Draft scandal rocks Mountain Top League

WEST ORANGE, NJ — Several coaches involved in the Mountain Top League’s middle school boys basketball program are coming out against the way two players who had missed the draft were placed on a team, accusing one basketball trustee in particular of creating a “stacked” team that eventually won the championship. The trustee in question denies that he ever made the final decision to place the boys on that team, instead stressing that it came as a result of a series of communication failures and a trustees’ vote from which he had actually abstained.

The controversy arose soon after the program’s March 20 championship game in which Coach Jonathan Bargad’s Clippers soundly defeated Coach Nayan Lassiter’s Suns by a score of 52 to 27. Though disappointed, Lassiter said he would not have been bothered by the loss had not a few players approached him after the game to tell him that the Clippers were “cheaters,” having added two players to their team after the final roster lists had been made at the start of the season. Stunned, the Suns coach said he checked his list and found that the boys were right — two brothers that played for the championship were not on the Clippers’ roster following the draft. In fact, he said one of the brothers was the most dominant player in that game, racking up more points than anyone else on either team.

But when Lassiter brought the situation to the Mountain Top League executive board — the governing body that holds authority over the trustees for basketball and every other sport — he said he was told that the board had decided not to take any action on the issue. It was only after he sent out an email to the rest of the coaches informing them what happened that the board issued a statement acknowledging that the situation was unfortunate but did not involve any malice or conspiracy to cheat. Rather, the board said it was a matter of a messy process and poor communication that resulted in one basketball trustee deciding it would be best to place the boys on the Clippers after a family obligation prevented them from being part of the Nov. 22 draft.

That explanation does not satisfy Lassiter, though. Speaking with the West Orange Chronicle, the Suns coach said he wants to know why the trustee — Mark Robertson, who is also vice-president of the West Orange Board of Education — chose to put the brothers on Bargad’s Clippers when Bargad already had the first draft pick plus a full team of nine players, especially considering that the older brother could have easily been snapped up by another team had the coaches been able to see his talent during the pre-draft evaluation.

Bargad could not be reached by press time April 12.

Lassiter said he is frustrated about the situation because, as a volunteer, he puts in a lot of time into the league in the faith that it will be run fairly. Yet that did not happen in this case, he said, and Lassiter is now worried about the message it will send to the children if nothing is done to remedy it.

“Maybe a kid down the road will be in a position to say ‘Maybe I can cheat on this test or maybe I can cheat on this game in college or high school because I remember back when I was young there was this league that had a stacked team and everyone knew it but nothing was done to them,’” Lassiter said in an April 7 phone interview. “I’m not trying to wreck the league or anything. I think the league is a great thing. They do a great job. But I think they made a mistake, and I think they need to own it.”

The young league players are indeed the reason the Suns are pursuing this issue, David Haden, the Suns assistant coach, told the Chronicle. Haden said the boys knew the brothers had been placed on the Clippers even before their coaches did, so they clearly were not naive to the situation. Not to do anything about this perceived unfairness would only cause the league to lose credibility in their eyes, he said.

Haden himself said he is disappointed in the league for allowing something like this to happen. He said he never had any idea that the Clippers had been given two extra players, always just figuring that Bargad had drafted well. But now that the matter has been brought to light, he said he wishes that the league would address it publicly instead of seemingly trying to “sweep it under the rug.”

“I think they should send a letter to the parents, and I think they should send something to the kids letting the kids know that they realize it was an issue,” Haden said in an April 7 phone interview. “They need to come out clean and let parents and the kids know because they are what this league is about: It’s about the parents, the kids and the volunteers.”

The frustration extends beyond the Suns as well. Hawks coach James Winfrey said he thinks it is ridiculous that this type of “under the table” dealing is going on in a program meant for sixth- through eighth-graders. Winfrey said the fair thing would have been to notify all the coaches that the two boys had missed the draft and ask whether anyone needed additional players. And he is sure that some would have taken the brothers on, telling the Chronicle that he knows of a few coaches who had only six or seven players this season and had asked the trustees for help.

If that had been done, Winfrey said he does not think the situation would have become a problem. To instead place such skilled players with Bargad — who had coached the older brother previously and is a friend of his family — after not making them available to other teams makes the situation look suspicious, he said. Not doing anything to resolve the issue makes things look worse, he added.

“I don’t have sour grapes, but what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong,” Winfrey said in an April 7 phone interview. “If you’re going to allow this, then what else are you going to allow?”

Lassiter, Haden and Winfrey all agree that the Clippers should have their wins disqualified for this season, with the Suns receiving trophies instead. They would also like to see Robertson step down as a basketball trustee.

Robertson said he is in fact planning to resign — but not because he did anything wrong. The trustee said he is tired of being blamed for the situation when he never permanently placed the boys on the Clippers. He called it “unfair” that the league said in its statement that he did so, because other people were involved with the decision.

