How the NBA Finally Broke Through the Iron Curtain

At the 1972 Olympic final in Munich, a 20-year-old Soviet center named Alexander Belov hit a buzzer-beating layup to give the USSR a 51-50 victory over the United States — the first time the Americans had ever lost an Olympic men's basketball game. The Soviet Sports Federation saw a historic upset. USA Basketball saw a robbery they refused to officially acknowledge. NBA executives, characteristically, saw something more actionable: a player they wanted to sign.

That collision of reactions — ideological, emotional, commercial — is essentially the entire frame of what followed over the next seventeen years, until the league finally got its first Soviet-born player onto an NBA floor. The story, detailed in a recent Secret Base video produced by Seth Rosenthal, operates on multiple levels simultaneously: as a Cold War negotiation, as a front-office chess match between rival franchises, and, improbably, as a friendship story. All three threads are real. The weight you assign each one probably says something about how you read sports history.

The Claim That Wasn't a Contract

The New Orleans Jazz drafted Belov 161st overall in 1975. That sentence requires immediate unpacking: the Jazz weren't confused about geopolitics. They were making a claim — which is all a draft pick ever is — on a player they genuinely believed they could pry loose. They sent a Ukrainian-American team executive to the Soviet embassy. They got, as Rosenthal describes it, an unambiguous no. The Soviets were not going to disqualify an Olympic hero for the operational benefit of an American professional club. Belov died of cancer in 1978 at 26, and that particular avenue closed permanently.

What the Jazz episode established, though, was a kind of institutional awareness: Soviet players were NBA-caliber, the draft was a tool that could theoretically be pointed at them, and the primary obstacle wasn't talent evaluation — it was the Soviet sports bureaucracy, which treated its athletes as national assets rather than free agents. The challenge wasn't scouting. It was sovereignty.

Ted Turner's Private Détente

When Ted Turner bought the Atlanta Hawks, he arrived with a suspended baseball owner's track record and a television magnate's instinct for reach. He was, as Rosenthal notes, "not a basketball guy" — he was an Atlanta guy, a publicity guy, a money guy, and above all a television guy. The Hawks served him on all fronts. After cycling through executives who couldn't survive his management style, Turner handed the general manager role to Stan Kasten, a 28-year-old lawyer who'd met Turner at a baseball stadium and abandoned a law firm offer to draw up contracts for his sports properties.

Kasten's Hawks, working through the mid-1980s, identified what is today called draft-and-stash as a mechanism for banking rights to Eastern European players. They used late picks in four consecutive drafts on players from multiple countries, including the USSR. Their competitive advantage, they believed, was sitting in the owner's suite: Ted Turner knew Mikhail Gorbachev personally. Turner had funded his own mini-Olympics when the US and USSR boycotted each other's Games. He was conducting his own foreign policy, and Atlanta thought that access was a private tunnel under the Iron Curtain.

Their primary target was Arvydas Sabonis, the Lithuanian center who was, by any reasonable measure, one of the best players on earth in the mid-1980s. Atlanta selected him 77th overall in 1985. The NBA voided the pick — Sabonis wouldn't turn 22 until December 1986, making him ineligible. The Portland Trail Blazers eventually secured his rights with the 24th pick in 1986 draft, though Sabonis wouldn't actually arrive in the NBA until 1995, by which point injuries had diminished what scouts had seen in Vilnius.

With Sabonis off the board, Atlanta shifted attention to other Soviet players. They stacked diplomatic goodwill — inviting Soviet players to Atlanta, sending Hawks players to the USSR, airing exhibition tournaments on TBS, even facilitating Sabonis's medical care despite holding no rights to him. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, where the Soviet men's team won gold as expected, the Hawks presented Sarunas Marciulionis — a Lithuanian guard who had emerged as the Soviet team's leading scorer at EuroBasket 1987 — with a contract. He signed it. The Soviet Federation reversed course. Atlanta tore up the contract, unwilling to risk consequences for either the player or Turner's Moscow relationships.

