NBA, ABA merger added flavor to pro basketball

Eugene “Goo” Kennedy knew something was amiss.

There had been constant whispers that his life was about to change, that has career was about to be turned upside down.

The year was 1976, and Kennedy, a former TCU standout, was playing with the American Basketball Association’s Utah Stars. Then came the stunning announcement that had Kennedy and other ABA players tossing and turning in their sleep.

“We were still playing and we were playing good ball at that time, and then all of a sudden the owners and coaches called all of us to practice,” Kennedy said. “When we got to practice they announced to us that the ABA was folding and it was going to be a merger and Utah was not part of the merger.

“So everybody was really disappointed to see the ABA break up like that.”

The ABA was formed in 1967 as a competitor to the more established National Basketball Association. While the NBA was progressing and had 21 years of good fortune behind it by the time the ABA came along, the ABA was bleeding financially.

The merger between the ABA and NBA occurred 40 seasons ago. It blended a league (the ABA) many never heard of with a league (the NBA) many were familiar with.

Basketball purists knew the NBA would become a much better league because the merger brought in ABA stars such as Julius “Dr. J” Erving, George “The Iceman” Gervin, Dan Issel, Moses Malone, David Thompson, Bobby Jones and George McGinnis. But the merger also left a trail of players, coaches and front-office personnel unemployed.

The Stars folded for a lack of funds on Dec. 2, 1975. In the merger in 1976, the NBA agreed to take only the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers and New York Nets. The other two teams in the ABA at the time — the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis — were forced to fold and their players were placed in a dispersal draft.

Style matters

The NBA establishment viewed the ABA as a league armed with a lot of gimmicks. The ABA played with a red, white and blue ball, and its teams were known for mostly ripping and running up and down the court, spreading the floor, and jacking up 3-pointers at a record pace.

Fast-forward 40 years later and, amazingly, the best teams in the NBA are known for mostly ripping and running up and down the court, spreading the floor, and jacking up 3-pointers at a record pace.

Irony?

“The reality is the NBA knew that the ABA had a lot of great players, the NBA knew that the 3-point line, while unusual, created a very powerful skill and weapon,” Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said. “The test of time has proven that the 3-point line has been a game-changer for the NBA.

“Look at the number of threes taken now. It’s beyond belief.”

The 3-point shot and slam-dunk contest were used by the ABA as a marketing tool to compete with the NBA. Finally, the NBA adopted the 3-point shot during the 1979-80 season and added the slam-dunk contest to its All-Star Weekend festivities in 1984.

“The whole NBA is the ABA,” said Walt Frazier, who led the New York Knicks to NBA titles in 1970 and ’73. “All the NBA do is run and gun.

“It’s like the old AFL. The NFL, they just ran the ball — 3 yards and a cloud of dust. Now all we got to do is color the [NBA] ball red, white and blue.”

Actually, the money ball in the 3-point contest during the NBA All-Star Weekend is red, white and blue. And the highlight of All-Star Saturday is the slam-dunk contest — another entertainment staple that Kennedy and others pointed to as being hijacked by the NBA.

Currently a radio color analyst for the world champion Cleveland Cavaliers, Jim Chones played in the ABA for the New York Nets (1972-73) and Carolina Cougars (1973-74) and later won an NBA title with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1980. His soul is deep-rooted in the ABA.

“The game that the NBA is trying to play now, that’s the game we played in the ABA,” Chones said. “Shooting early in the clock, a lot of transition stuff, and no real physical centers.”

Perception vs. reality

Before the merger, ABA players felt somewhat disrespected in how they were perceived by their NBA counterparts.

“I think what bothered a lot of us is the way we were treated,” said Ron Boone, who played 1968-76 in the ABA. “But in reality, you look at the players that actually made the All-Star team — a lot of the ABA players — we had the forwards and the guards, but the big men were definitely in the NBA.

“Obviously the NBA had some respect for what we had, because you look at Julius, David Thompson, Artis Gilmore, Issel, Moses Malone. You can go on and on and on about the players that came from the ABA to the NBA that really elevated the style of the play and the respect around the country for the NBA.”

The first year of the merger, 24 players participated in the 1977 NBA All-Star game. One-third of them — Billy Knight, Don Buse, Erving, Gervin, Thompson, Issel, Jones and McGinnis — played the previous season in the ABA. Erving, who scored 30 points and collected 12 rebounds in that prestigious mid-season contest, was named the All-Star game’s most valuable player even though his Eastern Conference squad lost to the Western Conference, 125-124.

