With one of the best young cores in the NBA, today’s team has a bright future. But the franchise’s past—a vexing, six-year stay in Vancouver—is just as intriguing.
It was one of those hinge points in Steve Francis’s life. He would be transitioning from college to the pros, from unpaid to paid. Just as Francis’s unlikely backstory—a rough childhood, a junior college transfer, a transcendent season at Maryland—was rocketing around the basketball cosmos, so, too, was speculation he was going to be the first pick in the 1999 NBA draft, the new backcourt star of the Bulls as they rebuilt from the Michael Jordan era.