In the previous twenty 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 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; the Oilers’ controversial 1998 Finals loss to the Bulls; and the effects of the NBA’s first-ever lockout on the Oilers’ performance during the ’98-’99 season. In this installment we’ll review the name change for the franchise’s home arena sparked by the Enron scandal; the arrival of Chinese basketball sensation Yao Ming in the NBA; and the franchise’s response to 9/11.

The Oilers went into the 1999-2000 NBA season trying to solve two rather thorny problems: 1)how to bounce back from their unfortunate ’99 Western Conference playoff collapse and 2)how to disassociate themselves from the scandal that was tearing Enron’s once-sterling image to pieces. The second problem turned out to be much easier to solve than the first-- the naming rights to the Enron Center were bought by the popular Sonic restaurant chain in the summer of 1999 and the arena was hastily re-christened as the Sonic Center.

       As for the roster of the team which would be playing in it, that was a whole other story. Houston head coach Rick Pitino was essentially going into the new season with a brand-new squad; most of the players who had been with the franchise for his past playoff runs were either retired or lost to other clubs via free agency or trades. The rest were showing their age, especially on defense....a fact which did not bode well for any aspirations the Oilers had of regaining the NBA league championship. Most of the national sports media, sensing that the glory days of the Pitino era were over, projected the Oilers would be lucky to make it as far as the second round of the 2000 NBA playoffs. Some thought it questionable if Houston would make the 2000 playoffs period; a Sports Illustrated opinion article published two weeks before the NBA’s 1999-2000 regular season opener argued that the Oilers should forget about the postseason and concentrating on securing for themselves the best possible position in the next NBA draft so they could get started on rebuilding their franchise.

    As one might expect, this kind of thinking didn’t sit well with the Oilers skipper; in his final press conference before the ’99-’00 NBA regular season started, Pitino made it crystal clear he objected to the Sports Illustrated article’s pessimistic tone and said his franchise was as always making it their primary goal to win the NBA league championship. But a 4-10 start, combined with a rash of injuries and the coming of age of Dallas as a bona fide Western Conference power under the aegis of head coach Don Nelson, didn’t do very much to encourage confidence in Houston’s ability to return to the top of the NBA mountain.

Nor did the abrupt resignation of the team’s vice-president for player scouting over what were vaguely described as “personal disagreements” with the coaching staff. By the time the 1999-2000 NBA regular season had reached the quarter pole the Oilers were in last place for the first time in nearly 25 years and more than a few hoops analysts were beginning to wonder if maybe Pitino had changed his mind about taking the SI opinion column’s advice. One Houston Post sportswriter got in legal hot water with the Oilers after submitting a column tacitly suggesting the team might well be purposely throwing at least a few of its games for the sake of landing that coveted No. 1 pick in the 2000 NBA draft; the matter was eventually settled out of court, but not before the writer in question got assigned to a different beat.

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     In December of 1999, as the rest of the world fretted over the Y2K bug that was supposedly going to shut down all computer systems at midnight on New Year’s Eve, Oilers fans were dealing with their own kind of bug: the “YUs?2K” bug, as one Houston Chronicle NBA columnist put it. The team was by now in a slump that, while not as bad as the droughts which they had endured in the mid-1970s, certainly didn’t do a lot to encourage faith that Houston would make it back to the NBA Finals. Two weeks before Christmas the Oilers sustained their worst East Coast road loss in a decade, getting blown out by the Miami Marlins in a game in which two of the Marlins’ top three scorers were sidelined with various injuries; a few days after that humiliation, they blew a fifteen-point halftime lead against the Celtics up in Boston and wound up losing by nineteen points.

     Up in Toronto, where the Oilers had traditionally manhandled the luckless Raptors to the point where some local sportswriters were openly suggesting that the 416 should bail out of the pro basketball business altogether, Houston got a serious and bitter dose of its own medicine as the Raptors took out nearly a half-decade’s worth of frustration on the Oilers. Before a pleasantly surprised crowd at the Toronto Skydome the Raptors demolished a shell-shocked Oilers team 127-98, further diminishing Houston’s already slim hopes for advancing to the 2000 NBA postseason. It seemed to some fans as if Rick Pitino’s club was devolving into a walking embodiment of the NBA version of Murphy’s Law.