The Other Bidder in the Room

Here is where the story pivots, and where Rosenthal's framing around friendship becomes analytically interesting rather than merely sentimental. Donnie Nelson — son of the coach Don Nelson, himself a former NBA player — had encountered Marciulionis years earlier while playing for Athletes in Action, a traveling Christian sports ministry that scheduled exhibitions against national teams worldwide. In 1985, AIA visited Vilnius. Donnie, by his own account, got thoroughly beaten by a powerful left-handed Lithuanian guard. They couldn't share a language, but they competed enough times — including a rematch in California — to establish a genuine bond.

That bond acquired real-world stakes in 1987 when Marciulionis reached out to Nelson for help with a humanitarian matter, asking him to assist a stranger in need. Nelson helped. He also recognized, around this same time, that Marciulionis had become a legitimate professional prospect. His father had just joined the Golden State Warriors as an executive. The Warriors selected Marciulionis with the 127th pick in the 1987 draft — and the NBA voided that pick too, because Marciulionis had turned 23 nine days before the draft, aging out of eligibility. Stan Kasten, who had been burned drafting a Lithuanian who was too young, had no intention of letting someone else get away with drafting one who was too old. He flagged the violation.

So Marciulionis, having technically gone undrafted across multiple eligible years, was now a free agent — in the narrow legal sense — but very much still constrained by Soviet federation rules. Atlanta, with Turner's relationships and the draft rights to two of Marciulionis's Soviet teammates, looked like the obvious landing spot. And then Seoul fell through.

What separated the Warriors from the Hawks in the final stretch was, by Rosenthal's account, the absence of institutional relationships to protect. Atlanta needed Moscow's goodwill for Ted Turner's broader business interests. The Warriors had no such constraint. Donnie Nelson spent much of 1989 living on Marciulionis's couch in Vilnius, a combination of genuine friendship and patient recruitment. "Promising more money, promising more minutes," as Rosenthal puts it.

The decisive moment came on June 20, 1989, when chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov staged a press conference in Moscow alongside several Soviet athletes and Nelson. It was a public challenge to the Soviet sports agency. Nelson's position, in Rosenthal's framing: "The Warriors will sign. He will come play for us. You do not have grounds to stop him." The federation, facing a direct and public confrontation rather than a private negotiation it could delay indefinitely, yielded.

What the Pipeline Actually Opened

Marciulionis arrived for the 1989-90 season alongside what Sports Illustrated's Jack McCallum called the "Green Card Five" — two Soviets, three Yugoslavians, all debuting that year. Among them: Drazen Petrovic, the Croatian guard who had already broken Yugoslavian federation rules to play in Spain before Portland finally got him on the floor; Vlade Divac, a first-round Lakers pick; and Zarko Paspalj, an undrafted Serbian who connected with Gregg Popovich and played that year in San Antonio. Alexander Volkov of Ukraine, whose draft rights Atlanta had held, became the Hawks' delayed return on their years of diplomacy.

The structural story here is worth pausing on. What the NBA had spent over a decade failing to accomplish through draft claims alone — official league mechanisms — was finally resolved through a combination of a media mogul's personal diplomacy, a public legal confrontation, and a relationship built playing pickup basketball in Vilnius. The formal instruments of the market existed. They were necessary but not sufficient. The actual breakthrough required leverage that existed entirely outside the NBA's institutional toolbox.

Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis both appeared together for the first time in Lithuanian national colors — green, not Soviet red — at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, two years after the USSR dissolved and Lithuania regained independence. That image, which Rosenthal notes with appropriate irony, is the coda the whole story earns: the pipeline that Soviet federation control had blocked for seventeen years opened just before the thing doing the blocking ceased to exist.

Donnie Nelson spent the following decade continuing to develop relationships with international players and programs. The Atlanta Hawks, freed from the political constraints that had driven their international strategy, largely abandoned it. The competitive advantage Ted Turner's Moscow relationships had theoretically provided dissolved along with the Soviet Union, and with it, apparently, the organization's appetite for the overseas market it had worked so hard to crack.

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By Marcus Tate, Sports Desk Editor