Q&A: Pete Babcock on his remarkable basketball journey

Pete Babcock was GM of the Atlanta Hawks from 1990 to 2003.

Pete Babcock began his working life as a high school basketball coach and teacher. He wound up spending 42 years in the NBA from 1976 to 2017, serving in capacities as wide-ranging as scout, assistant coach, director of player personnel, general manager, team president and minority owner.

Babcock, who turned 77 on May 12, worked for the San Diego Clippers (1980 to 1985), the Denver Nuggets (1985 to 1990) and the Atlanta Hawks (1990-2003) before spending two seasons with the Toronto Raptors and another 10 scouting and consulting for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Throughout his stints, he acted on his interest in America’s civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, focusing his individual and team energies on that and other community work. More recently, he penned a book that combines his memoirs with the history of Black players in basketball and the integration of the NBA. The handsome volume, “Courts of Justice: A Life in Basketball and Activism” (“75th” Anniversary Press, 2025) is

available here

.

Babcock’s career got an exclamation point near the end when he earned a championship ring with the 2015-16 Cavaliers. Under his guidance, his teams produced 22 All-Stars, 12 All-Defensive Team selections, seven All-NBA players, two Coach of the Year winners, one Rookie of the Year, a Most Improved Player and two Defensive Player of the Year recipients. The Bangor, Maine, native was nominated in

2023 for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

as a contributor. “It was humbling,” Babcock said, but it felt good that somebody recognized some of the contributions I’d made.”

Along the way, the basketball lifer earned the admiration and endorsement of some of the league’s most respected leaders. For example, Wayne Embry – a pioneer after becoming the first Black general manager in American sports with the 1971 Milwaukee Bucks – wrote this for the jacket of Babcock’s book: “Passion, integrity, selflessness, compassion and commitment are the words to describe Pete Babcock best.”

Here is a Q&A with Babcock from a recent conversation.

Editor’s Note: The following conversation has been condensed and edited.

NBA.com: You were involved with so many teams over your career. I need to ask if you had a favorite, though maybe that’s like asking, ‘Who’s your favorite child?’

Pete Babcock

: It’s complicated because I grew up as a Boston Celtics fan. Back in the Bill Russell, Sam and K.C. Jones, Satch Sanders, John Havlicek days. My family were all from New England, even though we lived out west for a large part of our lives. My dad was in the service

and we traveled everywhere, but New England was always home base. So, I spent 42 years in the NBA but never worked a day in my life for the Celtics.

Tell me your origin story, how you got a foothold in the NBA.

When I was a high school coach in Phoenix, I called Jerry Colangelo out of the blue. He was a young GM with the Suns and he met with me. I asked him for career advice – I didn’t have any contacts – and after the meeting he said, “I’ll hire you today to sell season tickets. You’ll be working in the NBA but you’ll be learning sales, and that doesn’t transfer to the basketball side.”

I realized I had to get some exposure to the basketball side. So, I bought a videotape machine, which had just come out, these big monstrous things with the big tapes. I started recording every game I could – we didn’t have cable – so it was basically the Suns and some games of the week.

I’d watch the tapes all season and I’d write reports. Nobody saw them, so I thought, I’ll send the reports to each team I wrote about, with a letter introducing myself as a high school coach in Arizona. I had breakdowns of players’ strengths and weaknesses, out-of-bounds plays, individual sets. I said, “If you like the report, I’m volunteering to scout for your team for free when your opponents come to Phoenix.” The only team that said yes was the New Orleans Jazz, when Elgin Baylor was the head coach and Bill Bertka was the GM. Bill was my first real mentor in that sense. He had me work for free for him – I know! – for two years and I learned. I was having a great time doing it.

You write about sitting elbow-to-elbow with NBA people, getting to know Jack McCloskey when he worked with the Lakers and Jerry West.

He would fly from L.A. to Phoenix, the nearest market where he could scout a lot of teams headed to face the Lakers. He looked at my reports, gave pointers … and two years in, McCloskey called to offer me $50 a game to save him the trips.

It’s a career universal: taking initiative rarely fails.

I remember just how much fun I was having. Not knowing where it would lead. If you had told me in X number of years you’re going to be a general manager in the NBA, I’d have said, “Get out of here.” But that fun told me I was on the right path.

From there, it was to the Clippers during their San Diego years?

Paul Silas hired me to be one of his assistants in 1980. That was my career, coaching, and I was never thinking about the front office at all. I was on the bench for two years when the Clippers hired Paul Phipps as GM and he offered me the job of director of player personnel. I recall talking with Silas about what I should do and he said, “Well, this whole thing could blow up. I’m in the last year of my contract and if I’m not back, my assistants are going to be gone too. It might be better for you to get that experience.”

Once I was in the front office, I kind of got the bug and started thinking about becoming a GM. A year later, Phipps and [owner] Donald Sterling parted ways and they needed a GM. I was three and a half years removed from coaching high school basketball. In no way was I prepared for it.

Fortunately, Sterling moved the team to L.A., which kicked me a little to get away from him. Things were so unstable, I had to move on.

The full picture of who Sterling was and how he operated didn’t come out until nearly three decades later. But Phipps was in Denver and helped you land there, first as player personnel director, then GM, then team president and a minority owner?

My time in Denver was six of the most enjoyable years of my career, because I was with Doug Moe and a cast of characters who were fun to be around. We sold the team in 1990 and that’s when I went to Atlanta.

Who else do you consider to be influences in your career?

My high school coach, Jerry Waugh, was a great teacher of the game, played at Kansas with Wilt Chamberlain, he’s the one who inspired me about wanting to coach. Bill Bertka was the first one in the NBA who mentored me.

