The Book of Basketball (21 page)

SUMMER OF 1976: THE MERGER

This gets my Greatest Summer Ever vote: our two hundredth Independence Day, the release of
Jaws
, the Montreal Olympics, the fictional graduation of Randy “Pink” Floyd’s class at Lee High School and the ABA-NBA merger in the span of three months? Come on. The merger process was given a jolt when the ABA hired a dick-swinging antitrust attorney named Fred Fruth, who had some world-class negotiating sessions with the NBA’s bright assistant commissioner—wait for it … wait for it—Mr. David Stern!
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Here’s what they settled, with my comments in parentheses:

1. Denver, New York, San Antonio and Indiana joined for a cost of $3.2 million per team. Those teams would not receive TV money for three years, could not take part in the ’76 college draft and would be called “expansion teams,” but they
   were
   allowed to keep their players. The Nets also had to pay the Knicks $4.8 million over ten years for violating their territory rights.
   

   (My thoughts: A bit of a raping so far, although it’s nice that the Knicks got even more money to throw away at bad players. My biggest issue was the NBA excluding ABA teams from a deep ’76 rookie draft in which Johnny Davis (number twenty-two), Alex English (number twenty-three), Lonnie Shelton (number twenty-five) and Dennis Johnson (number twenty-nine) dropped to Round 2. Shows how little leverage the ABA had at the time.)
   

2. Kentucky owner John Y. Brown received $3 million for folding his franchise, then spent half that money to buy Buffalo. So the four ABA teams that joined the NBA got crushed financially, but Brown bought in and pocketed $1.5 million? Huh? Meanwhile, the St. Louis owners struck the greatest mother lode in professional sports history, folding their shitty franchise for $2.2 million and one-seventh of the TV money from the four remaining ABA teams—money they were guaranteed in perpetuity. In other words, they received four-sevenths of a cut of the TV contract every year
   forever.
   Through 2009, that cut was worth about $150 million. Just free money falling out of the sky, year after year after year after year.
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   (My thoughts: The Nets won two titles with Doc, only the league’s signature player and a big reason for the merger, then got shafted to the degree that they sold Doc before the ’77 season just to keep their franchise afloat. The Spirits had a terrible team that would have folded anyway—no fan support, no assets that remotely compared to Doc, no appeal as an NBA market whatsoever—and they somehow finagled a deal that was a hundred times better than New Jersey’s deal. Go figure.)
   

3. Players from folded ABA franchises would be auctioned off in a dispersal draft, with price tags assigned to each player and Chicago guaranteed the first pick (so they could take Artis Gilmore). The remaining picks were made in reverse order of finish during the ’76 season, with Atlanta trading the number two pick to Portland for Geoff Petrie, then Portland landing the two biggest prizes (Maurice Lucas at number two and Moses at number five).
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   Also, Detroit paid a whopping $500,000 for Marvin Barnes in an apparent attempt to get Bob Lanier to hang himself.
   

   (My thoughts: In the Things That Would Have Been Much More Fun if They Happened Now department, can’t you see ESPN televising the ABA dispersal draft at like 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon as Ric Bucher breaks the Portland/Atlanta trade, Chad Ford laments the lack of European players and Jay Bilas spends ten minutes raving about Malone’s rebounding skills and “second jump-ability”? Alas.)
   

4. The NBA agreed to abolish the reserve clause and allow free agency for any veteran player with an expiring contract. This was the single biggest sticking point—the owners wanted compensation, the players did not—and it could have dragged on for another few years if not for a brainstorm by NBA Players Association head Jeff Mullins: give the owners compensation for four years because that’s how long it would have taken for the case to reach the Supreme Court, anyway. Everyone agreed and that was that. Compensation would be awarded by O’Brien’s office as long as the two teams involved didn’t agree first.
   

   (My thoughts: This was the single biggest NBA moment since the shot clock. Everything about the way players were paid and contenders were built was about to change. For good and bad. And for the first few years, it was mostly bad.)
   

