How Ted Stephen Nearly Destroyed the Cavaliers

“𝙄 𝙢𝙖𝙮 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙗𝙚 𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙧𝙪𝙣 𝙖 𝙗𝙖𝙨𝙠𝙚𝙩𝙗𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙢, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙄 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙧𝙪𝙣 𝙖 𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙬”

No, those are not the words of some shitposter on reddit, or of some bar owner trying to get a quick laugh. That was an actual sentence uttered by the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Ted Stepien. Stepien owned the team from 1980-1983, a short reign compared to most owners of other NBA franchises. But in just those three years he obliterated the Cavalier image.

With a mix of racist quotes, questionable basketball decisions, firing beloved personal, and cheap contractual decisions he brought Cleveland to a bleak outlook. He threatened to move the team to Toronto, and while he may have been bluffing, there was serious concern that Northeast Ohio would lose it’s team. Until Gordon Gund came in and grudgingly took over the franchise, the original savior of the tea, before LeBron. He managed to rebuild both the on and off court product. The rest is history.

Stepien was born in 1925 and had a rather uneventful childhood in Pittsburgh. His father was a railroad inspector, and Stepien would serve in world war two as part of the Air Force serving as a navigator bomber. Following the war he moved to Cleveland with just 500 dollars to his name. Stepien founded the Nationwide Advertising Service Inc,. Nationwide ran advertisements from prospective employers in 80 Ohio newspapers. Eventually the business skyrocketed and now has over 30,000 locations in the United States alone. Still it required some peculiar business dealings for Stepein to end up as the owner of the Cavs.

Former owner Nick Mileti was in debt and his debtors were looming over the situation, like vultures over a lion pack, just waiting for something bad to happen.

On February 4th, 1980 Mileti sold his share of the Cavs (21%) to Lou Mitchell. Mitchell added shares from numerous part owners to increase his share to 37%. But when he bought the franchise Mitchell was unaware of how deep Cleveland was in debt. A week after buying the team he realized they didn’t have the money to pay employees their March payroll. He needed over 200,000 in loans just to cover expenses. He had to get out. Thirty days later Mitchell would sell the Cavs to his cousin, Joe Zingale. Mitchell lost a million dollars in just two months.

Now, back to Mileti. Mileti was also the owner of the Cleveland Indians. During his time as owner he had more than 40 minority partners with one of them being Stepien. His company was peaking and Ted had a boatload of money. Stepien was also desperate to become a major player in Cleveland sports. So they reeled him in. Ted Stepien was now the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Some of the stories from the Stepein era were downright hilarious. One time he went to the top of the Terminal Tower and started dropping softballs hoping members of the professional softball he team owned would catch them. Predictably they didn’t, Stepien hit a woman breaking her wrist, hit another man in the shoulder and dented a car.

Stepein created a semi-sleazy dance team he dubbed, “The Teddi Bears’ ‘ and hosted lingerie shows at the bar he owned in Cleveland, hand picking the 33 dancers.

Perhaps most memorable of all was when he spent five grand to create a polka (Czech dance) for the team fight song. I don’t know about you, but this is exactly what I want to listen to before I play a game to get hyped.

But these funny acts were much less common compared to the disastrous actions Stepein took elsewhere.

Ted considered himself an outsider. He had Polish heritage and embraced it. Stepein wanted to prove the, “dumb pole” steroytpe wrong. He believed other businessmen were inherently against him and didn’t respect him. They didn’t of course. But it was more because he had some Donald Sterling esque quotes.

Stepein’s views on race is enough to give me a headache. He was a self acclaimed desegregationist. As in he believed his team should have an even 6/5 split of black and white players and believed that was the best method to running a business. The Cavs owner was on record saying,

“It’s a fact that having more white players would be beneficial from a marketing standpoint”.

“No team should be all white and no team should be all black, either. That’s what bothers me about the NBA: You’ve got a situation here where blacks represent little more than 5 percent of the market, yet most teams are at least 75 percent black and the New York Knicks are 100 percent black. Teams with that kind of makeup can’t possibly draw from a suitable cross section of fans.”

“blacks don’t buy many tickets and they don’t buy many of the products advertised on TV. Let’s face it, running an NBA team is like running any other business and those kinds of factors have to be considered.”

Can you imagine an NBA owner saying these things today? He would instantly be forced to resign. Instead Stepein was allowed to continue to run the Cavs into the ground. Free agents wouldn’t sign to Cleveland. Partly because of Ted’s racist quotes and also because he was such a cheapskate.

It was rumored that Stepein would refuse to give out the required per Diem money which is what NBA players use to purchase food on road trips. In a league where players were paid substantially less then they are today and many young players had to get a summer job this was a death blow to any free agency chances Cleveland had. This later would prompt the NBA to make a rule where per Diem money was strictly tracked.

Along with these baffling decisions outside of the office, Stepein made a bunch of terrible gm moves that have changed the landscape of NBA history.
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Stepein’s first decision was to fire the previous coach. This was also his only smart decision. Unfortunately he chose the worst possible replacement. Your local crackhead would have been a better coach for Clevealnd then Bill Musselman who was the most hated coach in Northeast Ohio at the time.

In 1972 Musselman was the coach for Minnesota University. During a game against Ohio State several Gophers attacked Buckeye center Luke White and several of his teammates. After Musselman’s departure Minnesota was hit with a dozen NCAA violations. Eight years later the hate for Musselman was still strong in Ohio.

The only reason Stepein even hired Musselman was because he was friends with Yankees general manager Bill Martin and put in a good word. The Yankees always find a way to mess with Cleveland.

In his first preseason game he played Randy Smith 48 minutes. He claimed he was trying to get his players into shape. Playing players 48 minutes was a great way to get them hurt.

