Glimpsing Glimmers in Chunks of Coal
As a giver, Inman built this championship team with an approach that mirrored C. J. Skender’s: seeing
potential in players where others didn’t. “Inman wanted a complete portfolio on everybody he was
interested in,” writes Wayne Thompson. “No doubt that is what made him so successful in finding
diamonds in the rough.” Half of the top six scorers on the championship team—and five of the top
nine—were drafted late by Inman, in the second or third round. “He was way ahead of the curve in
seeing potential,” noted Steve Duin. “Stu, in the subculture of basketball gurus, was near the apex. He
was considered a genius,” said Mavericks president Norm Sonju. In a chronicle of the 1984 draft,
Filip Bondy writes that Inman was viewed by many as “the best personnel man in the league. He was
so good, so respected, that other clubs would track his scouting missions and listen very carefully to
rumors about which players might interest him.”
In the 1970s, most basketball teams were focusing heavily on observable physical talents such as
speed, strength, coordination, agility, and vertical leap. Inman thought it was also important to pay
attention to the inner attributes of players, so he decided to begin evaluating their psychological
makeup. Before a draft, along with reviewing a player’s statistics and watching him play, Inman
wanted to understand him as a person. He would watch players closely during the pregame warm-up
to see how hard they worked, and he would interview their coaches, family members, friends, and
teachers about issues of motivation, mind-set, and integrity. According to the Oregonian, “Inman
made his reputation by finding undervalued players.... His eye for talent was as sharp as his feel for
people. He wanted players whose character and intelligence were as high as their vertical jumps.”
In 1970, Inman joined the Blazers, then a brand-new NBA team, as chief talent scout. That
summer, he held an open tryout for people to put their basketball skills to the test. It was partially a
public relations stunt to generate local excitement about basketball, but Inman was also looking for
players who had gone overlooked by other teams. None of the guys from the open tryout made the
team, but Inman’s fascination with unlikely candidates would bear fruit several years later. In 1975,
with the twenty-fifth pick in the second round of the draft, Inman selected a little-known Jewish
forward named Bob Gross. Coaches and fans thought it was a mistake. Gross had played college
basketball at Seattle, averaging ten points a game, and then transferred to Long Beach State, where he
averaged just six and a half points in his junior year. “The story of Bob Gross’s collegiate and
professional basketball life was that nobody noticed him,” wrote Frank Coffey in a book about the
Blazers, “until they really started looking hard.”
Inman happened to see a game between Long Beach and Michigan State, and his interest was
piqued when Gross hustled to block a shot on what should have been an easy Spartan layup on a fast
break. Inman took a closer look and saw more evidence of Gross’s work ethic: he more than doubled
his scoring average from his junior to senior year, when he put in more than sixteen points a game.
Inman “discovered a jewel, a consistent, hardworking, extraordinarily effective basketball player,”
Coffey wrote. Gross was praised by one of his college coaches for “unselfish dedication to the team.”
When the Blazers made the Finals in his third NBA season, Gross delivered, pouring in an average of
seventeen points per game. In the pivotal games five and six, he guarded Julius Erving and led the
Blazers by scoring twenty-five and twenty-four points. According to Bill Walton, “Bob Gross was the
‘grease guy’ for that team. He made it flow... Bob would run relentlessly, guard and defend...