Word Is Out on Secret of Laker Success

What the papers reported on Oct. 3, 1991, not necessarily on page one, was that on the previous day the Lakers had dumped three second-round draft picks for some smallish guy from Seattle named Sedale. When the stranger got to town, for everyone inside the Forum who had never heard of him there was someone else who could not pronounce his name--first or last.

Sa-dale or Sa-dolly?

And what about that last name?

“I think we’ve heard it all,” says Nicole Threatt, who had married Sedale that summer and began to encounter the tangle-tongued hotel clerks and restaurant maitre d’s who struggled to get it right. “Threat, Threet, Trick, Treat, This and That.”

It makes me think of that theme song from the TV show “Cheers,” the one with the line about preferring to go to a place where everybody knows your name. Inquire around Inglewood these days and you won’t find many who don’t know this man’s name. It is only around the league and around the country that Sedale Threatt, the new and true leader of the Lakers, is continuing to make a name for himself.

I presume by now everybody does know how to pronounce it. First name is Sa-dale. Its origins are unclear, but Nicole believes it to be French and proudly bestowed it upon the playful 11-month-old in her arms, Tyler Sedale, who might himself grow up to be a big basketball star someday unless the Laker equipment manager, Rudy Garciduenas, accidentally double-dribbles him again, the way he did the other day.

The last name? I like to think of it as the same sound a referee’s whistle makes. Threeeet! Which makes it a perfect name for a basketball player, a name right there on every referee’s lips.

So yes, you do know the name.

Yet I am not sure everybody is aware of what this guy is doing. Did you know, for example, that Threatt has played more than 100 minutes more this season than any other Laker? That he leads the team in points scored and in assists and in steals? All while technically playing out of position? All while technically taking over the position of the greatest player in the history of the team and perhaps the game?

Sedale Threatt downplays his success, would be the last to suggest--so permit me to do it--that he should be a prime candidate for the All-Star game next February in Utah. He is not a publicity hound and shrugs off his own relative lack of fame with the usual: “I’m not Magic Johnson, and I never will be. All I can do is try to help this team win games any way I can.”

He does.

But how? Kareem is retired and Magic is twice-retired. Riley left. Dunleavy left. Byron is hurting and Worthy is struggling. Here are the Lakers with a novice for a coach and a backcourt that is now down to three guards--two of them rookies --and somehow they are still one of the best teams in basketball. How is this possible?

Sedale is how this is possible.

“I’ve really been a Sedale guy since the first day we got him,” says Mike Dunleavy, the Milwaukee coach who is partly responsible for the Lakers having Threatt in the first place. “Jerry West came up to me one day and said: ‘We can get Sedale Threatt for a couple of second-round picks. What do you think?’ I said: ‘Sedale Threatt? Let’s get him.’ He was somebody I had always thought highly of, somebody who never seemed to be used to his maximum potential.”

Philadelphia had him. Then Chicago. Then Seattle. Some people out there actually think Threatt has been in the NBA for three or four years; this happens to be his 10th season. But he was so obscure, such an unknown after a collegiate career at West Virginia Tech, that it made him the NBA’s invisible man. An invisible man who has appeared in 643 NBA games.

“You know why I liked him?” Laker Coach Randy Pfund volunteers. “Because he’s an NAIA guy, like me. Strictly small-college. And he never let that stop him.”

Nothing does. Did you know that Threatt is the lowest draft choice playing in the NBA? In 1983, he was the 139th player taken.

Sedale came to the Lakers a month before Johnson’s original retirement. He stepped right into huge shoes. Dunleavy says the coaching staff practically had to place footprints on the floor, as in a dance studio, to show Sedale where to go as a point guard. All his life, Threatt had been an off-guard. Now he not only had to be the playmaker, he had to replace Magic Johnson.

Says Threatt with typical nonchalance: “They can play me at center if they like. I just want to be out there.”

When I went to a Laker game the other night, there was Threatt, running the offense. Know who was out there with him? Vlade Divac, James Edwards, Elden Campbell and A.C. Green. “Hey, he’s out there with four centers!” I said to the person beside me, and while I am aware of Green’s actual status as a forward, it hardly made this sight any less amazing to behold.

“Do you know what I think?” Pfund asks.

No, what?

“I think there are some teams who had Sedale Threatt who didn’t know what they had.”

Know what I think, Randy?

“No, what?”

Don’t give him back.