Rod Thorn had just finished wrapping up some other business that had prevented the Bulls general manager from attending the first training-camp practice for the 1984-85 season when he fielded a phone call from assistant coach Bill Blair.

“He said to me, ‘Congratulations.’ I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘You didn’t screw this draft up. This guy is great,’” Thorn said, chuckling, during a phone conversation about the early days of Michael Jordan. “I said, ‘How can you tell after 2 hours?’ And Bill said, ‘I’m telling you, this guy is great.’

“And once I went to practice, you could tell pretty much right away he was going to be a special player. But I had no idea he would turn out to be as good as he did. Nobody could.”

Thorn gets it. He understands the first line on his resume always will be “the man who drafted Jordan for the Chicago Bulls.”

But just as Thorn never wasted much time thinking about what might’ve been when new Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf replaced him with Jerry Krause less than a year after drafting Jordan, his career can’t be defined by one move.

When you spend 50-plus years around the NBA as a player, coach and executive, you move on to the next challenge. And so Thorn will arrive at the sport’s pinnacle today, officially enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor.

It’s a stellar Class of 2018, with names such as Grant Hill, Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Ray Allen and Chicago native Maurice Cheeks, among others, entering as players.

“To be selected to this august company is very humbling,” Thorn said.

Thorn, 77, was a good enough player out of West Virginia to be selected second by the Baltimore Bullets in the 1963 NBA draft and spent eight seasons with four teams. He moved on from his Bulls’ firing to work 14 years as the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations, doling out discipline and bettering the game.

During this time, he also helped assemble the original Dream Team, reconnecting with Jordan and helping USA Basketball reclaim its world supremacy with a captivating squad on and off the court at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Perhaps his greatest achievement came when he took over a Nets team that went 26-56 in 2000-01, traded All-Star Stephon Marbury to the Suns for Kidd and experienced back-to-back trips to the NBA Finals while being named Executive of the Year by his peers in 2002.

Still, as far as Bulls fans are concerned, Thorn always will be the one smiling next to Jordan in June 1984.

Jordan was named Rookie of the Year on his way to one of the greatest careers in professional sports. Thorn moved forward too.

“I’ve been fired a couple times in my life,” he said. “I always looked at it that I did the best I could and worked as hard as I possibly could and whatever comes next would be better. It turns out the way it’s supposed to. There’s a winding road.”

That road briefly led back to Jordan, who initially was noncommittal when Thorn called him to play in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

“He had been on the Olympic team before [in 1984]. The Bulls were playing deep into the summer every year,” Thorn said. “But he called back and said he’d love to do it.”

Jordan joined Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone and other future Hall of Famers, all at or near the peaks of their careers.

“That was probably the greatest team ever assembled. And the players interacted so well. We didn’t have any problems,” Thorn said. “And a lot of it had to do with Michael because he didn’t try to just take over everything and try to be the big scorer or try to dominate the games. The team was unbelievable to be around, a joy to sit there and watch. It’s one of the happiest moments of my basketball career.”

Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that team changed international basketball forever.

“They showed everybody the world had a ways to go to catch up. Which they did,” Thorn said, citing the Americans’ near-loss in 2000 and loss in 2004. “It got basketball better all over the world. Now, when you look at the NBA, over 100 players are internationals. The game has changed from an inside-out game to an outside-in game. It has materially changed.”

Thorn worked for the Bulls under Jonathan Kovler and Arthur Wirtz from 1978 to 1985, briefly serving as interim coach for a 15-15 stretch during the 1981-82 season. In his first draft, he selected Reggie Theus.

“We had some pretty good times and then some not-so-good times,” Thorn said. “We were never able to fully get the right people around Artis [Gilmore] to capitalize on his strengths. But my wife and I loved our time in Chicago. It’s one of the great cities in this country and certainly one of the great sports towns.

“The old Chicago Stadium, when you had a big crowd, was as good a homecourt as any in the NBA. The acoustics were such that sound hovered right over the floor. I know from coaching there 30 games, one night we were playing Boston and we had a timeout. And I couldn’t hear anything.”

On Friday, Thorn will hear his name called for his sport’s highest recognition, a fitting stop along the winding road.