NBA DNA with Hannah StormIn this week’s episode, we stay in the ABA as the upstart league lures top players like Dr. J, Moses Malone, and Spencer Haywood in an attempt to secure a national TV contract. Hannah recounts a story her father told her about the ABA’s top-secret pursuit of Lew Alcindor, dubbed ‘Operation Kingfish,’ and reflects on the lasting legacy of the ABA, including the hardship rule, three-point shot, and wide-open style of play. Plus, everything to know about the 1976 NBA-ABA merger. Guests include Dr. J, Bob Costas, Peter Vecsey, and Semi-Pro screenwriter Scot Armstrong.
If you love basketball, there's a good chance you love movies about basketball. I even had the chance to be in one, like Mike. You've probably seen it. It's about a kid named Calvin Cambridge played by Lil bow Wow, who comes across a mysterious pair of old sneakers inscribed with the faded initials MJ and.
The rest Ah. Well, you should watch it.
Here's one of my scenes which we shot on the set of the NBA on NBC.
The big story in the NBA, Calvin Cambridge, the four foot eight dynamo, has now signed a lucrative contract with the Knights, and no wonder after he led them to have come from behind win over the Spurs with twenty seven.
Points a kid was unbelievable.
Another one of my favorite hoops movies is a send up of something.
A little closer to reality, at least for me.
Very successful and this ninth Annual ABA All Star Game Shining.
Games Semi Pro starring Will Ferrell, set in nineteen seventy six, the final year of the American Basketball Association in semi pro, the fictional Flint Tropics are doing.
Whatever they can to survive a merger.
With the NBA despite having the worst record in the league. Will Ferrell's character is a team owner, head coach, starting power forward and pregame analyst Scott Armstrong wrote the film, they had.
To compete with the NBA, which was like impossible for them at the time. In order to compete with them, they had to like step up, you know, the showmanship and step up the excitement of the game. So they added things like the three point line. They added the dunk contest, They had like a rainbow ball to play with, and like gave out prizes and had halftime shows.
What makes Semi Pro fun for me is that many of the teams actually existed. The characters are based on real people, and some of the crazier stun like bear wrestling, those actually happened.
In the ABN the Destroyer wrestled Victor the Bear four hundred pound Victor the Bear.
I saw a charity event in pure Illinois, and like the early nineties, like I happened to see like people like were allowed to wrestle a bear for charity or whatever, and like now you would never ever ever be allowed to do that, but they used to do stuff like that in the seventies, and so that kind of inspired that scene where like Will Ferrell would wrestle a bear at halftime, we worked to a real grizzly bear and we were in the gym with like a trained grizzly bear for half of it.
Of course, like Will was never in danger or.
Anything, but there was one moment where there's this guy just like blowing a whistle and like the bear was not listening to the whistle and I'm like watching this and he's going like like that, and then the trainer's just like everyone get in the bathroom, and like we all had to like go into the bathroom of the of this like stadium that we built, and we're like hiding in there with like the door. When you're in the ring with that bear, you got to keep them busy or he's able to just walk away from me and wander to ring and back to his cage. So the bear just wandered around the stadium by himself and not eat anybody.
It was hilarious.
Oh my god, how did the bear finally get to where it was supposed to go?
I don't know.
He just started like listening again, and like we're and of course, like we need to get like a certain shot, so we're like, can we just.
Do one more? I'm like, I don't know.
Man, Like it's like like it's like that balance of like will the director get eaten?
How bad do we need the shot?
The film captures the essence of the ABA players, coaches, and executives like my dad, Mike Storren, a gang of ambitious dreamers who loved basketball and were determined to be part of the NBA. Was there anyone real that you modeled some of your characters after got Gae?
There's some moments, you know, like trading for a washing machine, like when Monix got traded for what really happened? I mean, there are kind of amalgamations of like types, you know what I mean. So I can't say it was like someone you know, but like again, I know it's a ridiculous, silly movie, but like at the heart of it, there is sort of like being the best you could possibly be.
I'm just so happy that it exists, that the film exists, because I think that so many people and really my motivation for doing this podcast was, you know, not only because I grew up around the ABA, but I was like, I know that there's so many people who watch a game today that have no idea. They don't know that this took place. They don't know where all this came from.
I can't believe it happened.
It really didn't happen. It really was insane, like these guys traveling on buses and like dunking, like doing stuff in a way that was like to half filled stadiums.
There's a freedom to it.
It's like seventies America, Free Love, Free basketball.
Every movie has an ending, and so did the ABA. It was over in nineteen seventy five when a fraction of the team left from the league's heyday made their way into the NBA. It's the journey to get there that is part of the screenplay of my life, and this podcast documents all the plot twists, storylines and characters along the way.
