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While researching Pipeline to the Pros, the interviews we conducted and books/articles we read yielded way more interesting quotes and factoids than would fit in a 250ish page book. So our cutting room floor is littered with stories we think you all might enjoy. Some of our favorites revolved around the founding of the Dallas Mavericks and their first president, Grinnell College grad Norm Sonju. The stories are especially relevant toda,y given the fact that the Mavs are currently in the NBA Finals. If you like these, please share or subscribe, and also check out our book!

Dallas founding president Norm Sonju

The 2024 NBA Finals are not the Dallas Mavericks first rodeo. This is their third trip to the championship round in the past 20 years, and today (6/12) is the 13 year anniversary of the night they won their first NBA title against the Miami Heat.

But 2024 is special. In three notable ways, the team’s recent playoff run - and, in fact, their entire season - has served as a sort of homage to the founding and ascension of Dallas’s NBA franchise:

Preface

The story of the Mavericks begins with John Y. Brown. Not only was Brown the man who helped buy Kentucky Fried Chicken from Colonel Sanders, he also owned a pro basketball team in the mid-70s called the Kentucky Colonels. When the NBA finally buckled and agreed to absorb four of the six remaining ABA teams, Brown somewhat surprisingly decided to bow the Colonels out of contention and take a buyout. He then used that money to purchase an ownership stake in the NBA’s Buffalo Braves. A year later, before the 1977 season, he increased his share of the team, to the point that he held a controlling stake.

When it came time to find someone to run the team, Brown called up Norm Sonju. It was actually Brown’s second overture to Sonju. Several years prior, Sonju, a Chicago businessman who, through several faith-based organizations, built connections to basketball powerbrokers like Jerry Colangelo, turned down Brown’s offer to run the Colonels. When Brown came calling again, this time for a role with an NBA franchise, Sonju accepted (more on this in our book).

In 1977, Sonju relocated to upstate New York. His NBA career began in earnest as president and general manager of the Buffalo Braves. “Norm is just an outstanding young man - an outstanding businessman,” John Y. Brown told The Buffalo News. “And that’s why he’s one of the highest paid general managers in professional basketball.” In addition to the healthy salary, Brown also gave Sonju a 7% ownership option. Not bad for a guy who had literally never worked in professional basketball in any capacity.

Since Brown did not live in Buffalo, Sonju immediately became the local face of the team. From the jump, he blew the media away with his enthusiasm and frankness. The Buffalo News sports editor Charley Young described Sonju as “to-the-point; as open-faced as a steak sandwich.” That accessibility with the press sometimes proved challenging for Sonju, especially when his owner went rogue and started wheeling and dealing. “[Brown] would make a trade and then communicate with us afterwards,” says Sonju. “My job was to make it look logical!” 

Despite his best efforts in promoting the team, Sonju struggled to fill the building. “I never in my life worked harder or had less luck in producing good results,” Sonju said in 1978.

Brown, who was gearing up to run for governor in his home state of Kentucky, started seriously considering relocation. So Sonju had to add “hunting for a new home for the Braves” to his long list of responsibilities.

After the 1978 season, Sonju met with Brown and the team’s other owner, Harry Mangurian, at Le Club International, a Florida resort owned by Brown. Brown and Mangurian wanted the team to move to one of their home states - Kentucky or Florida. Sonju, who had just put a $20,000 addition onto his new home in Buffalo, wanted to stay put. Ultimately, however, he knew the decision was not his to make.

Sonju carried five looseleaf notebooks to that meeting at Le Club International (I can’t get over that name…If Michael Scott had a resort, this is what he would call it). One notebook had player personnel options. In the others, Sonju had written detailed analyses around new possible locations for the team - Miami, Louisville, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Dallas. “I worked so hard to prepare these figures,” said Sonju, “so my owners have absolutely everything THEY need to make the best possible judgment.” 