    Any relief the Oilers might have felt at leaving Canada and returning to U.S. soil vanished when they visited Madison Square Garden to face the Knicks. In a textbook demonstration of how not to play professional basketball, the Oilers made scores of mental errors in the first quarter alone and stumbled to a 125-101 loss against New York; one ESPN NBA analyst openly predicted after the game that the Christmas Eve debacle at MSG would spell the end of Rick Pitino’s NBA coaching career.

    It certainly did mark the beginning of the end for his tenure in Houston-- Pitino was fired just after New Year’s Day of 2000, leaving a revolving door of assistant coaches to somehow shepherd the Oilers through the rest of January while the team’s top brass looked for a successor to take the reins and (hopefully)salvage the franchise’s bid to regain the NBA league championship. In the meantime, the seeds for a revolution in the NBA’s globalization campaign were about to be planted....

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     Given the long-standing cultural and economic ties between China and the United States, and the Chinese people’s fascination with athletic contests of all kinds, it was probably inevitable that a Chinese basketball player would one day wear the uniform of an NBA club. But a 7-foot-6 Shanghai native by the name of Yao Ming would help hasten that day. His sheer height alone made him a highly sought-after commodity; having helped to win three gold medals for China in the FIBA Asia championships as a member of
the Shanghai Sharks, one of China’s top professional teams, Yao was viewed by many American franchises-- Houston included --as a< potential cornerstone for future NBA title runs.

      But bringing Yao Stateside wouldn’t be an easy feat to pull
off; although he duly entered the 1999 NBA draft and also hired a New York-based sports talent agency to represent him in contract negotiations with the NBA franchises interested in acquiring his services, there were widespread (and not completely unreasonable) concerns among the league’s top brass that the Chinese Basketball Association, China’s principal professional basketball league and the holders of Yao’s international drafts, might yet still refuse to let him come to America. Those concerns were highly amplified when another Chinese NBA prospect, Wang Zhizhi, got into a heated dispute with China’s top sports executives over a request by the Chinese Army sponsored Bayi club to play for them in a nationwide tournament to fulfill his last contractual obligation in the CBA.

       The drama was still going on when the Oilers, having long since been knocked out of postseason contention, stumbled towards a sixth-place finish in the NBA Midwest Division to end the 1999- 2000 season. It would continue throughout most of what was a very forgettable 2000-2001 NBA season for Houston. And the conclusion of the delicate negotiations to bring Yao Ming to the U.S. would soon be overshadowed by a catastrophe which struck one September morning hundreds of miles from the Sonic Center....

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      The 2001 NBA preseason found the Oilers spending much of their time in Europe as a part of the league’s ongoing campaign to market its brand to fans overseas. On September 9th the team and its coaching staff arrived in Lisbon for the finale of a two- week European tour which had played to packed houses just about everywhere it went; the September 10th game between Houston and the Portuguese men’s national team was no exception, breaking a long-standing attendance record for an indoor sporting event in Portugal’s capital city.

      The Oilers entourage were on their way to Lisbon Portela Airport around 2:00 PM local time on the afternoon of September 11th when word reached them of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; by the time they got to the airport they learned that the FAA had shut down all major airports in the United States as a security message against possible further hijackings or attempts by the attackers’ co-conspirators to flee American soil. This meant the time would be stranded an entire ocean from home at precisely the minute when they most desperately needed to get to their loved ones and friends.

      To relieve some of the frustration of not being able to get back to the States, the Oilers players and their coaching staff began making impromptu goodwill visits to the homes and schools of some of the Portuguese fans who had come out to see their Lisbon games. This spontaneous gesture did more to help the NBA’s globalization efforts than a month’s worth of preplanned media hype; by the time the FAA allowed air travel to resume at U.S. airports, the Portuguese fans were almost pleading with the Oilers not to depart Lisbon. To ease some of the pain those fans felt at seeing their new-found friends leave Portugal, new Oilers head coach Mike Fratello arranged a deal with Portuguese national sports officials for Houston to make a return trip to the country in the summer of 2002.

