re: Who was biggest missed basketball recruit of the Dale Brown Era?

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Arvydas Sabonis(easily)

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Benoit Benjamin went to Creighton because their coach was Willis Reed who was also from NorthLa. Evidently Reed did a good job of convincing him he could personally develop him as a big man.

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Benoit Benjamin went to Creighton because their coach was Willis Reed who was also from NorthLa. Evidently Reed did a good job of convincing him he could personally develop him as a big man.

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So anyone Dale ever talked to or recruited qualifies?

Sabonis was never coming to college in the United States.

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tell me about LSU recruiting Arvydas Sabonis in the 80s. Did he almost come to college in the US and was he strongly considering LSU and playing for Dale Brown?

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Yes — LSU really did try to recruit Arvydas Sabonis in the 1980s, and it was not just a rumor. But “almost came” depends on whose version you trust.

The hard facts: in June 1986, The Washington Post reported that LSU coach Dale Brown was going to Moscow hoping to sign the 7-foot-1 Soviet/Lithuanian star to an LSU athletic scholarship. The trip was reportedly arranged with help from Armand Hammer and Norman Vincent Peale, and Sabonis was described as “generally regarded as the best big man in amateur basketball.” The same report noted that NCAA rules would have left him with only one year of college eligibility.

Brown’s idea was very Cold War-era Dale Brown: frame it as a U.S.–Soviet basketball exchange / diplomacy project, with camps or exhibitions in Baton Rouge and Moscow, and in return Sabonis would play a season at LSU while keeping amateur status for Olympic eligibility. Later accounts say Brown wrote to figures including Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Armand Hammer, pitching Sabonis as a kind of basketball-diplomacy breakthrough.

Did Sabonis personally want to come? That’s the murkier part. Brown later claimed Sabonis was “very close” and even made a commitment by phone through an interpreter. In a 2021 interview, Brown said Sabonis “made a commitment on the telephone that he wanted to come,” but then “disappeared” after returning from international play.

Other accounts are more cautious. Brown sent a Lithuanian-American journalism student, Rima Janulevicius, to talk with Sabonis during a 1986 tournament in Spain. Her recollection was that Sabonis did not know how such a move could happen and understood that, as a Soviet sports asset, he had very little control; she said Soviet officials were watching him closely. The apparent official Soviet response was that Sabonis intended to continue studies in Lithuania and play for Žalgiris and the Soviet national team.

So the clean answer is:

LSU and Dale Brown absolutely pursued Sabonis seriously. Sabonis may have been intrigued by playing in the U.S., and Brown believed he had him close. But the strongest evidence suggests the real barrier was Soviet control, not Sabonis choosing LSU over other options. “Strongly considering LSU” is plausible from Brown’s side of the story, but harder to prove from Sabonis’s own side.

He ultimately never played college basketball. Portland drafted him in 1986, first round, 24th overall, but he did not come to the NBA until years later; NBA’s current player profile lists him as a 1986 first-round pick from Lithuania/Real Madrid.

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Why was he ineligible?

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