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The American Basketball Association (ABA) was a major professional basketball major league that operated for nine seasons from 1967 to 1976. The upstart ABA operated in direct competition with the more established National Basketball Association throughout its existence; the second of two leagues established in the 1960s after the American Basketball League, the ABA was the most successful rival to the NBA.
While the first years of the ABA saw uneven team management (the first two champions immediately relocated after winning the championship), the offense-oriented league managed to attract select talent from players that were either ignored by the NBA due to perceived talent issues or because they were not eligible to play in the league. Stars that arose from these circumstances included Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown, and Doug Moe, who each had been blackballed from the NBA due to unfounded allegations of point-shaving, Spencer Haywood, who entered the league as a "hardship exemption" after wanting to turn pro after being a sophomore in college, and Larry Brown, who was thought to be too small to play in the NBA. The league never had a consistent national television contract but attracted loyal followings in select cities, most notably in Indianapolis, Denver, San Antonio, Uniondale, and Kentucky. The Pacers would win the most championships in league history, winning three with stars such as Mel Daniels, the first player with multiple MVP awards. The NBA engaged in talks for a merger as early as 1970, but an antitrust lawsuit filed by the NBA Players Association curtailed the plans for several years. The league went after select NBA stars such as Rick Barry and Billy Cunningham to go along with luring players with a select plan of payment by annuity to go along with luring respected NBA referees to the league. In the later years of the league, other stars would arise such as Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore, George Gervin, and Julius Erving. By 1976, the league was down to nine teams, with only six surviving long enough to be involved with merger talks. The ABA merged into the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1976, resulting in four ABA teams (Pacers, Nuggets, Spurs, Nets) joining the NBA. The final game was played on May 13, 1976, as the New York Nets defeated the Denver Nuggets for the final ABA championship. In 1979, adopting the practice of the ABA, the NBA introduced the 3-point shot.
In 1965, Dennis Murphy, a marketing executive and sports fan, had come up with wanting to make a football team in Anaheim, California, which led to a group sponsoring a doubleheader game in the city with the American Football League. But the war that the AFL had with the National Football League soon would come to a close with a merger. Not wanting to waste the effort of people who had some money and liked sports, Murphy came up with the idea of making a second basketball league, as it happened to be his favorite sport.
Murphy soon talked with Bill Sharman, who had coached in the last "second basketball league" with the American Basketball League (1961-62) and they came up with the name of the league. While Sharman could not get involved with the ABA at the time due to coaching matters, he suggested talking to George Mikan along with suggesting the use of the three-point play (an ABL staple). The eventual meeting with Mikan led to interest along with the mention of other names interested in business.
Eventually, an array of investors were lined up in several cities: Art Kim in Anaheim, Arthur J. Brown in New York, the DeVoe family in Indiana, Gabe Rubin in Pittsburgh, T. C. Morrow in Houston, Joe Gregory in Kentucky, Ken Davidson in Oakland, Charlie Smither in New Orleans, Robert Folsom in Dallas, and Larry Shields in Minnesota.[1][2] Mikan agreed to be commissioner and spearheaded the use of a red-white-blue ball to go along with the three point play. The first organizational meeting of the ABA took place on December 20, 1966, at the Beverly Hills Hilton.[3]
The ABA was conceived at a time stretching from 1960 through the mid-1970s when numerous upstart leagues were challenging, with varying degrees of success, the established major professional sports leagues in the United States. Basketball was seen as particularly vulnerable to a challenge; its major league, the National Basketball Association, was the youngest of the Big Four major leagues, having only played 21 seasons to that point, and was still fending off contemporary challenging leagues (it had been less than five years since the American Basketball League (ABL) shut down); the league, often considered third or fourth in coverage when compared to baseball or football, had just 12 teams at the time the ABA was founded. According to one of the owners of the Indiana Pacers, its goal was to force a merger with the more established league. Potential investors were told that they could get an ABA team for half of what it cost to get an NBA expansion team at the time. When the merger occurred, ABA officials said their investment would more than double.[4]