       When the Oilers entourage finally made it back to the States, they were greeted by a sheer tsunami of American flags and yellow ribbons as soon as they stepped off their charter jet at Houston’s Hobby Airport. Even by Texas standards it was a larger-than-life outpouring of patriotic sentiment; all the way to their practice facilities at the University of Houston every street seemed to be lined with red, white, and blue. The Sonic Center, for its part, had lowered its own flags to half-mast in tribute to those killed in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. And in the weeks between the end of the NBA preseason and the start of the regular season, the sight of Oilers players and coaches visiting families of servicemen getting ready to ship out for combat duty in Afghanistan was an almost hourly sight on the newscasts of TV stations in and around the Houston area.

       The 2001-02 Oilers season opener saw an outpouring of intense emotion even before the opening tipoff; when the Houston fire department’s honor guard gathered in mid-court to present the colors and pay tribute to the FDNY personnel killed on 9/11, it touched off a spontaneous ovation loud enough to be heard as much as two blocks away from the Sonic Center. The fact that the Oilers lost the game 102-95 to the visiting Atlanta Knights was a decidedly secondary consideration to those in attendance-- the idea of paying tribute to the firefighters was the most important thing that night. When the club ventured to Madison Square Garden to take on the Knicks in their first road game of the ’01-’02 NBA season, Houston team executives personally presented then-New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a check for thousands of dollars’ worth of donations from Oiler fans reaching out to help the families of firefighters, police officers, and other first responders killed when the Twin Towers collapsed. Before a Sunday matinee against the Washington Nationals, the Oilers gave free admission to armed services personnel with valid idea and pledged to donate two-thirds of their profits from that game to the USO.

      Even the longstanding Celtics-Oilers rivalry seemed to diminish a few degrees as the Houston front office collaborated with their Boston counterparts to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Oiler 9/11 Memorial Fund. In fact, in January of 2002 the Celtics co-hosted an online auction to raise money for the 9/11 Fund. The C’s also donated part of the proceeds from their two regular season meetings with the Oilers to the fund.

      The Oilers finished the ’01-’02 NBA regular season in third place in the Midwest Division. Their opening round foes in the 2002 Western Conference playoffs would be the Portland Trailblazers; it was Mike Fratello’s first postseason run since he was fired from his previous coaching stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and observers throughout the pro basketball world were curious to see if he would have better luck with Houston than he had experienced in Cleveland or Atlanta.

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      But it wasn’t to be. After just squeaking by the Blazers in the first round, the Oilers were swept out of the playoffs in the second round by the eventual NBA league champion Lakers. Game 3 of the ’02 series with Los Angeles marked a particular low point in Mike Fratello’s coaching tenure at the Sonic Center; not only did Houston manage to blow a 21-point fourth quarter lead and end up losing the game by sixteen points, but Fratello managed to get himself ejected early in the third quarter after arguing with the senior referee over a technical foul against Oilers center Kelvin Kato.

    The swift eviction of Fratello’s Oilers from the 2002 Western Conference playoffs made Houston hoops fans impatient for the day to arrive when Yao Ming came to the States and joined the Oilers’ roster. Nearly seven years had passed since Houston last stood on top of the NBA mountain, and the general consensus among sports aficionados throughout the Energy City was that Yao represented their team’s last best hope for returning to that plateau. As far as they were concerned, he couldn’t put on an Oilers uniform one minute too soon. One well-known Houston area sportswriter went so far as to say Yao Ming was all that stood between Fratello and a pink slip.

     A famous proverb has it that everything’s bigger in Texas, and at least where the formal introduction of Yao Ming to the American sporting public was concerned this certainly turned out to be true. The media pool for Yao’s inaugural press conference as a member of the Houston Oilers was so big that the event had to be moved from the Sonic Center press room to the grounds of Reliant Stadium. The Chinese press contingent alone accounted for nearly a third of the total number of correspondents present at Yao’s debut Q & A session as an NBA player.

     And the crowds would only get bigger as the Oilers went through their paces during the 2002 NBA exhibition season. The hype over the newcomer from Shanghai pushed pre-season game ticket sales to ridiculous new heights; some fans came simply to watch Yao practice with his Houston teammates. When Yao made his first NBA three-pointer in a 97-91 Oilers exhibition win over the Atlanta Knights in St. Louis, the milestone was considered sufficiently significant to warrant front-page stories in three of the Lone Star State’s five biggest newspapers. The story also got covered at length in major media outlets elsewhere around the world, even drawing a brief mention on the Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera.

     The hype would get even bigger when the NBA regular season began....