I'm Hannah Storm and this is NBA DNA Episode two, The.
Merger Waken out last Lloyd af here push it from you to Brown. He wants to tuck you to get it up quickly. Now as the end of the theory that think that on the post to go more he got it into position.
Throughout the history of the ABA, there was always an underlying belief on the part of certainly every owner that we should merge with the NBA.
Danny will only here in Manhattan.
The Lakers keep up the pressure.
The issue was that if we can create a merger with the NBA, we will then become one big, happy family. Our franchises will be very valuable, and we will be economic and psychological success. So every time a new owner came into the league, and there were a lot of them, one of the things that they believed was, I will create a merger.
That's my dad, Mike Storren, the ABA's fifth commissioner, in the same twenty fourteen interview you heard in the last episode. At the time the ABA was formed in nineteen sixty seven, the NBA was just over two decades old and had been fending off competing basketball leagues. Potential investors in the ABA were told they could get a franchise for half of what would cost to get an NBA team, With the price as low as ten thousand dollars for a team, at one point, many were scraping by. Here's Saint Louis Spirits play by play man thrown out mL car. This is a twenty footer.
Kentucky eadbounds death, no joke.
There were times when we would, let's say, arrive in Denver and they're about to pass out the keys, but they won't give them to us because we haven't paid the bill from the last time, you know. And teams take the Virginia Swires, they threatened strikes, player strikes because the last few checks had bounced. That's kind of what the ABA was, at least for some of the franchises.
Doctor J out of the Unbelievable Doctor J.
You know, if you got a check, you ran to the bank real quick. It made a deposit, just to make sure, make sure it held up.
Make Surrey be cash.
mL car was he talks about it the most. He said, Man, I had to get down there quick. I didn't want my check to balance. I want to be the first one in line, not the twelfth gap, because it's twelve men on a team, so maybe by the time you get to.
The twelfth guy there's a problem with his check.
The Holy Grail was an National TV contract to make the ABA viable. One of the league's founders was NBA Hall of Famer George Mikeen.
There are some fires to Miken and when Big George Gip said sixty nine sixty eight, the Laker.
Who became the ABA's first commissioner.
George, after being the foundation for creating the league ownership group, decided he wasn't the right.
Man to move the league forward.
And I don't even remember who the section commissioner was, but there was one. And then the owner said, oh, we need a guy with television experience because we need a television contract. So the next commissioner was a guy named Jack Dolph who was formerly vice president of sports Programming for CBS.
And everybody said, oh, this is great.
Jack's going to get us a million dollar television contract and we're all going to die and go to heaven and the ABA will be very successful. Well, Jack couldn't get him a tele vision contract, and they couldn't dine and go to heaven with all the television money they expected.
They said, we got to get somebody else in here.
Seven commissioners in nine seasons. My dad was tapped as number five, in large part because his Kentucky Colonels were perennial contenders for the title.
Kentucky Rebounds Day, your Fishline.
Selling out every night fifteen to eighteen thousand fans packed into Louisville's Freedom Hall to watch dan Issel, Louis Dampier and artist Gilmore put on a show.
Gilmore setting up low inside beached Roberts to come out the fleet, throw out and stores.
My goal as commissioner was not to create a merger, but was to create a league that would be the best basketball league in the world. So I was a logical choice to take the league forward to build a league on its own merits, and to that spend all of my time trying to figure out how it was we could get a merger.
The basketball itself, as we have documented, was highly entertaining, but another part of the ABA legacy is the show around the game, anything to get people into the seats. Some of my dad's ideas through the years worked out better than others.
One of the great promotions that I created was a punkin carving contest, and the theory was that at halftime we would select ten people from the stands who would come down and carve punkins, and we would turn lights out and the crowd would be excited by the wonderful punkins they'd carved. Well, of course, it takes a long time to carve a punkin. So we pre carved the punkins them, so all they had to do was come down and pull the pieces out. But we turned the lights out and several of the people fell down with their pumpkins, and the pumpkins splattered.
On the floor.
A bit more successful, perhaps, was the time my dad featured a team of Playboy bunnies on the court at halftime of a colonel's game. There were also cow milking competitions, the first ever Halter top night, and let's not forget the famous bikini clad ball girls in Miami. Now, since this wasn't on TV, it was really up to the writers to document it all. Here's longtime basketball writer Peter VESSI.
I don't remember anything but the cheerleader.
Course you don't.
You know now Lucky will tell you that he thinks that I dated a cheerleader from every city, and he's right.
