The draft-night trade for the third overall pick had shaken the entire league and stolen everyone's attention. But hardly anyone noticed that, a little later that night, the Boston Celtics quietly accomplished something else with another pick they held.
The twenty-first pick.
This was the Spurs' first-round pick that Lin Qi had pried out of Popovich's three-team trade during the "four-day window." He had already packaged the twentieth pick with Perdue and sent it to the Pistons for the eighth pick, the lever that secured the third overall selection. But he had kept the twenty-first pick firmly in hand, waiting for this very moment.
When Stern announced, "Boston Celtics, twenty-first pick," Lin Qi submitted a name.
Michael Finley.
A 2.01-meter swingman out of the University of Wisconsin, he was strong and well-rounded, able to drive and shoot-a classic scoring wing. In the actual course of history, the Phoenix Suns would have selected him at this spot, and he would have developed into a two-time All-Star who reliably delivered twenty points a game.
Now, however, he wore green.
The studio commentators barely reacted to the selection... To them, a swingman taken twenty-first hardly qualified as news on a wild night when the Celtics had just gambled the third overall pick on a high schooler.
As draft night drew to a close, Lin Qi also made a small deal that drew no attention.
He traded away Elliott Perry.
The goggles-wearing third-string point guard, excellent at pushing the pace, had added a dash of flavor to the Celtics' chaotic tempo last season. But with Sam Cassell now running the show and Lin Qi quietly planning to make the backcourt younger, there was less and less reason that Perry's role had to be retained.
In return, Lin Qi received two things: the signing rights to a second-round rookie and a 1996 second-round pick, protected through the top forty-five.
That rookie was Eric Snow, an unremarkable-looking point guard with modest scoring ability but solid playmaking and fierce defense. To everyone else, this was an inconsequential move, exchanging a fringe veteran for a second-rounder who probably would not pan out.
But Lin Qi knew that a pure playmaking point guard like Snow-smart, tough defensively, and undemanding of the ball-was exactly the low-maintenance piece to put beside future ball handlers like Garnett and Eddie Jones. With a second-round pick thrown in as spare change, this deal was no loss.
After draft night, it was time to settle which veterans would stay and which would go.
First came Robert Parish.
Last summer, Lin Qi had retained the forty-one-year-old veteran with a contract paying $3 million in the first year and a $2 million player option for the second. Now that the first year was up, the decision whether to exercise that $2 million option rested with Parish himself.
Lin Qi did not try to persuade him. He knew that, given The Chief's temperament, any persuasion would be unnecessary.
A few days later, Parish sent word to Lin Qi through someone else... It was as brief as the man himself: "I'm picking up that option. One more year."
Lin Qi smiled. He could more or less guess what the veteran was thinking. For one thing, this might truly be Boston Garden's final season, and the veteran who had won three championships in that arena wanted to see it through to the end. For another, the team now had a young Garnett, a future monster who needed one of the league's finest veteran centers to teach him, hands-on, how to play with his head and how to establish position and do the dirty work inside.
Parish never said any of this. But by "picking up the option," he had expressed it all.
The veteran was willing to serve as ballast for another year. For a young team about to welcome Garnett and Finley and still needing to develop its chemistry, that was priceless.
Second came Dominique Wilkins.
This case was far harder than Parish's.
Wilkins had played far too well during his year in Boston. His 18.7 points per game and those cold-blooded fourth-quarter jumpers in the playoffs had forced the entire league to swallow the words "he's old" and made twenty thousand Boston fans chant his name again.
Yet it was precisely because he had "played too well" that he could no longer stay.
Having proved his worth, the thirty-five-year-old Wilkins was in demand on the free-agent market again. Meanwhile, the Celtics were ready to develop the young group of Garnett, Finley, Eddie Jones, and Sam Cassell, while maintaining strict control over payroll... Lin Qi could not, and should not, give another expensive contract to a thirty-five-year-old veteran.
What was more, an offer had arrived from Europe that Boston simply could not match.
An Italian team offered an astronomical contract worth nearly $7 million. In Europe, Wilkins could not only collect a sum no NBA team could offer him, but also enjoy the status of the franchise's centerpiece and all the touches he wanted. For a thirty-five-year-old former scoring champion looking for another payday in the twilight of his career, it was an entirely reasonable choice.
This was neither abandonment nor betrayal. Both sides understood that their partnership had reached its natural end.
But Lin Qi did not want Wilkins to leave behind nothing more than a cold line of season statistics in the team's history.
He invited Wilkins to his office.
"Dominique, I know we can't keep you." Lin Qi went straight to the point, without a trace of insincerity. "Europe is offering you far more money than I can. And... you deserve that money."
Wilkins was a little surprised. He had expected an awkward negotiation about taking a pay cut to stay.
"I'm not going to ask you to take less money and stay." Lin Qi looked at him. "You fought for this team for an entire season. You proved you weren't old. You brought the Garden to a boil again. That's enough. Go get the money you deserve and enjoy the status you deserve."
Wilkins remained silent, waiting for him to continue. He knew someone like Lin Qi would not have called him in merely to deliver a few polished words of farewell.
"But before you go..." Lin Qi leaned forward slightly. "Help me leave something behind."
"What?"
"Not for me," Lin Qi said. "For those two kids."
Wilkins froze for a moment.