Ted now had a coach next he needed a gm.

Don Delaney was a friend of Stepien who coached his pro softball team, he was also a respectable JUCO basketball coach at Lakeland Community College. The Cleveland Owner decided he would be fit to be the team’s new general manager.

Delaney responded with, “you want me to do what?”.

He obviously accepted, the offer was too enticing to turn down. And while Don was a much more respectable man then Musselman or Stepien he was extremely underqualified and way over his head. Which was once a dream job was now a nightmare.

Luckily for Delaney he didn’t call most of the shots, that’s because Stepien believed he had a special gift for predicting NBA talent. This arrogance led him to make a multitude of terrible trades and draft choices. In 1982 the Cavs took John Bagley and David Magley. Ted was very amused that their two top picks rhymed. Bagley peaked at 11.7 ppg for the Cavs while Magley recorded just 56 minutes for them. Along with making some bad draft picks, the worst trade of all-time happened under Stepien.

Mavericks Receive

Cavaliers 1983-1986 unprotected first round pick

Cavaliers Receive

Jerome Whitehead, Geoff Huston, Richard Washington, Mike Bratz

If you’re like me you don’t know any of these players and that speaks volumes. The Cavs essentially traded their entire future for average players with limited potential. Cleveland also traded their 1982 first round pick to the Lakers which ended up being James Worthy. It got so bad that the NBA decided to step in and had to approve any trade the Cavs made. While they eventually residened the need for approval it did still cause a new rule to be implemented, the stepien rule. The rule barred teams from trading consecutive first round picks, stating that a team must always have a first round pick every other year.

Let’s go back and see how Musselman was doing coaching. Not great. Musselman limped to a 25-46 start before he stepped down and was replaced by Delaney. Delaney started the next season, coaching for 15 games before assistant Bob Kloopenburg replaced him. After just three games Stpien hired Chuck Daley to become the new head coach. After just 93 days, 41 games Daley was fired and Musselman returned as the coach going an abysmal 2-21. Daley would become a legendary coach with the Detroit Pistons. In just three years the Cavs had gone through five coaches with six stints. That type of instability is how you run a franchise into the ground.

As Ted put dismal teams on the court fan support began to plummet. In the late 1970s 20,000 fans packed Richfield Coliseumium, now you would be lucky to see 5,000. Stepein didn’t make it better by constantly butting heads with fan favorite media members.

Joe Tait was the beloved voice of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a fan favorite of the team. He also was not a fan of Stepein’s regime. The Cavs new front office alienated Tait and after one year he left to call games for the New Jersey Nets. The local media promoted Tait’s final home game as a tribute to the revered broadcaster. 20,175 fans packed the stadium, shattering the season high. Throughout the night fans chanted,

“𝗪𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗧 𝗝𝗢𝗘, 𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗧 𝗚𝗢!”

It was another deplorable episode in the Stepien era, fans threw food and screamed obscurities at Ted who was attending the game.

By 1983 it was even worse. The franchise was on life support. That 5,000 attendance figure I mentioned earlier? It had managed to fall even further to the point no more than 1,000 fans would be in attendance. In January 1983 Stepien talked on air about how he wanted to move the team to Toronto, or anywhere really. NBA interest was at an all-time low.

The league wide average attendance was 10,220. The Cavs brought in 3,916, their lowest since their inaugural season, and even that number was ridiculously bloated. Free tickets were easy to find, it was an embarrassment to say you had bought a ticket to a Cavs game. Stepien had lost 20 million in just three years. Cleveland basketball was dead in the water, that was until Gordon Gund came in and saved the franchise.

The NBA desperately wanted to preserve the Cleveland market despite the current state of the franchise. At one point the league hatched a plan to merge them with a fellow struggling franchise, the Pacers. The NBA needed a competent owner but they couldn’t remove Stepien due to legal reasons. So they looked for someone to purchase the franchise, Gordon Gund was the best, and perhaps only candidate.

Gund bought Richfield Coliseum in 1981, the NBA begged for Gund to take over but he wasn’t interested.

“I can get the franchise for you sheep” NBA commissioner David Stern told Gund.

“Why would I want it?” Gund replied.

The franchise, “was a mockery” as he put it and it looked to have little room for improvement. Stepien had traded it’s next four first round picks. Stern realized he needed to come up with something to entice Gund or the Cavs were as good as gone.

David suggested that Gordon would be able to “buy” first round picks from the league, something that was unprecedented and unpopular. This along with the salary cap Stern planned on introducing was enough to get Gund on board.

In 1983 Gund purchased the Cavs from Stepien in a complicated business deal. Those picks Gund bought became pivotal in rebuilding the team. The 1983 pick was used for Roy Hinson who was later traded to draft Brad Daughtery. The 1986 pick became Ron Harper. Both these players along with Mark Price and Larry Nance ushered in a new era of Cleveland basketball. From 1988-1966 the Cavs made the playoffs every year but one, winning 57 games in 1989 and 1992. A record for wins that would not fall until 2009.

Gordon replaced the team’s logo which was originally a “swashbuckling swordsman” was now the nickname ‘Cavs’ with a stylized V made of a net and basket. Attendance figures began to rise, eventually even getting even higher than the Pre-Stepien era. In 15 of the 16 seasons between 1990 and 2005 Cleveland set a new attendance record.

Who knows what would have happened if Gund didn’t buy the Cavs. They most likely wouldn’t be in Cleveland, possibly they would have merged with the Pacers, or moved to Toronto, or even disbanded. Gund eventually sold the team to Dan Gilbert in 2005 but retained a minority ownership. In 2016, 33 years after Gund bought the franchise the Cavs won the championship in an improbable 3-1 comeback and the man who saved the Cavaliers earned his ring.