Kevin: April 19th, 1979, the 13th floor of an office building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Rod Thorne, the general manager of the Chicago Bulls, is sitting at his desk on a speakerphone. On the other end in New York is MBA Commissioner Larry O'Brien. 2,000 miles the other way, in Los Angeles, is Bill Sharman, the general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers. There's a coin in O'Brien's hand. That coin is going to decide which team picks first in the 1979 NBA draft. The kid sitting at the top of that draft is a 19-year-old point guard from Michigan State named Irvin Johnson. They call him magic. He's 6'9. He just won the NCAA championship in front of the biggest college basketball TV audience anyone had ever seen. He's the most exciting player in the country. And the Bulls? The Bulls are a disaster. They went 31 and 51 last season. They fired their head coach 56 games in and then let the replacement go after that. Their attendance was so bad they couldn't fill half the seats in Chicago Stadium. They were so desperate for fans to care about anything that the marketing department had run a contest. Heads or tails, Bulls fans, what should we call? The fans voted heads. Rod Thorne, his entire life, every single time he'd ever flipped a coin himself, had called tails. He'd actually told reporters about it. It was his thing. O'Brien asks Chicago if they want to call it. Thorne says yes. Then he looks down at the marketing handout. We call heads. The coin lands tails. Two months later, the Lakers use the first overall pick on Magic Johnson. He joins a roster that already has Hall of Famer Karim Abdul Jabbar. That season, the Lakers win the championship. It's the first of five titles they'll win in the 1980s. The league refers to them as Showtime. Five years after that, a Bulls team that is still terrible drafts a kid out of North Carolina named Michael Jordan. And what comes next is the entire modern NBA. The league that just sold the Lakers for $10 billion in 2025 exists because Rod Thorne looked down at a piece of paper from his marketing department instead of trusting the gut feeling he'd had his entire life. But what if he doesn't? What if he ignores the handout? What if he listens to himself and calls tales? Let's hit Ctrl Z and rewrite history. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten. podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask what happens if they go the other way. Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with real alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision, we hit Ctrl Z, we try it the other way and see what changes. To get what would have happened if Thorne trusted his gut, you have to understand how bad the Bulls were. Bad enough that this coin was their entire season. Bad enough that they ran a public vote because they had nothing else to give their fans. The 1978-79 Bulls finished 31-51. Worst record in the Western Conference. And yes, the Bulls were in the West then. The league's divisions were different in the 1970s. Their coach got fired 56 games in. The replacement got fired after the season. Their best player was Artis Gilmore. He was a 7'2 Hall of Fame center putting up 24 points and 13 rebounds a game. Their second best player was Reggie Thias, a 6'7 guard who'd been the rookie of the year runner-up. So you had real pieces, but there was no head coach, no point guard, no identity, and fewer than 9,000 fans. Coming to a 17,000 seat building. The Lakers, on the other hand, didn't even need this pick. They were a playoff team the year before with Kareem and Norm Nixon and Jamal Wilkes. They had a real roster. The Lakers had this pick because of a free agent compensation rule from 1976. The pick was originally owed to them by the New Orleans Jazz, who finished with the worst record in the East that year. The whole thing was almost insulting. The Bulls were rebuilding from rubble. The Lakers were already good, and they got a free shot at Magic Johnson. In real history, Thorne called heads. The coin came up tails, the Lakers got Magic, and the NBA that we know took shape from there. But in our control Z timeline, Thorne doesn't go with the fans. He tells O'Brien they're calling tails. The coin comes up tails, and the Bulls win. Magic Johnson did not want to play in Chicago. In 1979, the Bulls played in Chicago Stadium. The players called it the Madhouse on Madison. It was old and loud. The team had just finished below 500 two years in a row. And Magic was 19 years old. He'd just won a national championship. He was the most charismatic player in college basketball, and he was looking at LA. Kareem played there. Jack Nicholson sat courtside, and the weather was 75 degrees in February. For a kid from East Lansing, Michigan, that was the dream. When the news breaks that Chicago had won the flip, Magic tells reporters that he might go back to Michigan State for his junior year. Now this is posturing. You don't walk away from number one pick money in 1979, especially when you grew up the way that Magic grew up. His agent knew that