Michael Cooper was a key piece of the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers that won five NBA championships. But he was an unknown player upon arriving with the team and only played three games in his rookie season under head coach Jerry West. Regardless, West had a belief in Cooper because he heavily scouted him, and the Hall of Famer pulled back the curtain on how it all went down.
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Funnily enough, Cooper wasn’t the player that West was supposed to originally scout when he first noticed him. In fact, he was sent there to scout his teammate, Marvin Johnson, who was a 6-foot-5 guard on Cooper’s team at New Mexico. He led the Lobos in scoring in his freshman season and was a hot topic of discussion.
Cooper recently talked about this and how Johnson was one of the best shooters he had ever seen.
“Marv attracted all of the NBA scouts,” Cooper told Vlad TV. “So, Ellenberger had asked Jerry West to come down. I’ve got this guy Marvin Johnson. And he told us at the morning shootaround, ‘Hey, we got a couple of NBA scouts. Jerry West from the Lakers is going to be here.’”
This is a common procedure that teams still do today. Even with the invention of the internet and the advancement of sports coverage, teams still like to get a set of eyes on players in person. But sometimes, this can lead them to surprises.
Cooper wanted to be one of those surprises. “I said to myself, hey, if he’s coming to see him, I’m going to show him what I can do,” he stated.
And show what he could do, he did. Cooper finished the game that West scouted him at with 18 points, 15 rebounds, and three dunks. However, he later shared that it wasn’t his stat line that caught West’s attention.
“They had this good scorer… He was like a number two scorer in the conference. I held him to, I think he was averaging 23, I held him down to 12. And that right there is the thing that I think perked Jerry West’s ears up,” Cooper added.
It’s exactly what caught West’s attention, and what Cooper eventually became known for. During his 12-year career with the Lakers, he earned eight All-Defensive Team selections and won the Defensive Player of the Year award in 1986-87. Cooper became one of the best three and D role players in the game’s history. After that big performance, West kept coming back to watch him, and the rest was history.
“He started coming back, and he wasn’t just coming back to watch Marvin. He was coming back to watch me.”
Despite his strong performance, teams still overlooked Cooper in the NBA Draft. He fell all the way to the 60th overall pick, signing with West’s Lakers for just $30,000. A year earlier, his teammate Johnson had been selected 31st overall by the Chicago Bulls, but he never logged a single minute in a game.
All in all, West and the Lakers got Cooper for a bargain. He eventually became one of the best draft picks the franchise had ever made, showing the value of in-person scouting and the hidden gems that can emerge from it.
