Game 69: Gail Goodrich - Broccoli and Cheese Casserole

On April 19th, 1979, the Lakers won a coin flip against the Chicago Bulls that drastically changed the course of Dr. Jerry Buss’ newly-bought franchise. The flip in their favor meant that the Lakers had won the #1 overall pick in that year’s draft and the opportunity to select a transcendent point guard out of Michigan named Earvin “Magic Johnson. Prior to the institution of the NBA Draft Lottery, the teams with the two worst records flipped a coin, Iowa Caucus style, to determine the winner of the #1 pick. So that must’ve meant that the 1978-1979 Lakers were pretty shitty, right? Nope. It was because the anti-labor NBA punished the Utah Jazz for having the audacity to try and make their team better by signing a free agent several years earlier. That free agent was UCLA great and Lakers Hall of Famer, Gail Goodrich.

The son of Gail Goodrich Sr., the captain of USC’s 1939 basketball team, the younger Goodrich was only 5’8” in his junior year of high school. But he proved skeptics wrong by leading his team to the 1961 city championship. While he wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps, he made the right choice by joining John Wooden’s surging UCLA Bruins, where he led the team to back-to-back titles as an All-American. The L.A. native stayed in town when he was drafted by the Lakers in 1965 as a territorial pick, just like his Bruins teammate Walt Hazzard the year before. But unlike in high school or in college, Goodrich wasn’t given a shot to prove that he was more than his “stumpy” (as Elgin Baylor liked to call him) height. He rode the bench for three years before being picked by the Phoenix Suns in the expansion draft.

Goodrich flourished in Arizona, where as a starter he averaged 23. 9 points / 6.4 assists / 5.4 rebounds his first season, an All-Star campaign. But the Suns fan favorite only lasted two seasons in purple and orange. Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke wanted Goodrich back and orchestrated a deal that sent 7 foot back-up center Mel Counts to Phoenix for Goodrich. In his first year back, Goodrich’s points dipped. But when new coach Bill Sharman instituted a faster-paced offense for the 1971-1972 season, the trio of Goodrich, Jerry West, and Wilt Chamberlain became almost unbeatable. They won a record 33 consecutive games and the L.A. Lakers’ first title. Goodrich would also make the first of four consecutive All-Star Games as a Laker.

That fourth consecutive All-Star year, the 1974-1975 season, was also the first year since the ‘50s that the Lakers were without the just-retired Jerry West. Goodrich, who was the team’s scoring leader for several years running, rightfully thought he deserved a bigger contract. So he held out the first four games of the 1975-1976 season to see if the Lakers would call his bluff. But that fat contract never came from the notoriously stingy Cooke, so Goodrich took his talents to Utah. There, he signed a three year deal that would team him up with “Pistol” Pete Maravich and make the Jazz a Western Conference contender for the rest of the ‘70s. At least, that’s how it looked like on paper. Both guards suffered serious injuries during the length of Goodrich’s contract and were rarely able to be on the floor together.

But bad injury luck was nowhere near the most disastrous part of that contract. A decade earlier, MLB player Curt Flood sued the MLB for not allowing him to sign a contract with any team he chose when his current contract ended. While he ultimately lost the case in 1972 after it ended up in front of the Supreme Court, an arbitrator's decision in 1975 essentially ruled in his favor and opened the Floodgates for freedom of association in professional sports. That didn’t sit well with the NBA and its owner, who collectively decided to punish teams who signed free agents… without telling the teams. "Going in, the Jazz did not know they were going to have to give up all those draft choices for me," said Goodrich.

Those draft picks ended up being a 1977 1st rounder, a 1978 1st rounder, a 1979 1st rounder, and a 1980 2nd rounder. The Jazz also received a 1977 2nd rounder and a 1978 2nd rounder from the Lakers, but this was a forced transaction designed to scare other teams from signing free agents. And it worked. The NBA didn’t have its first unrestricted free agent, Tom Chambers, until 1988 when the NBA was in a much stronger financial position and free agency was normalized in professional sports.

Even though the Lakers had all those picks, it still had to do something with them. While 3 of them ended up being traded or used on busts, the stars aligned for the ‘79 pick. The Jazz posted the NBA’s worst record due to Goodrich’s age and Maravich’s injuries, giving them a shot at the top selection: Magic Johnson. But they no longer held that pick, taken from them by a league intent on flexing its muscle in labor relations. So the Jazz could only watch in frustration as the NBA announced that the Lakers had won the coin flip against the Chicago Bulls. The flip was done by commissioner Larry Brown in the NBA’s Manhattan office with representatives from the Lakers and Bulls listening on speakerphone. If I worked in the Bulls front office, I would’ve been on a plane to NYC the day earlier to make sure that coin actually had two different sides.

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Broccoli and Rice Casserole

1 package frozen chopped broccoli

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 teaspoon salt (optional)

1 8-ounce package Velveeta cheese, cut into pieces

1 cup uncooked wild rice or 1 package frozen long grain and wild rice

1 medium onion, finely chopped

½ cup milk

1 can cream of chicken (or mushroom or celery) soup

Thaw broccoli. Combine onion and oil in saucepan and heat through, do not brown. Add broccoli and cook for 5 minutes. Add soup and heat to boiling, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and stir in cheese and milk. Add salt and cook for 3 minutes or until bubbly.

Cook rice separately and combine with above sauce. Pour into casserole. Heat through, about 20 minutes, at 350 degrees. Freezes well.

Hell yeah. This is the good shit. Classic 1950s suburban American cuisine. Frozen broccoli and 7 slices of Velveeta. It’s how America got big and strong.

I wasn’t looking forward to making this. Now that I’m reaching the finish line for Goldstein and Gasol, I have a 6th sense about which dishes I’m going to be immediately tossing into the garbage. And despite looking the exact same before and after it went into the oven (always a great sign), it wasn’t that bad. “Wasn’t that bad” is the highest Goldstein and Gasol compliment I can give. I mean, this is basically macaroni and cheese with rice instead of pasta. You could do a lot worse than refrigerated leftovers of this casserole as a side. “Wasn’t that bad.” “You could do a lot worse.” The good shit.

(Fun Fact: This was the last recipe I cooked before the NBA shut down two days later)