The ABA distinguished itself from its older counterpart with a more wide-open, flashy style of offensive play, as well as differences in rules — a 30-second shot clock (as opposed to the NBA's 24-second clock, though the ABA did switch to the 24 second shot clock for the 1975–76 season) and use of a three-point field goalarc, pioneered in the earlier ABL.[5] Also, the ABA used a colorful red, white and blue ball, instead of the NBA's traditional orange ball. The ABA also had several "regional" franchises, such as the Virginia Squires and Carolina Cougars, that played "home" games in several cities.[6]
The league's practice of luring players with money would spur a war with the NBA. Under the "Dolgoff Plan" (as first used by the Indiana Pacers), teams would pay a player a certain amount of money over a certain amount of years as an annuity (for example, Jim Ard signed a $1.4 million contract with the Nets that saw him paid $250,000 in total from 1970 to 1974 while the team would put $8,000 a year for ten years where Ard would receive $1.15 million paid to him over the course of 24 years, starting in 1989). Various players such as Dan Issel and Rick Mount would be paid in this manner, much to the consternation of jilted executives in the NBA, who even believed the league was paying off agents to help players agree to these contracts, which in select cases was correct. Both leagues went as far as spying to keep tabs on signings.[7]
In the 1973–74 season, the ABA also adopted the no-disqualification foul rule: instead of fouling out after six infractions, when a player is charged with his seventh or succeeding fouls, the opposing team retains possession and the offended team attempts any free throw.[8]
The ABA also went after four of the best referees in the NBA: Earl Strom, John Vanak, Norm Drucker and Joe Gushue, getting them to "jump" leagues by offering them far more in money and benefits. In Earl Strom's memoir Calling the Shots, Strom conveys both the heady sense of being courted by a rival league with money to burn — and also the depression that set in the next year when he began refereeing in the ABA, with less prominent players performing in inadequate arenas, in front of very small crowds. Nevertheless, the emergence of the ABA boosted the salaries of referees just as it did the salaries of players.
However, ABA teams like the Nets, Colonels, Pacers, Spurs, Nuggets and Stars, especially in latest seasons, registered higher attendance on average than most NBA teams at that time (excluding the Lakers, Knicks, Celtics, SuperSonics and Bucks).[9]
The freewheeling style of the ABA eventually caught on with fans, but the lack of a national television contract and protracted financial losses would spell doom for the ABA as an independent circuit. In 1976, its last year of existence, the ABA pioneered the now-popular slam dunk contest at its all-star game in Denver.[10]
The league succeeded in forcing a merger with the NBA in the 1976 offseason. Four ABA teams were absorbed into the older league: the New York Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and San Antonio Spurs. As part of the merger agreement, the four teams were not permitted to participate in the 1976 NBA draft. The merger was particularly hard on the Nets; the New York Knicks were firmly established in their arena, Madison Square Garden, and would not permit the Nets to share dates there. For drawing audience away from the Knicks, the Nets were forced to pay $4.3M to the Knicks organization. The Nets offered league superstar Julius Erving instead but the Knicks declined. The Nets had to settle for an arena in Piscataway, New Jersey, and, to meet expenses, were forced to sell the contract of Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers.
Two other clubs, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis, were disbanded upon the merger, with each getting a buyout: the Colonels received a one-time buyout that owner John Y. Brown, Jr. used to purchase the NBA's Buffalo Braves, while the Spirits owners negotiated a cut of the other ABA teams' television revenues in perpetuity. This deal netted the ownership group of the Spirits over $300M over nearly four decades due to a large increase in television revenues. In 2014, the NBA and the Spirits ownership agreed to phase out future payments in exchange for a one-time payment of $500M, making the total value for the deal over $800M.[11] The seventh remaining team, the Virginia Squires, received nothing, as they had ceased operations shortly before the merger. The players from the Colonels, Spirits, and Squires were made available to NBA teams through a dispersal draft; the four teams absorbed by the NBA were allowed to choose players from this draft.[citation needed]
One of the more significant long-term contributions of the ABA to professional basketball was to tap into markets in the southeast that had been collegiate basketball hotbeds (including North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky). The NBA was focused on the urban areas of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. At the time, it showed no interest in placing a team south of Washington, D.C., other than the Atlanta metropolitan area where the NBA's Hawks franchise relocated from St. Louis in 1968.