What ensued was the single zaniest summer of player movement in NBA history. Chicago and Houston reinvented themselves with franchise centers (Gilmore and Malone). Portland landed a rebounding sidekick for Walton. The Nets sold Doc to Philly for $3 million and traded Brian Taylor with two number one picks for Tiny Archibald.
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Philly suddenly had the ’75 ABA co-MVPs (Doc and McGinnis) on the same team. Moses bounced around twice before landing in Houston. Portland stupidly traded Moses to Buffalo for a number one pick; Buffalo rerouted him to
Houston for two first-rounders just six days later. The Knicks bought McAdoo from Buffalo and lavished him with a five-year, $2.5 million deal, killing his incentive to give a shit until 1982. Gail Goodrich became the Jackie Robinson of free agency, inadvertently murdering professional basketball in New Orleans for two solid decades (hold that thought). Red Auerbach refused to pay Paul Silas market value, shipped him to Denver for Curtis Rowe, then bought Sidney Wicks from Portland (and murdered Celtic Pride in the process). None of the top five teams from ’76 (Golden State, Phoenix, Boston, L.A., Cleveland) improved itself in any conceivable way. Throw in the rise of cocaine, free agency, and escalating salaries and you need to get emotionally prepared for the weirdest three-year stretch in NBA history.

1976–77: THE CANNONBALL

Brace yourself: this might be the only time in sports history that a professional sports league didn’t expand enough. The NBA jumped from eighteen franchises to twenty-two but added
twenty-eight
quality players to its talent pool, including four franchise guys (Erving, Gervin, Gilmore and Thompson) and a potential franchise guy (Moses).
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Throw in a loaded draft class (John Lucas, Dantley, English, DJ, Parish, Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis…) and there were two quality newcomers for every franchise. Suddenly we had teams struggling with alpha dog battles (McAdoo-Haywood, Erving-McGinnis, Barnes-Lanier) and contrasting styles (old-school versus playground), certain teams quickly gelling into contenders (Portland, Denver) or falling off (Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, G-State), and fans alternately delighted by the ABA’s infusion of athleticism and appalled by high-priced guys playing so selfishly. And if that’s not enough, cocaine and freebasing were taking the league by storm. Again, silliest year ever—like mixing up everyone’s Madden rosters, restarting a franchise
season and randomly giving drug problems to 25 percent of the players. Even the records bore out the chaos: no team won more than 52 games and only one lost more than 28 (the Nets). Meanwhile, the “ABA was a quality league” argument gained steam when nine alumni became ’77 All-Stars and five played prominent roles in the ’77 Finals. The infusion of ABA blood made the league faster, deeper, and infinitely more athletic; other than Bill Walton, the league’s most thrilling players were ABA guys (Doc, Ice, Thompson and Moses). The days of a potbellied Nelson logging big minutes in the Finals were long gone, personified by Phoenix returning every key player and finishing 34–48. Still, it was an upheaval of sorts. Like watching the water in a pool thrashing around after a cannonball.