Peter started covering professional basketball in the nineteen seventies when he wrote about the ABA for the New York Post, or maybe Lived it would be more accurate.
After the game, we would all go out and party.
I was going to say, you weren't getting to bed early because of that early flight. That was not happening. No one of the trainers. Fritz Masman taught me early that you got to go to sleep with your clothes on.
Say step in the morning.
That was big. That was big, you know.
So whenever you went to sleep with that night, you were waking up with that next morning, so you know, you might get two or three hours sleep whatever. We were out partying.
Back to Bob Costas, who was rolling with the Saint Louis Spirits.
What'd you guys do when you were hanging out?
Well, yeah, sometimes we'd go to dinner together.
Sometimes we'd you know, gather in the hotel our road game afterwards. I practices. I could shoot. I couldn't play. It was too small to really play. I couldn't guard anybody, and if I was guarded, I couldn't get a shot off. But if we were just shooting free throws back then I could shoot and I would win bets. I would get in three point contests and in free throw contests with some of the guys who I knew I could be. Wow, and then they got wise because I was taking their money.
Yeah.
It was crazy, but crazy fun, and the sports world took notice. Peter Carey, who would eventually become executive editor of Sports Illustrated was assigned to cover the Renegade League.
First of all, the ABA hit a three point shot, which the NBA didn't have at that time. The game was more open in the way it was played, so it was more running, more excitement, and so on and so forth. A guy came out of nowhere named Julius Serving and he became a very compelling player, and people wanted to see.
One of the more enduring ABA ideas is something we see every All Star weekend, the Slam Dunk Content Test, which took place in nineteen seventy six at the ABA's final All Star game before the merger.
The judges will score on each dunk on a basis of five to ten points.
Here's Doctor j.
The first was in Denver. It was an ABA idea. You know. The lineup was me and Larry Keenan, George Gerb and David Thompson.
The man that has turned the slam dunk into an r got six foot six for the New York That's the fabulous Doctor j. Julius Ervant.
So didn't you start by dunking two balls and the hoop? Isn't that how you began that.
I've seen the video a few times, and I think it was, you know, duncan two balls at the.
Same time, and now the doctor goes to work.
Which was something there. You know, not everybody could do that. I mean there's funny guys who can't do it. Easy to go one in the other and two at the same time. It was a little bit different. But I think the question was why a you synonymous with dunking.
I think that dunk contest and dunking from the.
Foul line at the end and David missing on one of his dunks kind of paved the way because he was doing great dunks too.
He was doing pirouettes from the corner.
And David Thompson finishing it with a trush around. Pattna slammed dunk.
With his leaping ability, and he was at home because he played for the Nuggets.
You know, I felt a little threatened, did Okay?
Yeah?
Yeah, I felt I felt I felt threatened by him. I mean, you know, he.
Thought the Skywalker was gonna maybe take that dunk title instead of you, that nobody had the title.
That's right, this was a title to be earned.
Okay, tell me about the free throw line dunk. Where that idea came from?
You know how many times you had done that?
That's everyone.
Really, I'm gonna definitely credit Converse with that one, because if I didn't have the Converse, it never.
Would have happened.
And the reason and the reason I had the Converse on is because I did basketball clinics for Converse for kids, and I would always end.
The clinic with a dunk from the foul.
That was my exit. You know, It's like, you know, somebody's on the stage. They danced, they got the cane and they dance, and they danced their way into the off the stage and they come back out for the ovation.
Was just dunk your way off the court and then I.
Leave and then I leave it and then like all standing up on crazy and I come back out and take a bound.
So cool. What did you think when you saw mj do it years later?
Well, here's what happened because I was there and we're like courtside, and Michael's knew heated battles with domin Ainsbury.
Now, Michael Jordan told me he had something special.
He may be trying to take off from the freefront line.
I'll af Julia serving let's see what happens.
He kind of measured it.
From there and he looked old with me, and I'm like, Poyton, do it. Go back down there and he talks about this and then interviews.
So whatever said, go back then, So he runs back and then he comes dribbling.
And you know, and when he jumps, he does a little pump. That's gotta be it.
You know.
Rest was history.
It was derivative of the ABA's approach.
Well.
Great players like Well Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul Jabbar were not allowed to dunk in the NBA and dunks weren't allowed in college.
For that matter.
The ABA allowed playground moves that made the game so exciting, moves popularized in places like Rucker Park, a Harlem court that's hosted some of the greatest players to ever play the game. Vessi coached in Rutgers Summer League. That's where he first met doctor j.