NBA great George Mikan was the first commissioner of the ABA, where he introduced both the 3-point line and the league's trademark red, white, and blue basketball.[13] Mikan resigned in 1969. Dave DeBusschere, one of the stars of the New York Knicks championship teams, moved from his job as vice president and GM of the ABA's New York Nets in 1975 to become the last commissioner of the ABA and facilitate the ABA–NBA merger in 1976.[14]
Spencer Haywood Hardship Rule
One of the primary contributions of the ABA to modern NBA was the introduction of the Spencer Haywood Hardship Rule, which would later become the framework for the current NBA draft eligibility system that allows players to declare for the NBA after being one year removed from their high school graduation.[15] The origin of the Hardship Rule was a result of the NBA prohibiting players from joining the league until they had completed their four years of college eligibility.[16]
In 1969, Spencer Haywood left the University of Detroit as a sophomore and signed with the Denver Rockets.[17] The ABA believed that in extenuating circumstances, such as a financial situation or familial needs, players should be able to leave for professional leagues early.[16] While the NBA and NCAA initially contested the rule, after the courts ruled in favor of Haywood playing in the ABA, the NBA followed suit and relaxed the four year rule to allow players to enter the league if they qualified as a hardship on the basis of “financial condition…family, [or] academic record.”[18] Haywood paved the way for other players to enter the ABA before they had completed their collegiate careers such as George McGinnis and Julius Erving. Today, the "one-and-done" rule in the NBA can be traced back to the ABA's decision to allow players to leave college early and pursue a professional career before they had completed their collegiate careers.[19]
The ABA pioneered the advent of the now popular NBA slam dunk contest at the final ABA All-Star Game in 1976.[20] The game was held in Denver, and the owners of the ABA teams wanted to ensure that the event would be entertaining for the sellout crowd of 15,021 people.[16][20] The ABA and NBA had begun to discuss a possible merger,[21] and the ABA owners wanted to establish the viability and success of their league.[16] The Dunk Contest operated as a means of unique halftime entertainment that displayed the style and excitement that the ABA players brought to the game. The dunk contest was held at halftime of the All-Star game and the contestants were Artis Gilmore, George Gervin, David Thompson, Larry Kenon, and Julius Erving.[20] The winner of the contest received $1,000 and a stereo system.[16] Julius Erving went on to win the competition by completing the now famous free throw line dunk. The Slam Dunk Contest would make its way to the NBA in 1976–77 as a season-long competition for that season only, and on a permanent basis as a standalone event as part of the NBA All-Star Weekend in 1984.
Folded, 1975 NBA relocated Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans as New Orleans Hornets (now New Orleans Pelicans) in 2002. NBA relocated Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis as Memphis Grizzlies in 2001.
Folded, 1976 (prior to merger) NBA relocated San Francisco Warriors to Oakland as Golden State Warriors in 1971. NBA relocated Baltimore Bullets to Washington as Capital Bullets (now Washington Wizards) in 1973.
In 1999, a new league calling itself the ABA 2000 was established. The new league uses a similar red, white and blue basketball as the old ABA, but unlike the original ABA, it does not feature players of similar caliber to the NBA, nor does it play games in major arenas or on television as the original ABA did.
1 2 3 4 5 Pluto, Terry (2007). Loose balls: the short, wildlife of the American Basketball Association (1sted.). New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. ISBN978-1416540618. OCLC153578380.
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