Reflection4Life Athletic and Mentoring Program

Seattle drafted Vinnie Johnson seventh overall in 1979 out of Baylor, where he'd averaged 24 points a game and once dropped 50 on TCU. Two years later the Sonics traded him to Detroit, and he spent the next decade doing the same job every night. Coming off the bench. Thirteen NBA seasons and he was never the guy. He was the guy who came in when the guy needed a rest. He was spectacular at it. In the 1985 playoffs he scored 22 points in the fourth quarter against Boston. Danny Ainge came out of that game and gave him the name that stuck forever. "If that guy in Chicago is the Refrigerator, then Vinnie Johnson is the Microwave." In Game 5 of the 1990 Finals he hit a 14-footer with 0.7 seconds left to beat Portland and clinch Detroit's second straight championship. After that they called him 007 too. Two rings. 11,825 career points. Number 15 hanging in the rafters in Detroit. Total career earnings: about $6 million. His best season paid him $1.4 million, at the very end, in 1990. He retired in 1992. Three years later he started a company in Detroit that made packaging supplies for automakers. Here's what he said the point of it was. "I really wanted to get into business and create some jobs and opportunities. I wanted to do something different outside of basketball, but the main thing was giving back to the city of Detroit for all the support they have given me." General Motors gave him his break. He shifted the company from packaging into automotive assembly, which meant building whole systems for car manufacturers instead of shipping them parts in boxes. Then he just kept going. Piston Group today does more than $3 billion in annual revenue. It employs over 10,000 people across the United States, Mexico and Canada, in about three and a half million square feet of plant space. It supplies Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota and Chrysler. It is one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the world. Vinnie Johnson is worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. He made $6 million in thirteen years of professional basketball. His company now generates roughly 500 times that, every single year. And he built it in the city that watched him play, specifically so people there would have somewhere to work.