‘The McAdoo Thing’
“Frustrations? There were quite a few,” he recalled, wincing at one in particular. “The biggest one was the thing with Vitale and the (Bob) McAdoo thing. That was the killer. fantasized. He said, ‘Boy, if I had McAdoo along with Bob Lanier, I could really do something.’ And the way it ended up, McAdoo never wanted to play for us.”
Davidson, an avid tennis player and a terrific track athlete at Michigan, saw more passion out of McAdoo on the tennis court, often looking to the next court at his tennis club to find McAdoo swatting fuzzy balls.
“He was a great basketball player when he wanted to play,” Davidson said, “and he was a pretty good tennis player, too. He just didn’t want to play for us. They ended up calling him McAdon’t.”
The Pistons traded two first-round draft choices and M.L. Carr to Boston for McAdoo; Red Auerbach parlayed those picks into Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, acquired from Golden State for one of those picks that the Warriors used to select Purdue center Joe Barry Carroll, a player of such flickering passion that his nickname – especially apropos given the “McAdon’t” roots of his acquisition – was Joe Barely Cares.
“We ended up with a player who didn’t want to play and (Boston) wound up with three Hall of Fame guys,” Davidson said, still irked nearly three decades later at allowing Vitale to hoodwink him into a deal that grounded the Pistons for years. “They got three great players and we got nothing. That haunted me for several years.”
The Pistons wound up waiving McAdoo – after firing Vitale 12 games in to his disastrous second year – midway through his second season, one that saw them go
21-61 and get the second pick in the draft. With a proven basketball man in the general manager’s chair, Jack McCloskey, the Pistons selected an elfin guard with an angelic smile and an assassin’s heart from Indiana, where Isiah Thomas had just led Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers to the NCAA le in his sop re season.
And that started a turnaround that led to the 1989 and ’90 les famously bagged by Chuck Daly’s Bad Boys and saw the Pistons through their transition from the Pontiac Silverdome – where they’d relocated in 1978 from Cobo Arena in downtown Detroit – to neighboring Auburn Hills, where The Palace opened in time for the 1988-89 season and the franchise’s first NBA championship.
Antonio Daniels scoring 20 points.
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They did that on purpose. For five years! 
