Please take the following with a few grains of rather sizeable salt. This is a first-hand tale, but not an unimpeachable one.
This is a 28-year-old story, told in a conversational style rather than with forensic accuracy or corroborative evidence, and is told through the memories of a then-young man who lacked the proper guidance at the time for the complicated NBA Draft process. Misunderstandings could easily have happened, especially with the passage of time.
Anyway, those are the caveats out of the way. Now to the story. According to former Chicago Bulls forward Eddie Robinson, the San Antonio Spurs once promised to select him in the NBA Draft, despite not having a pick with which to do so.
Robinson’s Accidental Draft Entry
Appearing on a podcast earlier this week called NY Yankee Mania – a show which some reason interviewed a basketball player from two decades ago, with no obvious links to either the Yankees or to baseball, on a podcast seemingly designed around both – Robinson told the story of how he accidentally entered the NBA Draft by mistake. And he recounts doing so in large part because of the interest shown by the Spurs.
In almost all online sources, Robinson is listed as having gone undrafted in the 1999 NBA Draft. This would make sense, as he completed his fourth season of college basketball in 1998-99, when he averaged 28.0 points, 9.5 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game as a senior for Division II University of Central Oklahoma. However, according to Robinson himself – and with corroboration from RealGM, whose long-standing partnership with the NBA seems them have access to official NBA documentation on a wide variety of matters – Robinson actually entered the 1997 NBA Draft, despite not intending to.
By being an athletic specimen, Robinson had drawn the eye of NBA scouts even at the junior college level, and in his NY Yankees Mania appearance, he told the story of how the Spurs told him (or at least implied) that they would draft him in the second round of the draft. Robinson does not expressly say “second round”, admittedly – but the Spurs only had one selection in the 1997 Draft, the first overall, which they quite correctly used to draft Tim Duncan. (Their second-round pick had been sent out to the Detroit Pistons in the Sean Elliott trade some years before.)
Spurs Went In Different Tim Duncan-Shaped Direction
However, while Robinson had been able to enter his name into the draft, he was less successful at taking it out again. Unaware of how the process worked and operating without representation, Robinson’s attempt to withdraw went unheeded. Even though he had no representation, and the team he had declared for could not select him anyway, he was in the 1997 NBA Draft to stay.
Of course, Robinson’s retelling of the story on the NY Yankees Mania podcast – told with the express words “they promised to take me or whatever” – could instead be a mild misremembering that they had in fact expressed an interest in adding him to their summer league team or whatever. The Spurs’ draft capital situation is understandably not something he would need to know today, and while a young man so new to basketball toiling away at the junior college level is certainly going to remember the NBA teams who took an interest in him at that time, that is different to both remembering and understanding the particulars of both what was said and what was possible.
Nevertheless, the story, as told by Robinson himself, is that the Spurs made a draft promise that they then did not (or could not) keep.. Robinson spent two years with the Charlotte Hornets, three with the Bulls (despite signing for five), and then never played in the NBA again – seemingly, the Spurs’ interest did not extend beyond the pre-draft process. They could also have signed him before the 1999 Draft, due to the anomaly of his draft eligibility situation. But no – unless a comeback is on the cards at age 49, it seems that despite it all, Eddie Robinson will never be a Spur.
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