Part 20

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary: In the previous nineteen chapters of this series we recalled the history of the Rochester Royals’ transformation into the Houston Oilers and the Oilers’ subsequent successes and failures in their new home; the short but eventful lives of the IBL and the ABA as they both attempted to supplant the  NBA as the dominant force in pro basketball; Houston’s back-to-back 1989 and 1990 NBA league titles; their painful 1991 NBA Finals loss to the New York Knicks; their premature exit from the 1992 NBA postseason; their return to the top of the mountain with their 1993 NBA Finals victory over the Chicago  Bulls; their triumphant rematch against the Knicks in the ’94 NBA Finals; the departure of Michael Jordan to Chicago as a free agent; the Oilers’ 1995 NBA Finals victory against the Indiana Pacers; their defeat by the Bulls in the 1996 NBA Finals; their stunning early exit from the ’97 NBA playoffs; the opening of the Enron Center; and the controversy which surrounded the Oilers’ loss to the Bulls in the 1998 Finals.  In this episode we’ll look at how the first-ever lockout in NBA history affected the Oilers’ performance during the ’98-’99 season.

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Before July of 1998 the mere concept of an NBA work stoppage would have seemed so absurd as to be unthinkable. The NFL might occasionally have some labor-management problems, Major League Baseball seemed to be in a nearly perpetual state of civil war between owners and players, and even the NHL was experiencing  its first taste of labor squabbling, but nobody believed that a strike or lockout could ever interrupt professional basketball in America. That is, until NBA commissioner David Stern announced on July 1^st that the start of the ’98-’99 season had been put on hold since the league’s owners had been unable to revive stalled CBA¹ talks with the NBA Players Association.

It was like an earthquake had hit NBA fandom; for the first time since the league’s establishment in 1946, there was a genuine possibility the season might not be played at all. There were few cities where hoops lovers took the news harder than in Houston, where the sting of losing the ’98 NBA Finals was still  fresh in the minds of Oiler fans. At least after the ’96 Finals defeat there’d been some hope of a second chance the following year-- this time, however, it looked like even that small comfort might be taken away the Oilers.

Hopes for a quick end to the standoff were fated to go unanswered. The owners and the Players Association were as fixed in their respective negotiating positions as a fly stuck in amber and showed little if any sign of even slightly altering them; the prospect of the entire ’98-’99 NBA season being canceled outright was becoming more realistic-- and more alarming --with every day that the lockout continued. In fact the public relations staff at the NBA commissioner’s office was forced to do serious damage  control when, in mid-September of 1998, a Miami TV news station erroneously announced the season had been officially called off.²

The Oilers players did everything they could to avoid getting rusty while the lockout dragged on. Some put in hours of practice at their local high school or college gyms; others took part in exhibition games; a few took their talents abroad to play in Europe or the Far East. But every one of them wanted more than anything to get back onto an NBA court. While they rode out the impasse between the Players’ Association and the league’s senior executives, the general mood among basketball fans turned angrier  and angrier with every passing day the lockout continued.

One of the most dramatic expressions of that anger among Houston fans came in early November, when over two hundred Oilers season ticket-holders got together to take out a full-page ad in  the Houston Chronicle essentially saying to players and owners "A plague on both your houses". Shortly after the ad was printed one of its creators, a car dealer and well-known caller to local AM sports radio shows, staged a mock funeral in which a casket full of Oilers team merchandise was tossed into a landfill. "They(NBA players and owners) are treating us like garbage," the indignant salesman told KHOU-TV, "so we should treat them in the same way."  The pressure on the opposing sides of the lockout to achieve some kind of compromise grew more intense as Thanksgiving Day came and went.

By Christmas Eve half the basketball fans in America were ready to hang David Stern by his necktie, and most of the other half had come to view NBA Players’ Association president Patrick Ewing as Public Enemy No. 1. So it came as something of a relief when on January 1^st, 1999 players and owners finally signed a new collective bargaining agreement and the lockout came to a long-overdue end. With the agreement in place, the Houston players and coaching staff sought to bring their focus back onto the job of regaining the O’Brien trophy....