The water kept splashing the following summer, when eleven of the top eighteen draft picks switched by trade and two were repackaged a second time. Trading picks was a relatively recent trend; as late as 1971, everyone picked in their spots and that was that. All hell broke loose in 1977, with two trades netting Milwaukee the first, third and twelfth picks in a superb draft—and, of course, they botched two of them (Kent Benson and Ernie Grunfeld, back in the halycon days when teams could waste two top-twelve picks on slow white guys without getting creamed on the Internet and talk radio). Still, they were the first team to say, “We’re going to rebuild with multiple picks,” a relatively bold move in a league where nearly every franchise was losing money and worrying about its precarious relationship with fans.
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We also had our first full-fledged free agency summer in 1977, with Jamaal Wilkes (Lakers), Gus Williams (Seattle), Truck Robinson (New Orleans), Bobby Dandridge (Washington), Jim Cleamons (New York) and E. C. Coleman (G-State) switching teams.
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Usually teams banged out compensation themselves, with the most famous example happening in ’79, when Boston signed Detroit’s M. L. Carr and it ballooned into a larger deal: Carr and two future number one picks for McAdoo (used to land Parish and McHale a year later). When San Diego signed Walton that same summer, the teams couldn’t agree and left it up to the league. The wackiest free agent transaction will always be the ’79
Clippers signing Brian Taylor from Denver, then giving up two second-round picks, four kilos of cocaine and their best drug connection as compensation.
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Despite unprecedented upheaval, our first postcannonball Finals (Portland-Philly) made everyone happy: CBS (highest-rated Finals ever), the NBA (Bill Walton, backing up the “great white hope” hype), Brent Musburger (who nicknamed Walton “Mountain Man” and tried to become the Cosell to his Ali), basketball purists (delighted that Portland “saved” the league), and virulent racists (who enjoyed the way this series was “analyzed” by mainstream media). The Sixers were painted as a disorganized schoolyard team, a product of the ABA and its “look at me” culture, just a bunch of high-priced blacks who didn’t care about making each other better. They had players with nicknames like “Jellybean”
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and “World,” their layup lines were more famous than any of their wins, and because everyone was out for themselves, Doc was unfairly considered to be more sizzle than steak. By contrast, Portland played like Russell’s old Celtics teams and thrived on fast breaks and ball movement, with everything hinging on Walton’s once-in-a-generation skills. They started three white guys, their best player had red hair and their point guard had a crew cut. Their deliriously happy fans filled a 12,666-seat bandbox and made every game sound like a mid-sixties Beatles concert. Even their rough but lovable bald coach barked out orders and looked like he should have been running one of those
Dead Poets Society-
-type boarding schools. So when the Blazers swept the Lakers, then rallied back from a two-games-to-none lead by winning the next four from Philly, they defeated the NBA’s two biggest quote-unquote problems in one felt swoop: Kareem (the surliest of superstars, someone who had just worn everyone out) and the overtly prejudiced belief that undisciplined, overpaid black guys really
were
ruining the game. That’s why Portland’s “quest” to save basketball made for ratings magic. As long as Walton and the Blazers were kicking some selfish black ass, the average white sports fan would pay attention to the NBA.
(And if the Blazers didn’t keep kicking some selfish black ass? Then the NBA was in trouble.)
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1977–78: THE BLOWN TIRE

If ’77 was the NBA’s craziest season, then the ’78 season had to be its most damaging. Let’s rank the problems in order of least harmful to most harmful.

Crisis no. 1: the drive-by shooting of the Blazers.
Walton went down with Portland sporting a 50–10 record and generating buzz that they might be the greatest team ever. In one felt swoop, the NBA lost its signature team, most visible white star, most compelling story line and most entertaining team not just for ’78 but ’79 and ’80, too. Imagine Jordan breaking his foot during Chicago’s 72-win season and disappearing for the next three years. How does that Heat-Sonics Finals in ’96 grab you? Or consecutive Indiana-Utah Finals in ’97 and ’98? Get the idea? Walton’s injury was practically a death blow until Larry and Magic showed up.
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Crisis no. 2: cocaine.
Everywhere at this point … and nobody knew it was bad yet. I don’t need to spell it out for you. Just watch
Boogie Nights.
You should, anyway. I made ten references to it already and could easily go for thirty more. Just rent it. It’s a real film, Jack.

Crisis no. 3: consecutive Bullets-Sonics concussions.
Do you realize the ’78 and ’79 Finals were the only NBA Finals of the past half century that didn’t have a recognizable superstar or big-market team? The ’78 Finals
stretched over eighteen agonizing days to accommodate CBS; Unseld won Finals MVP and a brand-new car, although the ceremony was marred when the distraught head of CBS asked if he could borrow Unseld’s car to kill himself in it. The bad luck extended beyond Walton going down: the league barely missed out on a Sixers-Nuggets Finals in ’78 (“Thompson versus the Doctor!”) and a thoroughly entertaining Spurs-Suns Finals in ’79 (“Davis and Westphal take on the Iceman!”). If Stern had been running the league in ’78 and ’79, you might have seen that decade’s equivalent of Dick Bavetta or Bennett Salvatore reffing a few of those pivotal Spurs-Bullets, Sixers-Bullets and Nuggets-Sonics games. And you know it’s true.
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Crisis no. 4: the CBS problem.
A heated contract negotiation that spring resulted in a four-year, $74 million deal that the network tried to back out of even as it was signing it. As part of the deal (and we’re using that word loosely), CBS was given carte blanche to run playoff games on tape delay, tinker with playoff dates/times and scale back on the number of Sunday telecasts. And cable TV hadn’t been invented yet. Yikes.