In 2006, a movie titled We Are Marshall was released. Based off of true events, the movie documents the tragedy that struck the Marshall University football team back in 1970 when their team plane crashed, killing the entire team and coaching staff. The movie then shows how the team rebuilt itself in the years following. This begs the unimaginable question – what if something like this was to happen in the NBA? The answer? The Disaster Draft.
Disaster Draft: The NBA’s Contingency Plan
Crisis Averted
Many people don’t know this, but the NBA almost had a very similar story to the disaster that struck the Marshall football team. In 1960, the then Minneapolis Lakers (modern-day Los Angeles Lakers) almost met the same fate. On January 18, 1960, the Lakers played an away game in St. Louis and had to catch a flight back home. Unfortunately, there was a blizzard going on.
A rookie on the Lakers at the time, Elgin Baylor, recalls the awful night.
“We were playing cards, and then the lights went out, and it got cold, and for a while, the pilot didn’t say anything. And finally everybody wanted to know what was going on, and he said the only thing that was working was the generator. (Not) the instrument panel, nothing. They couldn’t see anything.”
Since nothing was working, they couldn’t return to St. Louis, and they were still too far away from Minneapolis. The blizzard continued to get worse, causing the pilots to have to reach out of the window to brush the snow off of the glass so they could see. With a frostbitten face and the plane running out of gas, the pilot said to the Lakers what every person fears to hear on a plane: “We are going down.”
Miraculously, Baylor said it was the smoothest landing of any plane he had ever been on as the plane touched down in a cornfield in Carroll, Iowa. What the team didn’t know at the time was that about 75 yards ahead of where the plane stopped was a massive cutoff that would have caused them to plummet to their death.
The Disaster Draft
With the team saved by nothing short of a miracle, the NBA knew that they needed to add protections in case if something like that ever happened again. The NBA then implemented the Disaster Draft.
The Disaster Draft will take place if and only if five players on a team are “killed or dismembered” in the same accident. Something similar to an expansion draft would happen, but the unaffected teams are allowed to protect fewer players than a normal expansion draft would allow. In a Disaster Draft, teams are only allowed to protect five of their players. Everyone else would be up for grabs by the team that lost their players.
Luckily, the Disaster Draft has not been needed, and hopefully, it never will be.
One interesting question has been thought about with the Disaster Draft – if a team had to field a team from the Disaster Draft, would they be in playoff contention? Just think about the talent. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
(Main Photo Courtesy of the LA Times)