The darling of the fledging ABA, Erving led the Nets to ABA titles in 1974 and ’76. Dr. J also was the league’s slam-dunk champion in 1976, highlighted by a dunk — since copied by Michael Jordan and many others — in which he ran and jumped from the free throw line before throwing down a memorable, jaw-dropping dunk that has since become a YouTube sensation.

And then there is the ongoing financial controversy that resulted from the merger, which has totally irked some former ABA players.

“We had a merger agreement that was signed by both leagues and in that merger it says that the ABA players would be entitled to the same pension benefits as the NBA teams,” Cincy Powell said. “That’s one of the reasons the ABA players signed that agreement, but from day one those [NBA] teams never really intended to pay us when the time came.

“So as a result of it we go along all these years waiting until we get eligible thinking we are going to get a pension, but they just kept putting it off and they used all kind of tactics to delay it, which made it obvious that they had no intentions of paying the players. So now we’re at 2017 and we still haven’t been paid our monthly pension.”

Powell, who played from1967-75 in the ABA with the Dallas Chaparrals, Kentucky Colonels, Utah Stars and Virginia Squires, said the merger agreement stated that if a player played at least three years in the ABA, he would receive a pension from the NBA. He added that the strong arm of the NBA has vigorously fought the case with its lawyers, but promises that the court battle will continue.

Indeed, that’s one wound time hasn’t healed.

“My good friend Michael Goldberg was in the room when the deal was struck,” Carlisle said. “My belief is that the merger happened ultimately because of Julius Erving’s star power, his special artistry and the fact that he came to the NBA with Philadelphia and was an instant superstar and went to the Finals right away, really made the merger a perceived success, and it was a success.”

Goldberg, who died last month, was the general counsel of the ABA in 1974 and helped negotiate the NBA-ABA merger.

Test runs

Before the merger, NBA and ABA teams played each other in preseason games. The final three years before the merger, the ABA won most of those battles — 15-10 in 1973, 16-7 in 1974 and 31-17 in 1975 — and they were contentious.

“The reason why we didn’t respect them was because they didn’t play any defense,” Frazier said. “We played Indiana, we played Dr. J, Denver and the Spurs.

“I’m like, ‘Man, these guys are good.’ Plus they had a little added incentive to try to impress us anyway, too, but the games were close and that’s when we gained respect for them.”

Bob MacKinnon Jr. grew up respecting the ABA players because his dad, Bob MacKinnon Sr., coached the Spirits of St. Louis during the 1974-75 season.

“I was a freshman in high school, I was a ball boy with the St. Louis Spirits and they had Marvin Barnes and Maurice Lucas,” the younger MacKinnon said. “Bob Costas was our (radio) play-by-play guy and it was an unbelievable experience.

“I remember there were times when my dad’s team would go on the road and get to a city and couldn’t check into a hotel because the bills weren’t paid. There weren’t any TV contracts back then, so the league made their money on sponsorships and fans. It was kind of a day-by-day, night-by-night existence.”

So how did the Spirits resolve those embarrassing hotel dilemmas?

MacKinnon said, “They’d go to another hotel that hadn’t heard about them yet.”

Spur-of-the-moment financial blunders in the ABA like those sometimes played havoc with the family budget.

“I remember my dad telling me there were times when he’d come home with his paycheck and the owner would say, ‘Hey, could you wait until next Monday to cash that check?’ — when he got it on a Friday,” said MacKinnon, now the coach of the Texas Legends. “He told them ‘You tell somebody else to wait until next Monday. I’ve got a family.’ ”

Character counts

All in all, the ABA family wants today’s basketball aficionados to know that the league had character, had pizzazz, and it helped elevate the NBA into the multibillion-dollar empire that it is today. They also want their pensions, and want the millennials, who are totally unaware of their existence, to know that the NBA which they adore today is nothing more than a revamped version of the ABA in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Willie Wise, who played from 1969-76 in the ABA and 1976-77 in the NBA, noted that the ABA had the wherewithal to give the fans what they wanted, which was a ton of offense.

In this, the 40th anniversary season of the NBA-ABA merger, Wise wants the ABA’s contributions to the success of pro basketball to be well-documented.

“I look at Golden State now and I thought to myself that’s just an ABA team running and gunning and shooting up 3-pointers, spreading the floor, driving to the hoop and doing dunk shots,” Wise said. “I said to myself, ‘If that ain’t the way we played [in the ABA], I don’t know what is.’

“We were just ahead of the times, and the NBA couldn’t take it. They were all crunch you back in, shoot 2-pointers. It was a center-focused league, and the ABA was saying, ‘Hey, let’s spread it out and run and gun,’ and that’s exactly what you have today. The NBA is nothing but the ABA revisited.”

This story was originally published February 28, 2017 at 3:48 PM with the headline "NBA, ABA merger added flavor to pro basketball."