After that it was [Suns guard] Paul Westphal, who called me in 1976 when I was a freshman high school coach. He had gotten my name and was starting a basketball camp with Alvan Adams, and he wanted me to run the camp. Westphal was the one who called Paul Silas.

Where did your social awareness come from?

“How did this white guy who lived in Phoenix get involved in the civil rights movement?” I’ve been asked that a lot. As a student in the 1960s, I’m watching the news and Walter Cronkite every night, and seeing the coverage. I couldn’t believe it, the Freedom Riders, the sit-ins at lunch counters, how non-violent the protesters were.

My dad became a member of the Phoenix Urban League in 1970 and by that point I was a senior at Arizona State. He got me on the board, and one of the board members was [famous 1936 Olympic sprinter] Jesse Owens. I spent 10 years learning from him. I had begun teaching history in high school – predominantly white – and I started introducing units of Black history into my classes. Jesse would come speak to those classes.

When I got into the NBA, it all came together. Here I was working in a predominantly African-American business. I’m seeing things happen first-hand – like racial profiling, when I’d get call from a player who got pulled over by the police, driving a nice car in a nice neighborhood. I thought, there must be things we can do to help.

The more I studied, I learned that the game had become a vehicle for integration. Actually, it was the Black basketball leagues that were the first ones to integrate, hiring white coaches and players before vice versa.

Many folks by now know about the NBA’s first three Black players – Chuck Cooper, Sweetwater Clifton and Earl Lloyd – but I don’t think a lot of us knew that there first had been Black leagues that opened the doors to whites.

Black basketball got started in earnest in the early 1900s, and Black churches were big drivers of it. After the migration of Blacks to the north to get away from Jim Crow laws, it was a myth that every Black family was poor. There were affluent ones, and they were the ones responsible for these leagues.

You’re talking about the “Black Fives Era” when teams like the New York Renaissance (Rens) and Alpha Physical Culture Club competed regionally.

One team, the St. Christopher Club, hired a guy named Jeff Wetzler, a Jewish man, as coach because he was so respected in New York City. He brought in [for the 1913-14 season] his best player, Irving Rose. They won the ‘colored world championship’ with a white player and a white coach. But it was highly competitive and they wanted to win.

You tell about Red Auerbach’s involvement in Black basketball, too, from his day as a young hoops junkie going to a Rens game and asking questions of coach Bobby Douglass.

Red noticed from the bleachers that the Rens were blowing out the other team, then switched from man-to-man to zone and barely won. He asked Douglass, who told him that he had to pay his players from ticket revenue and that, as barnstormers, they had to fill out their own schedule. Lopsided victories would have been bad for ticket sales and lining up opponents.

Douglass began tutoring Red as a coach, and when Red got out of the Navy, he recommended him to coach the BAA Washington Capitols.

And the rest became NBA history, with Auerbach moving to the Boston Celtics and building the dynasty that won 11 of 13 NBA championships from 1957 to 1969. He and team owner Walter Brown were the ones who drafted Chuck Cooper when Abe Saperstein – impresario of the Harlem Globetrotters – didn’t want to meet Cooper’s and Sweetwater Clifton’s demands for better pay and living conditions on the road.

Red stayed close with Sweetwater. When Sweetwater retired, he moved to Chicago to drive a cab – his mother was ill and he wanted to be close to her there. Red bought a cab for him. And that was the cab he died in.

How did you turn back to your teaching roots at Emory University?

After I got fired in Atlanta in 2003, I got a call from Emory. They had a series of ‘senior seminars’ in which folks from various fields shared their experiences and knowledge. I put together a class on the history of the NBA, then on civil rights and basketball, and most recently teaching right from my book.

You’ve said the reason for writing the book was to get your journey down for your kids and grandkids. Family has been a big part of your NBA career, too, with your brothers Rob and Dave. Rob worked as a scout and GM with Minnesota and Toronto. Dave, after a lengthy stay coaching in college, has been in player personnel with Milwaukee.

We mostly worked for different teams but we would travel together at times – when you’re scouting, you develop these groups and try to meet up on the road. We’re all going to see the same players anyway. I used to tease them both, “You guys have no creativity. You just followed me in whatever I did. Couldn’t come up with your own career paths.” But they both had the same passion.

You got an NBA championship ring consulting with Cleveland in 2016, then retired soon thereafter. But I’m interested in your thoughts on some current NBA issues. Such as the heavy use of the 3-point shot.

To me, it’s less interesting from the fan’s perspective to come down and fire up a 3-point shot. I love to see the ball going inside and outside, cutters going to the basket, somebody actually running something.

Ask people who scored the most points in the 1980s and most of them won’t know it was [Denver Hall of Famer] Alex English. What are the chances today that a player like Alex could do that? He rarely took a 3-point shot. Really wasn’t a great 1-on-1 player. He played with his basketball IQ, moved so well without the ball and never stopped moving. Today’s world, that type of player wouldn’t even lead his team in scoring, much less the NBA.

Thoughts on expansion?

My theory has always been, there’s a finite number of stars in any generation. That number doesn’t go up, let’s say there’s seven, eight or nine. So not every team is going to have a star. That’s the negative side of expanding. But the number of good players has gone up. Outstanding players.

Speaking of which, what do you make of the “championship or bust” mentality so prevalent these days? That either you win it or you’re a loser.

My theory was let’s be competitive, let’s be good, and we’ll do what we can to win a championship, and in the process, let’s use the game as a vehicle so we’re having an impact and doing things that actually are more important than basketball anyway. So we could have a meaningful season every year

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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him

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