Celtics

Brown and Mangurian ended up opting for a plan that was nowhere to be found in Sonju’s many notebooks - an unprecedented and never replicated team-swap-plus-relocation. Boston Celtics owner Irv Levin wanted to own a franchise in San Diego. Moving the famed Celtics would never fly with the league, but moving the Braves, a team that already had one foot out of Buffalo, could work. If general managers could swap players, Levin figured, why couldn’t owners trade franchises?

Levin traded his stake in the Celtics to Brown and Mangurian for the rights to the Braves. Brown and Mangurian gladly took over the iconic Celtics, while Levin took possession of the woebegone Braves, a team he could relocate to San Diego without a hassle. In order to make it a fair deal, they also swapped some players. So, years before a Canadian blogger started with a red paperclip and, after a series of 14 trades, ended up with a house, John Y. Brown turned the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels into the Boston Celtics in just three moves.

Where did that leave Sonju? Some speculated that the Braves GM would join Brown with the Celtics, even though Red Auerbach planned to stay on as Boston’s general manager. Sonju instead stuck with the Braves. His first order of business? Telling the public that the team would soon skip town. “Because my partners refused to come back to Buffalo,” says Sonju, “I alone was the guy who had to make the announcement that the Buffalo Braves are leaving.” 

Clippers

When the team set up shop in San Diego, Sonju was the one who planted the flag. He ran the newspaper name-the-team contest and decided on “Clippers.” He signed radio and television deals and scaled the arena. He even found a temporary mascot. At a Padres game, Sonju, impressed with the Famous San Diego Chicken, approached a well-dressed man who he deduced worked for the team. “I would like very much,” Sonju said to the well-dressed man, “to hire your Chicken.” As a result, the Chicken picked up a job during baseball’s offseason, working Clippers games for their inaugural 78-79 season. 

But Sonju’s days with the Clippers were numbered. After taking orders from a chicken man and then giving orders to a man dressed like a chicken, Sonju was ready for his next adventure.

Sonju’s stint with the Braves-turned-Clippers may not have provided the warmest welcome to the league. It did, however, leave him feeling as though he could succeed in a more favorable circumstance. While compiling those five notebooks for Brown and Mangurian, Sonju’s analysis landed on a clear top option for a new NBA city - Dallas-Fort Worth. He felt certain that a franchise under his guidance would flourish there. But first he’d have to find an ownership group, and then convince the other existing NBA owners that Dallas deserved an expansion team.

“It was a small league,” Sonju says. “Twenty-two teams. I knew all of the owners on a first-name basis. I was friends with several of them but liked all of them. We really got along in those days.” It was time to call in some favors.

The journey from ideation to franchise-hood was no comfortable trot. It was a perilous and expensive journey. Sonju sold his Buffalo home with that brand new addition, moved to Texas, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to build the foundation of an NBA organization. On his hunt for an owner, over 125 investors told him “no.” Don Carter, who made his fortune co-running a multi-level marketing company founded by his mother and wore a cowboy hat so frequently it might as well have been sewed to his scalp, agreed to back the venture.

Sonju signed the lease, handled the television and radio contracts, and visited most of the 22 NBA franchises to sell them on the merits of welcoming Don Carter and Dallas into their league. Sonju’s buddy Jerry Colangelo ran the expansion committee, and most other owners were happy to vote them in and split the new franchise’s entrance fee. Thanks to their support, Sonju, Carter, and the NBA reached a tentative agreement to make Dallas the 23rd franchise. With the deal all but done, Sonju hired Rick Sund, a young front office man from the Milwaukee Bucks. Sund immediately started preparing for the upcoming expansion and college draft. 

Then a few surly owners from the league’s most recognizable franchises threw a hitch in Dallas’s giddy-up. New Lakers owner Jerry Buss argued that the original Dallas expansion terms were too favorable. He and a few other owners successfully lobbied to increase the price tag, from $10 million to $12 million, and change payment timing and interest terms. Then the Boston Celtics, who, absent expansion, were likely to own the top pick in the upcoming draft, also pushed the league to revise the original agreement. As a result, Dallas’s 1980 draft pick moved back from first to eleventh. (This was a HUGE deal. The Celtics retained that number one pick and then flipped it for Robert Parish and the pick they would use on Kevin McHale.)

