An i for an i

Sporting News, The, Jan 29, 1996 by Shaun Powell

The other team's guy never looked so good.

To the 76ers, Derrick Coleman was a dedicated, hard-working player, who arrived much too early for practice, who embraced the idea of wearing suits on the road and who yelled "Whoop-dee-damn do!" when he heard about the trade.

To the Nets, Shawn Bradley was a gym rat who loved to pump iron, who had the heart of a lion, who worked like Moses Malone on his low-post game and whose true personality was more gangsta than Goober.

The lasting images of Coleman and Bradley are quite the contrary, of course, but not to the Sixers and Nets. When you're honeymooning with your new companion, you tend to see beauty in places where others see ugly.

The Sixers were so willing to give up Bradley and the Nets were so fed up with Coleman that each team eagerly awaited the exchange. What they were getting in return seemed attractive, when in truth, it was one headache for another, your unwanted for mine.

The deal was consummated November 30, with four other players tossed in for salary-cap purposes. Coleman, the petulant power forward and poster child for the '90s player, headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. Bradley, an expensive long-range project still under construction, went north.

And both teams made it sound like a steal of a deal.

"Derrick is a special, special player," beamed Sixers Coach and General Manager John Lucas.

"We're ready to start the Shawn Bradley era," gushed Nets General Manager Willis Reed.

So what happens?

Coleman reports to the Sixers 30 pounds overweight announces that he would rather not practice after back-to-back games, and after spraining his right ankle for the second time in six games, has his foot placed in a cast. Then he takes an extended leave to his hometown of Detroit, which wasn't the kind of rehabilitation schedule the Sixers had in mind. Bradley is handed the Nets' starting center position and immediately becomes the team leader in blocked shots - and fouls per minute.

These incidents set the clock ticking on the time Coleman and Bradley bought when they switched uniforms. They will need a long grace period to overhaul their reputations and reinvent themselves into productive, problem-free players. Their warts will be ignored - for now - because fresh starts are always blissful periods. But be forewarned: The honeymoon won't last forever.

The deal was clinched when Sixers Owner Harold Katz traveled to New Jersey for the Sixers-Nets game November 18 and met Michael Rowe, the neophyte president of the Nets. Then they waited for Coleman to receive medical clearance for the irregular heartbeat diagnosed before training camp.

Coleman is the most condemned star in basketball. At 6 feet 10, he is saluted for his enormous talent, scorned for his attitude. He can give a coach 25 points, 12 rebounds and two aspirin. Coleman claims he can dominate a game whenever he wants, and few doubt him. No one questions Coleman when he says, "whenever I want."

He blames his image on the New York-area media, who usually came en masse to the Meadowlands only when a crisis developed, which was often. He says he was a victim of his outspokenness, but Ali never created this kind of ripple. Coleman pushed the envelope once too far for the Nets' liking. Within days after the league-wide lockout was lifted in September, Coleman demanded to be traded. The owners were livid. About a year earlier they had handed him a four-year, $37-million contract extension and made him - at the time - the game's highest-paid player.

Money, it was thought, would make Coleman happier. Instead, he grew grumpier. Twice in a span of a year, Coleman pledged himself publicly to the Nets. The day camp opened, in fact he said he was in "for the long haul." But that was rubbish. Coleman and his manipulative agent, Harold MacDonald, were busy pushing for a trade.

The relationship between the Nets and Coleman was strained from the start. Within months after making the Syracuse forward the No. 1 choice overall in the 1990 draft, they were at odds. Coleman held out until shortly before the season began, when he eventually signed a five-year, $15-million contract.

"When he came into the league as the first pick," Lucas says, "Derrick was fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. He did not have a veteran as a mentor, and therefore he did some things he probably shouldn't have done."

Ultimately, Coleman grew disenchanted with the franchise. The club never could replace Drazen Petrovic, the automatic outside shooter who died in a car accident in Germany two summers ago. Then Chuck Daly, the only Nets coach Coleman respected, quit in disgust after the '93-94 season.

The frustrated owners in October hired Rowe, who previously ran the Meadowlands sports complex, to oversee the operation. Rowe brought no basketball experience, but when he approached Katz, he was prepared to deal. For the Sixers, Coleman wasn't much of a gamble. They had already signed Vernon Maxwell and Richard Dumas, a pair of players with checkered pasts. Besides, what's a losing team have to lose?