and the Bulls knew that. But he says it anyways because He's 19 and he's disappointed. What changes his mind is a conversation with his attorney, a Chicago-based lawyer named George Andrews. Andrews sits Magic down and walks him through it. Chicago is only three hours from Lansing. LA is 2,000 miles. His family is in Lansing. Magic is very close with his parents. The Bulls have Artis Gilmour in the middle, a future Hall of Famer who needs exactly the kind of point card. Magic is about to become. They have Reggie Theus in the backcourt, a six foot seven scoring guard who can put up twenty a night. They've just hired Jerry Sloan as head coach nine days after the coin flip. Sloane is a Bulls legend who's about to build the team's defensive identity. And the Bulls have the number one pick in a draft where Magic is the consensus best player. This is a launch, it's not a rebuild. So Magic says okay. On june twenty fifth, 1979, the Chicago Bulls draft Irvin Magic Johnson with the first overall pick. The Lakers, picking second, listened to Jerry West. Jerry West was the Lakers. He'd spent his entire playing career there. He won them their only LA title in 1972. He's the only player in NBA history to win Finals MVP on the losing team. He's literally the silhouette on the NBA logo. And right now, in the spring of nineteen seventy nine, he just stepped down from coaching the Lakers to become a special consultant. For months, he's been telling Lakers ownership he didn't believe a six foot nine point guard could function in the fast-paced NBA. He preferred a six foot three guard out of Arkansas named Sidney Moncrief. With magic off the board, West gets his way. Lakers GM Bill Sharman concurs and they take Moncrief at number two. Now, Sidney Moncrief is Had a career most players would kill for. He was a five-time All-Star, he was a two-time defensive player of the year, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2019. But he wasn't Magic Johnson. For the Bulls, the 1979-80 season is everything they needed it to be. Magic running point, feeding Gilmore in the post, Theus scoring on the wing, Sloan installing the defense. They make the playoffs. People start coming to the games. Now they'll lose to Philadelphia somewhere along the way because the 76ers were the class of the East that year. In the West, the Lakers go to the finals. Kareem is the league MVP, both in the Control-Z timeline and in the real timeline. Wilkes is a 20 points a night scorer. Norm Nixon is a very good point guard. And rookie Sidney Moncrief is providing depth and scoring punch off the bench. They beat Seattle and they face the 76ers in the NBA Finals. Game five. The series is tied 2-2. Karim Abdul Jabbar, as he does in real life, severely sprains his ankle. He plays through it, gives the Lakers a 3-2 lead, but then doesn't make the trip to Philadelphia for Game 6. Now, in real history, this is the moment that made Magic Johnson a legend. He started Game 6 at center as a 20-year-old rookie. He scored 42 points, he grabbed 15 rebounds, and he dished out seven assists, winning finals MVP on the way. It was the most famous closing performance in basketball history. But in our timeline, there's no magic to start at center. Sidney Moncrief is six foot three and 180 pounds. He can't fake center for a quarter, much less an entire finals game. The 76ers win Game 6 going away, and then they go back to LA and win Game 7. Julius Irving, who in real history wouldn't get his first championship until nineteen eighty three, gets it in nineteen eighty at the age of thirty. The first ring of the magic bird era goes to Dr. J. Now, the Lakers without magic, they're really the slow tragedy of the timeline. Most of it, you can guess. The Lakers are still good. Kareem is still Kareem and one of the greatest players of all time. Wilkes is still a pure scorer. Nixon is still a good point guard. James Worthy still arrives in 1982 because the trade that got them that pick was made before anyone in LA knew the pick would land at number one. So they make the finals twice in the early 80s, but they lose both times. James Worthy retires without a ring. The roster is good, it's just never quite great. But the real story of the Lakers without Magic isn't on the floor. It's Pat Riley. In real life, Pat Riley becomes the Lakers head coach in November of 1981 because Magic publicly demanded a trade and said it was either him or Paul Westhead. So Paul Westhead got fired midseason. No magic, no demand, there's no firing. Westhead stays. Riley remains an assistant. He never becomes the slick haired, Armani suited coaching legend who turns Showtime into a TV show. The Knicks of the early 90s never have him. The Miami Heat franchise that landed LeBron and Wade and Bosch in 2010 doesn't exist on the same terms. Pat Riley spends his entire career in someone else's shadow. The man who in real life would be on every list of the greatest NBA coaches of all time becomes a respected assistant who maybe gets a head coaching job somewhere quieter, but he never gets the franchise. He never gets the era. And he never