"Garnett. Finley." Lin Qi named them. "One is 2.11 meters tall, runs and jumps like a guard, and is still a high school kid, a blank slate. The other is strong and can score in every way, but he's too rigid. He doesn't know how to turn his talent into a killing blade."
Lin Qi looked Wilkins in the eye. "Dominique, I see traces of you in both these kids. All that scoring ability that made you The Human Highlight Film-I couldn't buy it for any amount of money. Before you leave... leave a little of it with them."
Wilkins was silent for a long time.
He remembered the humiliation of being traded in Atlanta, the talk that "he was old" during his brief stay with the Clippers, the respect Lin Qi and Auerbach had shown by inviting him to Boston and giving him a starring role and a stage, and the playoff night when twenty thousand people had chanted his name again.
This team had given him a respectable season, a season of dignity.
And now, Lin Qi was offering him an even more dignified exit... Not "you're old, so you're being sent away," but "pass the spark to the next generation, then go earn the money you deserve."
Wilkins slowly nodded.
"...All right," he said. "Give me two weeks."
Over the next two weeks, a private coaching course that the rest of the league never got to see unfolded inside the Celtics' practice facility.
Wilkins did not have Garnett start by learning to pound away with his back to the basket.
"Don't rush to turn yourself into a center," the veteran told the boy who was taller than him yet as skinny as a bamboo pole. "At your height, only knowing how to back people down would be a colossal waste. The first thing you need to learn is how to face the basket."
So everything he taught Garnett involved facing up: the triple-threat stance, the deception of the jab step, the midrange jumper from the elbow, the baseline spin, and the first decision after catching the ball... Drive, shoot, or pass.
Garnett learned incredibly quickly. The gifted boy was like a sponge, absorbing Wilkins' decades of scoring wisdom bit by bit. After two weeks, he no longer just mindlessly passed after catching the ball facing the basket; he was beginning to dare to use jab steps. His elbow jumper was taking shape, and he was bolder about going coast to coast after grabbing a rebound.
Most importantly, his mindset changed... For the first time, the boy clearly realized that he was not a traditional blue-collar power forward who could only do the dirty work. He was a future monster whose face-up skills had been developed early.
With Finley, Wilkins taught something else.
Finley was well-rounded, steady, and smart, but he had one flaw... He was too rigid. On every possession, he searched for the "most correct" choice, often missing his own chance to shoot as a result.
"Stop looking for the right choice every time," Wilkins said, cutting straight to the heart of it. "Sometimes, you are the right choice."
Those words split through Finley's mind like a shaft of light.
Wilkins taught him not to hesitate after the catch, how to take one dribble into a pull-up jumper, when to cut from the weak side, how to punish bigger defenders from midrange, and how to overpower smaller defenders with a back-to-the-basket spin. After two weeks, Finley was more decisive about shooting off the catch, had a lethal one-dribble pull-up, and no longer shied away from contact when finishing. More importantly... he began daring to call for the ball himself with the second unit.
With his own hands, Wilkins had lit the "killer instinct" a scorer needed.
On the day the two weeks of special training ended, Wilkins offered no hugs and gave no farewell speech.
The old killer had never been the sentimental sort.
He simply walked up to Garnett and tossed him a videotape.
"Watch it every day."
Then he tossed another to Finley.
"You too."
Finley caught the tape, looked at it, and asked in some confusion, "Is this... your highlights?"
Wilkins glanced at him.
"No."
He picked up his bag and turned toward the door, leaving them with one sentence. "It's the possessions where I got stopped."
The two young men stood frozen.
Wilkins did not turn around. At the door, with his back to them, he left them one final sentence: "Before you learn how to score, first learn why you can't."
The door closed softly behind him.
Garnett and Finley lowered their heads and looked at the tapes in their hands, saying nothing for a long time.
At that moment, they might not yet have fully understood the weight of those words. But years later, when one became one of the league's greatest power forwards and the other an All-Star who reliably delivered twenty points a game, they would remember that afternoon in the summer of 1995...
A scoring champion whom the whole world had called "old" had handed them a lifetime of scoring wisdom before leaving, along with all the lessons from the times when he "couldn't score."
And so the spark was passed on.
On the day Wilkins flew to Italy, Lin Qi went to the airport to see him off.
The two men exchanged few pleasantries.
"Lin Qi." Just before entering the security checkpoint, Wilkins stopped and looked back at him. "Those two kids have something."
It was the highest praise the old killer, so sparing with compliments, could offer.
"Especially the tall one." Wilkins paused, his eyes holding the certainty of someone who had seen it all. "I've played basketball my whole life and seen plenty of geniuses. But that kind of height with that kind of agility... I've never seen it before. Lin Qi, you really might have stumbled onto a treasure this time."
"I didn't stumble onto it." Lin Qi smiled. "I snatched it."
Wilkins smiled too. He patted Lin Qi's shoulder, turned, and carried his bag through security, toward the nearly $7 million in dignity and reward that belonged to the twilight of his career.
Lin Qi stood where he was, watching the veteran's retreating back until he disappeared into the crowd.
A veteran had taken his final bow with dignity.
And the spark he left behind was quietly burning inside two young men.
Lin Qi turned and looked toward Boston.
Wilkins was gone. Elliott was gone. Barros was gone...
A group of the old faces had been seen off.
But a brand-new, younger, more terrifying team was rising on the horizon.
Every bet had been placed.
Next, it would be time for these young men to tell the world on the court whether Lin Qi, this time, was a madman or a prophet.