Johnny Dawkins spent three seasons in San Antonio, from the fall of 1986 to the spring of 1989. Those were dark days for Spurs fans. Alvin Robertson couldn’t carry the weight of being a franchise player. Mike Mitchell, Artis Gilmore and Johnny Moore were headed towards retirement, and there wasn’t a lot of promise for the future to be found in players like Frank Brickowski and Kevin Duckworth. The Spurs finished 6th in the ’86-’87 season and 5th in ’88 under Bob Weiss and 5th in ’89 under Larry Brown.
But Dawkins showed tremendous promise. He was averaging 16 points and 7 assists per game when an injury hampered him in his second season. He spent most of his third season in rehab before being traded away to the 76ers, the season before the Spurs acquired David Robinson in the draft.
I always liked Johnny Dawkins as a player and often thought the Spurs might have beaten the Blazers in the 1990 playoffs had Dawkins been in the backcourt with Rod Strickland, instead of Maurice Cheeks or Vernon Maxwell. He was a disciplined player, the kind of player that would fit in well with Pop’s system today. I’m sure he’ll bring that same discipline to Stanford as their new head coach.
Johnny Dawkins has taken a precise, if not speedy, route to his new appointment: head coach of Stanford basketball. It is his first head-coaching job, after 11 years on the staff at Duke, where he is in the Hall of Fame as a player.
When Dawkins was an NBA rookie with the San Antonio Spurs, he and crusty Spurs veteran Johnnie Moore were shooting around in preseason camp when Moore inexplicably took Dawkins’ ball and flung it into the stands. The annoyed Dawkins knew nothing about Moore other than his old-school reputation but decided the best course of action was to grab Moore’s ball and throw it out the door of the arena.
“He looked at me,” Dawkins said, “and I thought, ‘OK, it’s going to be on now, one way or the other,’ and then he goes, ‘You’re a crazy rookie.’ And laughed. He took me under his wing after that.”