becomes Pat Riley. That's the loss. And then there's Kareem. In real life, Kareem retired in 1989 at the age of 42 with 38,387 career points. It was the all-time scoring record. And it went untouched for almost 35 years until LeBron broke it in 2023. But that career happens because Magic kept him going. Magic got him five more rings, the second win, and the joy of playing on the best team in basketball well into his late 30s and early 40s. Without magic, Kareem is carrying it alone. So he retires after the 1985-86 season at 39 years of age. Three years earlier than he did in real life. He still passes Wilt Chamberlain's all time scoring record on April 5th, 1984. That's locked in by then. He just finishes with around 35,000 points instead of around 38,000. He's the all time leader, but by a smaller margin. LeBron breaks the record a little earlier. Without magic, there's no showtime. The forum is full, but it isn't celebrity row. Hollywood goes somewhere else. The Lakers are a successful big market team, but they aren't the gold-plated franchise of American sports. When Kobe Bryant gets drafted by Charlotte in 1996 and traded to the Lakers for Vlady Divac, the trade still happens. LA is still LA. The market draws stars regardless. But Kobe arrives at a Lakers organization without championship banners from the previous 20 years, so he carries a different weight. In our timeline, the Bulls are the dynasty franchise of the 1980s. Magic, Gilmore, Theis, Sloan, they go from 31 wins to roughly 50 in year one. By the mid 80s, they're the most valuable franchise in the Eastern Conference. They sell out Chicago Stadium every night. The Eastern Conference finals almost every year is Bulls Celtics, and that series is the marquee event of the entire NBA season. Magic and Bird in the same conference meeting every May. The Western Conference rep at the finals is almost an afterthought. In real life, the Magic Bird Finals rivalry was the thing that pulled the league out of the tape-delayed era. In our Ctrl Z timeline, that rivalry exists just in May instead of June. The league still gets pulled into primetime, it just gets pulled by Bulls Celtics instead of Lakers Celtics. But here's the part that changes everything. The ownership group that in real life sold the Bulls to Jerry Reinsdorf in March of 1985 doesn't sell, or they sell at a much higher price to a different buyer. They had been planning to sell because the team was horrible. In our timeline, the team is a championship contender with Magic Johnson on the roster. The valuation is double, maybe even triple. The estate of Arthur Wirtz is not dumping a championship asset. So Reinsdorf doesn't get the Bulls, which means Jerry Krauss never gets hired as general manager in 1986. Which means Krauss never builds the staff that built the dynasty. That means Phil Jackson, who in real life would win 11 championship rings, six with Chicago and five with the Lakers, he's the most successful coach in NBA history. He doesn't get the combination that made him Phil Jackson. No, he still gets to the NBA. Let's not worry about Phil. He works his way up. He spends a few more years in the CBA. Maybe lands an NBA assistant job somewhere, gets a head coaching shot with a middle league franchise. He's a good coach. Maybe he wins a playoff series or two, maybe he gets to the finals one year. But he doesn't have Tex Winter, and he doesn't have Michael Jordan, and he doesn't have the triangle offense as his championship vehicle. He's an NBA head coach who finishes his career. as a pretty good NBA head coach. The Triangle offense never gets a championship platform, and Tex Winter retires as the inventor of a system that never wins a ring at the pro level. Here's where the timeline really turns. Now, in real history, the 1983-84 Chicago Bulls finished with the second worst record in the NBA. They ended up with the third pick in the 1984 draft, and they used it on a 21-year-old shooting guard out of North Carolina named Michael Jordan. Two centers went ahead of him: Hakim Olajuan to Houston at number one, and Sam Bowie to Portland at number two. They've called it the steal of the century. And it happened because the Bulls were terrible. But in our timeline, the Bulls aren't terrible. They've been a 50-win team every year since 1980. They've won a title, possibly two, in the last five years. They have Magic Johnson. They aren't picking in the lottery in 1984. So who gets Jordan? The Bulls' real life slot at number three goes to the next worst team in the East. In our timeline, that team is the Cleveland Cavaliers. So Cleveland takes Michael Jordan. The Gundbrothers had bought the Cavaliers from Ted Stepion in 1983, just a year earlier. Stepion had nearly destroyed the franchise. He'd traded away first-round picks so recklessly that the league created a rule named after him to keep other teams from doing the same thing. The Cavs roster Jordan walks into is mediocre at best. World B Free is the leading scorer. There's no infrastructure, there's no plan, there's just a small market franchise with new ownership trying to