person probably met expectations.) Without question the Jordan vs. Bias thing is hyperbole, but it's not his fault that he was part of one of the worst and most notorious drafts ever, if not the worst.

You can flip that around: put him two years earlier with Jordan, Bowie, H. Olajuwon, et al. What does he go there? 4th or 5th I guess. Or maybe higher? Then you could argue that in a weaker draft he'd have gone higher. Point is, using the draft to measure his success or failure is a pretty weak argument.

The first time I heard of Glen Baez was on Denis Leary's "No Cure for Cancer" comedy CD in around 1994.

"It's always the really talented people who die from drugs, it's always Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin, or Glen Baez....... like.. Bret Michaels would never ****ing overdose on drugs man!"

This isn't just Celtics fans, it is standard for the media to build up the deceased to a level higher than they actually achieved.

Len Bias, Pat Tillman and Sean Taylor have all gotten the halo effect, even Steve McNair got a quick bump to his HOF chances.

Len Bias was unbelievably good at basketball

i know it guarantees nothing in the NBA but Bias really could do it all

His father accidentally referring to Jay as Len was heartbreaking.

Definitely true. But even if we scale it back a bit and he becomes a fringe all-star type then that's a pretty good upgrade over guys like Ed Pinckney. Granted, there would be salary issues so something would have to give but they took some pretty bad beats between Bias and Lewis. And hiring Rick Pitino to coach, but they have themselves to blame for that one.

I wasn't trying to use the draft to argue whether he'd be successful or not, moreso just to show that him becoming a superstar player in the NBA was certainly no guarantee.

Bias was amazing, everyone knew it then before he died. You guys are being ridiculous saying that him dying has a lot to do with how people overestimate his abilities.

of course there's no "guarantee", but it seems like he had a really good chance to reach that highest echelon of basketball players that others can only dream about

Of course everyone selected in the top part of the NBA draft looks like they have a chance to be great, that's why they're drafted that high. Go look at the list of second picks though, there a lot more slightly above average players to total busts than there are hall of famers, so by dying young everyone just assumes the best would have happened for him, nevermind that he was already into drugs before he even joined the NBA. Who is to say that even if he had lived he wouldn't have just become the next Derrick Coleman?

Came here to post just this. So sad, more tragedy than one family should ever have to endure.

Enjoying it so far, could do without the voiceover, though.

yeah the voiceover stuff is terrible, but this is amazing.

+1 to the voiceover stuff, cringe inducing. Jimmy the Greek was way before my time, but it sounded like he was pretty much just a degen who got on television.

voiceover completely ruined it for me.

Yeah I wasn't sure what was going on with the voiceover. However, of the ones I've seen I think this was the best (although I missed Ali/Holmes and Len Bias). Pretty interesting stuff, especially with the Notre Dame bet he made for all of his money.

Pretty boring stuff. A risky degen who has some huge wins and huge losses. Revolutionary stuff!

The most interesting part of the story imo was that he's had 3 kids die from cystic fibrosis.