So Julius is coming out of college and I had a friend of mine who played at Hofster, guy named but Dave Brownville. I went to Hofster for a year, played ball there for a year, left before they asked me to leave. So I asked Dave. David was very good friends with Julius. You know, do you think Julius would want to play for me and the Rooker I'm starting a team, he asked them. And he came or coming into Rutger Park for the first time, me first time him, and we sit on a bench to three of us, and Julius says to me, how much am I going to get paid? And I said, Julius, as far as I know, nobody's getting paid in the Rucker Tournament. And he said, okay, he said, let me think about it. So him and Dave walked around the park, came back, started leasing up the sneakers. Let's go. And so the first game that he played, we played against Tiny Archibaal's team and it was raining, so we had to go indoors. And Tiny's team was loaded with pros, just like my team was. I had Charlie, I had Julius, I had Billy Paul, sayed Ali Taylor. But he did too. He had Austin Carr, you know the year before, he had Dave Cowen's rookie year. Wow, you know loaded. Each team was loaded, and they beat us indoors. But on one play in the first half, Julius is driving down the sideline, right sideline and he takes off. There are two people in front of him. One guy was Marvin Roberts, remember him. He was like six ' nine. So Julius takes off from about fifteen feet twenty feet away from the hoop and we're like, what is this. He goes over both of the tough and dunks wow. And we had never ever seen anything like that.
The Rucka Park happened before the ABA. I mean, I actually my junior year of college, before training camp started. You know, Charlie Scott, who's the leader and the captain of the Virginia Squires, he and Fatty Taylor, he invited me to come and play in the Rutger and when we were playing for Peter Vesti's team, you know, one of the things that I really love to do was going to dunk the ball. So when I got to the rugby League, you know, it was I mean, my jaw dropped. Players were playing at the highest level of playground basketball.
What does it feel like to dunk a basketball?
Because you know, ninety nine point nine percent of the population has never.
Been I never felt it, you know what I mean?
You never climbed the ladder and just you never never climbed up the steps. That Okay, it's probably be hard to hold the ball one hand too.
Right, Yeah, yeah, So I have made a hole in one of golf second year when I was playing, and holding one's a lot harder than dunking the ball.
It exceeds the experience of dunking the ball. And dunking the ball is kind of parallel. If anything, it might be knocking it out of the park on a given day because in the course of the game, you know there's going to be a certain number of home runs or whatever when you knock it out the park, you know, dunking the balls like knock it out the park. You know, come in and you know there's going to be some kind of resistance or maybe not today's game.
But.
Somebody there. There was always somebody in my era, in the previous era. There's always somebody there trying to knock your teeth out or trying to put you put you on the ground and put you in your place.
And my place is here in your chest, dunk in his basketball.
That's my place.
Is what's your favorite dunk? Do you have a favorite?
So Elvin Hayes was great basketball.
Dennis Aufrey at six against Delvin Hays Hayes at six ' nine, and you see Larry Wright coming up whether it's moving.
Two year eleven Hall of Famer earned his kudos, and the only floor he had from my perspective, was when he defended the basket.
You jump in the air, you have both hands up in the air, and I saw him.
This time and time again. So we're playing the Bullets, Washington Bullets, and I'm I'm coming off the wing and I get around Bobby Dandridge and Elvin's back there defending the basket.
To this so it looked like gold posts.
Right when you're playing when you're playing football, and you got gold posts right, So that was the goal post defense.
I end up chest to chest.
I actually feel his chest against my chest and we're both in the air, so.
With chest to chess and I'm coming with my right hand and I move it over to in between the goal posts and then I dunked the ball and the whole.
Capital Senate gets quiet. It was like because that was their guy. But that moment goes down with me.
Is probably the best endgame dunk that I ever had because you know, he's six foot nine, six ten.
And he's strong.
And then it happened, and then it was punctuated.
I love it, and dunk isn't greater unless it's punctuate.
Peter Carrey wrote the first national article about Julius.
I say that this guy's an emerging figure. We've got to put him on the cover, right. So I'm writing the story and it actually approached Julius before the game and said, do you feel comfortable dunking in warm ups? Which I knew he did, but I didn't want to ask him to do something you want to do. And he said yes, And I said, okay, we're probably going to have a photographer shooting you while you're dunking in practice, because I want a picture of your dunking. He says, okay. So the teams come out on the floor and there's no Julius. Oh, and I'm sitting scratching my head. I'm sort of standing behind the nets bench and Julius isn't there, and they're they're doing all their shooting and stuff. And then finally over in the corner of the stands on the opposite side, I see Julius is talking to a guy and a little kid in the stands. I don't know what the hell's going on. Anyway, So time passes and the pregame warmups have ended and he comes loping across the floor. He doesn't even go to his menk. He comes directly to me and he said, I'm sorry, but that man up there is a rabbi from I think Buffalo, and he's brought his son down here to me play as a bar Mitzer present. So I thought I had to, you know, pay some attention. I said, okay, he said, but don't worry, I'll get you dunk in the first quarter.