Many of Sonju and Carter’s 20-plus investors, peeved at the league for the bait and switch, pulled their money. Bill Saxon, an oil maven and potential investor, spoke for the group when he said, “You ask yourself what kind of folks are you dealing with here. Do you want to get involved with people like this?”

The deal had about as much life as a wanted man being dragged by the sheriff to the nearest gate cross. Then Don Carter valiantly rode in to the rescue. He agreed to buy up all of the team’s outstanding shares.  “It all goes back to Norm,” Carter said at the time. “He sold his home and moved to Dallas…If I move someone somewhere to do a job for me, I do have an obligation to them and their family.”

Tank

Sonju called the team the Mavericks, picking the name out of thousands of fan submissions. Then he and his basketball man, Sund, charted out their team-building strategy. Sund, who played basketball at Northwestern and then worked with Sonju’s pal Don Nelson in Milwaukee, was not even 30 when he joined the Dallas franchise. Without a family or a more established current role, he could afford to take a risk and join Sonju before they were officially in the NBA. Many of the other, more qualified men Sonju interviewed could not. Sonju and Sund worked to devise a plan that might look familiar today, but was entirely novel in 1980. 

Consensus credits the 1983-84 Rockets with inventing what is now referred to as “tanking.” Back then, the NBA Draft still awarded its top pick to the league’s worst team. Houston, eyeing local college star Hakeem Olajuwon, benched players in order to drop 17 of their last 22 games and sink to the bottom of the standings. They selected Olajuwon first overall in the 84 Draft (a guy named Jordan was picked third that year). To avoid incentivizing teams to lose, the league responded with a draft lottery the very next season. All non-playoff teams would have an equal chance at drawing the number one pick. 

The true origins of tanking can actually be traced back a few years earlier and a few hundred miles north, to Dallas. Theirs was a more sophisticated version, one frequently employed by today’s rebuilding teams. They completely deprioritized winning by trading away any useful players for future draft picks. Why? Because more losses meant a higher draft pick, and more assets meant more chances to select useful players in the years ahead.

Prior to the NBA officially granting Dallas a franchise, Sund was working for Sonju and Carter on a personal services contract to prepare for the expansion draft. To fill out a new team’s roster, a special draft always accompanied any NBA expansion. Existing teams could only protect a handful of players, and the new team or teams plucked who they desired from the pool of unprotected players. Sund still lived in Milwaukee, and his former coworkers at the Bucks continued letting him attend games. Whenever any executives who had been through the expansion process were in town for a game, Sund would seek their advice. He conducted research, which showed that (a) the average expansion team won 22 games and finished in last place, and (b) rarely, if ever, did a player selected in the expansion draft have a long and fruitful career with the expansion club that selected them. 

Sund remembers relaying his findings to Sonju and telling him, “Norm, here’s what we should do. We shouldn’t take anyone [in the expansion draft] with guaranteed contracts if we can avoid it.” Sonju has a slightly different version of events. He consulted with Colangelo, who had experienced expansion with the Bulls and Suns, and reached a similar conclusion to Sund. “I told Rick,” Sonju recalls, “that it is critically important that we trade any player that we pick up in the expansion draft for future first round picks, with no exceptions.”

Regardless of the specific impetus of the idea, the two agreed upon the strategy and put it into motion. If all went according to plan, the team would slowly and steadily improve. At that time, when they would (hopefully) start winning and (hopefully) be slotted further down in the draft, the additional picks would come into play (this should be familiar to fans of the Oklahoma City Thunder and GM Sam Presti). “We need draft picks those years when we start getting close to the playoffs,” says Sund, “because how are we going to get better if our draft picks are going to be middle of the road?” 