“No single action or breaking of protocol by me led to (the brothers’ placement),” Robertson told the Chronicle in an April 9 phone interview. “Rather, it was the collective decisions and actions of the trustees.”

Robertson said he first became involved with this situation after Pete Massung, a fellow trustee, asked him to call the parents of the 12 boys who had paid to join but did not attend the pre-draft skills evaluation to find out if they were still interested, a practice he said had never been done before. He made the calls on a Friday and could not reach the brothers’ family, though Robertson said that did not surprise him because the boys’ father is a rabbi and may have been preparing for the Sabbath, which began that night.

Robertson assumed the brothers would be included in the draft as the program allows children who paid but were not evaluated to be included as a wild card, with coaches able to use past years’ statistics for boys who have played before. He said he later learned that Massung and basketball Commissioner Gene Galantini had excluded the brothers from the draft without telling the other trustees or coaches. Had Robertson known the boys were going to be left out, he said he would have insisted they be included because he knew the older brother had already played two seasons in the league and was committed.

Since he felt that the brothers had been treated unfairly as the only two excluded from the draft, Robertson said he decided to include them in two practices for his team, the Nets, so that they would not miss any playing time; however, Robertson did not see them play as he missed those two practices due to family obligations. Then, after the boys’ father and Bargad expressed concern that they had not been placed on a team, Robertson said he temporarily put them on the Clippers. The trustee admitted that both of these decisions broke protocol, but said they were only stop-gap measures that everyone understood were not permanent.

Meanwhile, Robertson said that he and the other trustees were trying to find a solution to the boys’ problem. He said several suggestions were raised, including placing the brothers with a low-attended team or permanently placing them on either Bargad’s team or Robertson’s own team. In the end, Robertson said his idea — a player’s lottery in which the brothers would be available to all coaches, excluding trustees, or just the ones experiencing attendance issues — was the only solution proposed for a vote.

But Robertson said his idea was rejected by the basketball trustees in a 4-1 vote on Dec. 18, approximately three weeks before the season started Jan. 14. Robertson then exited the process to tend to family issues and the rest of the trustees voted 4-0 to permanently place the boys on his Nets, he said.

If he had known that the trustees had made that decision, Robertson said he would have refused because it would have looked highly suspect for a group of trustees to place two extra players on a fellow trustee’s team. Yet, as luck would have it, he said the stress of dealing with multiple family ailments at the same time caused him to misread the decision as being one to place the boys with the Clippers. When the other trustees realized Robertson’s mistake after the first game of the season, they voted 3-0 on Jan. 19 to keep the brothers on the Clippers, with Robertson abstaining and Galantini having departed to become league treasurer.

While all of this transpired, Robertson said no one knew that the older brother had become a star player since last season — he had been a fourth-round draft pick the year prior — otherwise the trustees would have likely handled his placement differently. In addition, he said he does not know why the coaches were never alerted to this placement, calling it a “massive, collective sin of omission” brought on by being focused on executing the season.

Overall, Robertson said he hopes people will understand that the blame for this situation should not fall on any one person, but on a number of failures.

“No one cheated or stacked the team,” Robertson said. “The core problems were poor communication internally among the trustees; a lack of consistent process or policies regarding the draft of paid, unevaluated players; and the need for greater transparency.”

To correct this, Robertson said he has already implemented the practice of regular conference calls and meetings among trustees so that everyone is communicating more effectively. Additionally, he said he has put forward several more ideas, including codifying a clearer and more consistent policy for how to handle players who have paid the league’s registration fee but miss evaluations, and mandating that all changes to rules or team composition be posted on the league website and emailed to parents and coaches. These measures have not been voted on though, he said, as it has not yet been decided whether they should go before the current basketball trustees or next season’s.

Mountain Top League President Pete Scalora said he believes revising the basketball program’s policies is a great way to prevent such a controversy from happening again. As for the current situation, Scalora said the league’s executive board is currently investigating the matter by reading all emails related to it and speaking with the coaches and trustees involved. Though the board will likely announce its findings at its April 23 meeting, he said he is sure Bargad was not involved with the decision to place the brothers on the Clippers and that Robertson always acted with the “best intentions.”

In the end, Scalora said the basketball trustees were simply trying to live up to the league’s more than 50-year mission to provide township youth with an opportunity to play sports, even those not included in the draft.

“When you are faced with that situation, the first way to look at it is ‘How can I get these kids to play?’” Scalora told the Chronicle in an April 7 phone interview. “I would feel worse if I turned them away.

“Everyone’s in it for good intentions,” he continued. “If decisions are made, they’re always made with the best intentions for the kids.”

Even if the decisions were made with good intentions, the resulting controversy is sure to impact the basketball program next season. Winfrey said he knows of a few coaches who have quit out of frustration over the situation, and Lassiter said he is seriously considering doing the same.

Before deciding whether he should come back, however, Lassiter said he wants to see how the league cleans up the “mess.”

“They have to deal with it with integrity,” Lassiter said. “What they expect from everybody else, we expect from the league.”

  Mountain Top League