dig out from years of wreckage. But they just landed Michael Jordan. Jordan still becomes Jordan. The individual greatness is independent of geography. Nike still signs them in 1984. That deal had nothing to do with Chicago. Air Jordan's launch in 1985. Rookie of the year, scoring titles. That amazing foul line dunk in the 1988 slam dunk contest. What changes is the team. Cleveland doesn't have the staff Krauss built around Jordan in real life. There's no Pip and trade because Krauss isn't there to make it. There's no Phil Jackson, no triangle. Cleveland builds around Jordan organically with whatever the Gunn brothers can put together over the back half of the 80s. But by 1987, they're climbing. And by the early 90s, They're a real championship contender. Jordan wins multiple titles. Now, the dynasty is shorter and it's less iconic than the six-ring dominant run we know. There's no last dance documentary because there's no last dance. But Cleveland has rings. And that changes the whole identity of the city. The Cleveland Sports Curse, the one that ran from 1964 until LeBron broke it in 2016, isn't the same wound. There's nothing to be cursed about. Jordan won championships there in the early 90s. The city lays claim to the greatest player in NBA history. When LeBron James is growing up just outside of Cleveland in the 90s, he's living in a place that already knows what winning looks like. He grows up rooting for a Jordan-era Cavs team the way kids in real-life Chicago grew up rooting for the Bulls. But by 2003, when LeBron enters the NBA, The Cavs aren't the worst team in the league. They're a competent franchise with championships. So they aren't picking first. LeBron doesn't come home. He gets drafted by whoever wins the 2003 lottery, Memphis, probably. Now he's still LeBron. He becomes the best player of his generation. He wins championships. It just happens somewhere else. But the homecoming story isn't there. The 2010 decision either doesn't happen at all. Or it doesn't carry the same weight because he isn't leaving his hometown team. The 2016 comeback against the Warriors? Even if he ends up in Cleveland later through free agency and that finals comes around, it isn't a savior moment. There's no curse to break it. Not in basketball at least. The kid who grew up just outside Cleveland never becomes Cleveland's savior because Cleveland didn't need one. That's what alt history does to a city. It does the same thing to a league. The 90s belong to Cleveland. Jordan in a wine and gold uniform, winning championships in a city that in real life would wait until 2016 for its first major title in any sport. Akimalajuan in Houston wins his rings too. And in our timeline, they don't carry the asterisk that real history unfairly hung on them. Hakeem is the best Western player of the decade, and his championships stand on their own. Cleveland is the brand, Houston is the runner-up. The Midwest and the South become the basketball heartland. LA is just a market. The global NBA that David Stern built in real life still happens. It just reaches fewer countries. The Bulls dynasty was the engine for the league's international expansion in the 90s. Jordan jerseys in Beijing, Bulls hats in Buenos Aires, all of it traces back to the six ring Bulls run. In our timeline, the dynasty is in Cleveland, an American city without the same global pull that Chicago had in real life. The league expands, it just expands more slowly. Today, in 2026, the NBA is a major American sport. But the center of it sits in different cities than the ones we know. Today, Rod Thorne is 84 years old. He went into the Hall of Fame in 2018. He spent 14 years running basketball operations for David Stern. He drafted Michael Jordan five years after that coin flip, and he took the New Jersey Nets to back-to-back finals as their president of basketball operations. He had a serious Hall of Fame career, but the thing he gets asked about in interviews is still that coin flip. He's told the story for 47 years. Every Magic Johnson documentary, every retrospective, the cadence hasn't changed. He called heads, the fans had voted heads. His gut said tails, and he went with the fans. The coin came up tails, end of clip. He didn't know how the coin would land. He didn't know Magic Johnson would become Magic Johnson. He didn't know Larry Bird would have nobody chase him in the East. Nobody knew. That's what coin flips are. But here's the thing. The whole NBA we know today hangs on that one word. Showtime is built on that word. Pat Riley's career is built on that word. The Bulls dynasty of the 90s, Jordan and Chicago, Phil Jackson's 11 Rings, the Cleveland Curse, the Global Brand, the League became all of it. From the moment a guy in a Chicago office looked down at a piece of paper from his marketing department and said, Heads. Instead of tails. One word, one coin, a whole different NBA. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It actually helps other people find the show and helps me figure out whether people enjoy it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Ctrl-Z with me.