As the only expansion team, and, as such, the only participant in the expansion draft, the Mavericks had to select one unprotected player from each of the 22 other teams. It would leave them with nearly double the number of players they needed, but it was their best chance to start accumulating potential trade chips. Sund and Sonju had to turn in their list of picks to Deputy Commissioner David Stern. Before finalizing the submission, Sund kept hounding the other general managers for intel.

“I’ll never forget the night before the expansion draft,” says Sund. “I met with just about every general manager in that room.” If there was a particular player a team coveted, he’d snag them in the draft and work to flip them over for a draft pick. Sonju trusted Sund, and Sund trusted Sonju, and Carter had enough trust in both of them to let them do their thing without much intervention. 

That first season, the Mavericks lost 67 games and acquired five additional first-round draft picks. Finishing seven wins below the expansion average of 22 didn’t bother Sonju one bit. “Whether you win 11, 15, or 22, really doesn’t impact the business side at all,” he says. “You’re bad. You’re a long way from competitive. I knew how to market, we did things well, and [businesses] wanted to advertise with us.”

Sonju was able to fulfill his responsibilities to Carter’s ownership group without shortchanging his future roster - the team cash flowed positively, finishing in the black, which was no layup in the early ’80s NBA.

To acquire those additional first-rounders, the Mavs found themselves an ideal trading partner the Cleveland Cavaliers. Where Sonju and Sund were happy to shed talent for future assets, Cavs head coach Bill Musselman and owner Ted Stepien wanted to acquire players that would help them win immediately. And where Sonju and Sund coveted future draft picks, Musselman and Stepien were happy to ship out any and all post-dated assets. 

Musselman, who Sund calls “as fierce of a competitor as there was in coaching,” called up Sund shortly after the expansion draft. Stepien had given him strict win-now orders, and Musselman was quick to oblige his new boss.

“Hey Rick,” Musselman said, “you’re an expansion team. You’re building for the future. I want to win, and I want to win now. Let’s talk.” One trade became two trades became three. Musselman kept calling, and Sund’s answer never changed. “It has to be a first-round pick.” 

For those keeping score at home, Cleveland eventually shipped out four first-rounders that season in exchange for four Dallas players, none of whom had ever started an NBA game. The only person in the Mavericks organization who wasn’t joyfully dancing a jig was equipment manager Keith Grant, who had to keep supplying new uniforms for the ever-changing roster.

The Mavericks took that cadre of picks and became the model expansion franchise. For the first seven seasons of their existence, they won at least as many games as the prior season. Sonju and Sund continued to innovate when it came to acquiring future picks, employing the very first “pick protection” in league history in 1984. To help get the Pacers comfortable with trading away their first-rounder, Dallas wrote in language that the pick would not convey if it landed in the top seven. Indiana agreed to the deal, and a mechanism that is now applied to most traded draft picks was born. In 1988, Dallas reached the Western Conference Finals with a roster almost entirely composed of homegrown players they had drafted.

Clippers (again)

The league took notice of how buttoned up the Dallas operation was. As noted in Tip-Off, Filip Bondy’s book on the 1984 NBA Draft, executives from other mid-to-small market teams, like Indiana and Utah, would visit Sonju to learn how he organized his franchise. Sonju served on and led several committees, including one aimed at vetting a wealthy Angeleno named Donald Sterling, who wanted to purchase the San Diego Clippers and move them to Los Angeles.

Having dedicated a lot of time and mental energy into relocation strategy, Sonju did all he could to dissuade Sterling. He urged him to consider several locations an hour or so away from LA that still had an area of dominant interest greater than a majority of NBA teams. “You don’t have to take it to LA,” Sonju told Sterling, “where you’re always going to be second fiddle to the Lakers.” Sterling absorbed Sonju’s rational argument and responded, “Well, my friends live in LA. So we really want to move the team to LA. [Otherwise] it’s just too far to drive.” 

***

Norm Sonju, Rick Sund, Don Carter, and the rest of the Mavericks founding brain trust were wise enough to understand what Donald Sterling did not - often times the longer, more difficult road leads to a more rewarding destination.

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