For nine seasons, there was another major professional basketball league in America. It played with a red, white and blue ball. It shot three-pointers when the NBA considered them a gimmick. It invented the slam dunk contest. Its players wore big hair and bigger personalities, and its greatest star could seemingly fly.
The American Basketball Association lasted from 1967 to 1976. It never achieved the stability or television money of the NBA, and it ended in a merger on the NBA's terms. Yet so many of its ideas survived that, in a real sense, the modern NBA looks more like the ABA than the league that absorbed it.
A league built to be different
The ABA launched in 1967 with eleven teams, many in cities the NBA had ignored. Its founders knew they could not compete with the established league on prestige, so they competed on entertainment.
The league's first commissioner was George Mikan, the NBA's first great big man. Among his ideas was a ball that no one could mistake for the NBA's: red, white and blue panels instead of plain brown. Critics laughed. Fans loved it, and the tricolor ball became the league's symbol.
The ABA also adopted the three-point line, an idea borrowed from an earlier rival league. It rewarded long-range shooting, opened up the floor and gave smaller players a weapon against bigger ones. The NBA would not add a three-point line until the 1979–80 season.
Stars from everywhere
To compete for talent, the ABA took risks the NBA would not. It lured established players away from the older league, including Rick Barry. It signed college players before they had finished school, such as Spencer Haywood. It even signed Moses Malone directly out of high school in 1974, decades before high school stars routinely jumped to the pros.
It also gave second chances. Connie Hawkins, a spectacular forward who had been unfairly barred from the NBA after being linked to a college gambling scandal, became the ABA's first MVP and led the Pittsburgh Pipers to the league's first championship.
Dr. J
No player embodied the ABA like Julius Erving. Arriving in 1971 with the Virginia Squires and later starring for the New York Nets, "Dr. J" played above the rim in a way few fans had seen. He glided through the air, switched hands mid-flight and finished with dunks that looked impossible.
Erving won three ABA MVP awards and led the Nets to championships in 1974 and 1976. Because the ABA's television exposure was limited, many fans knew his greatest plays only by reputation — which only deepened the legend.
The first dunk contest
At the 1976 ABA All-Star Game in Denver, the league tried something new: a slam dunk contest at halftime. Erving's final dunk became one of the most famous moments in basketball history. He ran the length of the court, took off from the free-throw line and threw the ball down.
The NBA, which had long been wary of that kind of showmanship, held a season-long dunk competition in 1976–77 and, from 1984, made the slam dunk contest a fixture of All-Star weekend.
The merger
Despite its creativity, the ABA struggled financially. Teams moved or folded, and the league never secured a major national television contract. By the mid-1970s, both leagues were spending heavily in bidding wars for players, and a merger made sense for everyone.
In the summer of 1976 the deal was done. Four ABA teams — the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, New York Nets and San Antonio Spurs — joined the NBA. The others, including the Kentucky Colonels, who had won the 1975 title, were left behind.
The most famous part of the deal involved the Spirits of St. Louis, one of the teams that did not join. Their owners, brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna, agreed to fold the franchise in exchange for a share of the four joining teams' future television revenue — with no end date. As the NBA's television deals grew, those payments became enormous. The arrangement lasted for decades before the league finally bought out the brothers in 2014.
The ABA's legacy
The ABA's influence is everywhere in today's game:
- The three-point shot, now central to almost every NBA offense
- The slam dunk contest, a fixture of All-Star weekend
- An emphasis on speed, spacing and athleticism
- A willingness to bring young talent into the pros
- Franchises such as the Spurs, Nuggets, Pacers and Nets, which have all reached the NBA Finals since joining
Many ABA stars also proved themselves after the merger. Erving won the 1981 NBA MVP award and a championship with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1983. Moses Malone, who had started his professional career as a teenager in the ABA, was the MVP of that 1983 Finals.
The league that won by losing
On paper, the ABA lost. It ran out of money and its survivors joined the older league on unfavorable terms. But the game the NBA plays today — fast, spread out, built around the three-point line and highlight-reel athleticism — is the game the ABA was selling in the late 1960s.
The red, white and blue ball is gone. Its ideas never left.