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...but first there was some fence-mending to be done between the Oilers and their understandably disgruntled fans. So much of the regular season had already been lost that some people in the Energy City had sworn off the NBA for good, and plenty of others were still contemplating taking that drastic step. In the knowledge even the tiniest PR misstep could have endless negative consequences for the franchise, Houston’s front office mounted a no-holds-barred campaign aimed at repairing the team’s seriously frayed ties with its fan base and issued a series of memos urging its players to be on their best behavior when out in public.

 However, the most effective remedy for any PR troubles the Oilers had in the wake of the lockout turned out to be the simplest one: winning games. In their first week back in action after the lockout ended the Oilers won six straight contests, one of them being a 119-116 overtime victory against the Lakers at the Inglewood Forum in one of the last regular season meetings at that arena between the longtime Western Conference rivals. Even with the abbreviated regular season schedule Houston was still able to compile a highly respectable record; they would finish the lockout-shortened ’98-’99 campaign at 31-19, good enough to earn them the #2 seed in the 1999 NBA Western Conference playoffs and a chance to bring the O’Brien Trophy back to the Energy City.

Unfortunately for Houston hoops fans, in the opening round of the postseason the Oilers played more like a #8 seed than a #2. Facing the Sacramento Kings, a team most sportswriters that year expected to fade from the Western Conference playoffs quickly, Houston barely managed to pull out an overtime victory in the first game of the series and blew a twenty-point fourth quarter lead in the second game to end up losing that one by ten points. When the contestants came out to Sacramento’s Arco Arena for the third game, some odds-makers gave Houston little better than 50-50 odds to survive and advance to the next round.

That assessment turned out to be wildly optimistic. In front of the largest home crowd Arco Arena had seen for an NBA playoff game up to that time, the Kings mopped the floor with the Oilers in Game 3, clobbering them 122-93. Sacramento forward and Michigan alumnus Chris Webber burned Houston for twenty-nine of the Kings’ 122 points that night; on defense, he blocked twelve of Houston’s last fourteen shots in the third quarter and early in the fourth quarter made a steal off Felton Spencer that killed  a potential game-tying Oilers rally. A few nights later, Webber closed the book on Houston’s ’99 Western Conference playoff run as he drilled them for 44 points to help lead the Kings to a 106-91 series-clinching victory over Houston.

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Some people in hindsight have suggested that the Oilers’ misfortunes in the ’99 postseason may have been partly the result of the bad karma being generated by the corporation for who their  arena was named after, and they may have a valid point. Houston’s stunning early exit from the ’99 Western Conference playoffs came just as the truth about Enron’s financial chicanery was beginning to surface in the media, and naturally there were some people on the Oilers’ franchise payroll who worried that the scandal could very well rub off on them. Publicly the Houston team brass’ only response when questioned about the backroom intrigues of Enron’s top executives was "no comment", but behind closed doors they too fretted the Enron affair might undo much of the work the team had done to try and restore its good name after the lockout. The fact that Enron and the Oilers were two completely separate corporate entities wasn’t much comfort-- the franchise still had to play in a building named after a company whose reputation in the business world was coming apart like wet paper.

As the 1999-2000 NBA season began and the Enron scandal heated up, fears of the scandal’s taint overwhelming the Oilers intensified. Desperate to avoid even the most tenuous connection with the legal and financial disgrace that was eating the once seemingly invincible energy giant alive, Oilers team ownership hastened to try and convince Enron to agree to a deal under which the Enron Center’s naming rights to another company; Enron, in urgent need of cash to keep its corporate ship afloat, was just as quick to consent to the proposal. The real trick was finding a company willing to put its logo on the arena in place of Enron’s crooked³ E...