Another way Malone was ahead of his time: wearing Nike shoes. The reason there weren’t more Hall of Fame players in the original Air Force 1 poster is that in 1982, all of the biggest names — Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Dr. J — wore Converse. Even Michael Jordan was wearing Converse back then while playing at North Carolina. Jordan signed with the swoosh upon entering the NBA in 1984 and forever changed the shoe game. But Moses was there first.
The more you read about Moses Malone, the more impossible it is to avoid the conclusion that Malone is most underappreciated great player of the modern NBA.
We think of the early 1980s as the dawn of the Magic-Bird era, but Moses was the guy winning back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards in 1982 and 1983, before either of them got their hands on the Maurice Podoloff Trophy. Malone was so dominant back then that when he signed with the Philadelphia 76ers on Sept. 2, 1982, I still remember how the news broke on the radio: “The 76ers won the NBA championship today.”
The radio guy was right, of course. Malone arrived in Philadelphia, and in his first season he took the chronically great-but-not-great-enough 76ers from 58 wins to 65 wins and a dominant march through the playoffs, capped by Malone’s 26 points and 18 rebounds per game in the Finals.
“He took us over the hump,” said Cheeks, the point guard on those early-80s Sixers teams. “He was that physical presence that we didn’t have offensively in the paint. That’s how he took us over the hump.”
He also did it by seamlessly integrating into a team that had an established star in Julius Erving, a rising star in Toney and an All-Star in Cheeks.
“He just kind of blended in,” Cheeks said. “It wasn’t even a problem. He said it was Doc’s team.”
And they nearly made good on Malone’s classic prediction of “Fo, fo, fo,” as the conference finals were the only one of the 76ers’ three series (top seeds got a first-round bye back then) to go beyond the minimum four games.
A statement by the Philadelphia 76ers on Sunday called Malone’s words “three of the most iconic in this city’s history,” which is saying something when that is where the words that shaped our country’s independence and Constitution were first printed. They were certainly Malone’s most famous — and they typified the minimalism that defined both his interviews and his game.