I love it.
A few minutes into the first quarter, steals the pass, goes down the floor, takes off it about the foul line.
He had a kind of a very ari.
Afro and so when he was really going fast, it sort of got swept back a little bit and he's like, you know, a foot above the basket, coming down really hard. And that ended up being on the cover of the magazine.
Wow, and he willed it.
That is incredible.
So why was this incredible talent in the ABA instead of the NBA. Well, that had a lot to do with my dad, who helped create what was known as the hardship Rule, enabling doctor j to play as a pro in the ABA after his junior year in college, something the NBA did not allow.
You know, stepfather work for the sanitation department and he made about ten.
To fifteen thousand dollars. The two of them together probably made ten to fifteen thousand dollars, right, So the economics of it were off the charts, and they had a caveat where they were paid over seven years. So it was fire for two thousand dollars, but you get paid over seven years, so you basically making like seventy two thousand dollars a year. I wasn't making anything in college, so I called my mom and we had a heart to heart and she said, well, you only one year away from graduating, and you know, we will be very proud of you if you graduated, and if you promise me you're going to graduate, then do what you want to do.
Julius signed a four year, five hundred thousand dollars contract and years later he did graduate in nineteen eighty three. Now, of course, sits the norm for players to leave college early or skip it all together, as in the case of Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, and Kevin Garnett. But it actually took a lawsuit for the hardship rule really.
Truly all right gifted, greaceful athletes.
Here's Haywood Heywood.
Spencer Haywood was the Denver Nuggets first ever MVP, long before Nikola Jokic, and in nineteen seventy he sued the NBA for barring him from signing a six year, one and a half million dollar contract with the Seattle SuperSonics. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Peter Vessi covered the story.
So Spencer Haywood did play college ball. He didn't come right out of high school, you know, like Moses did, or Toby did, or many others.
With the thirteenth pick in the nineteen ninety six NBA Draft, the Charlotte Hornets select Tovey Bryant from Lowerman.
He winds up signing with Denver in the ABA, and he has a sensational rookie year, MVP of this MVP of that rookie of the year year, top score, top rebound. I mean, you know, he's out of control. At the end of the year. The NBA comes courting and Seattle. Sam Schildan was the owner, so Denver wouldn't do anything of his contract, and Seattle was willing to bring him into the NBA right And so the NBA said, no, we don't allow underclassmen to come until their class graduates. So there would have been another year for Haywood. He was never in the NBA draft, so Seattle felt that they could take him, and so it went to court, and it went to the Supreme Court, and he wins it.
Here's Bob Costas.
So eventually the hardship rule comes into play, which now is gone where you had to at least establish some kind of hardship. Now it doesn't make any difference. Your family can be millionaires. If you want to come out directly from high school or come out after one year as so many do now from college.
You can.
With the first pick in the two thousand and three NBA Draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers select Lebron James.
When we look back on it and think about what even the least the players makes now, the last guy on the bench, it all seems so trivial. But these guys had to fight for the right to have free agency, and the right to have some sort of control over their own lives and careers, and Spencer Haywood was kind of at the forefront of that. And I think what's lost to history largely is what a good player he was.
He had a really good player.
Every year in the existence of the ABA, there was a competition for players coming out of college. So each year in college and each year of the pass there are always great players leaving college and having to make a choice between the NBA.
And the ABA.
There was Kareem Abdul Jabbar. There was Dan Essel, there was Artist Gilmore, there was Bill Walton Siel.
Again, thatsl just all over the place tonight.
Certainly, one of the greatest players to ever play at the University of Kentucky was Dan Issel. Dan was number one draft choice of the Detroit team. But tell me who would want to go to Detroit and you know the snow when you could stay at home with all your friends at play at Freedom Hall.
So Dan signed with US.
Doctor j Artist Gilmore, and Dan Issel were all huge wins for the ABA. But then there's the one that got away for my dad, that was lou Al Cinder.
Kareem what a.
Big pressure shot.
Later known as Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
The League appointed me to put together a strategy for signing lou Elsinder, and as a result, in order to keep this whole project a secret, I named it Operation Kingfish, examining who he was, where he grew up, what his history was, what was his relationship to his agent, what was his relationship to UCLA, what were the psychological things that could impact his decision. I kept the document in my desk called Operation Kingfish, and there was an employee who got his hands on that. I suspected this, and so the document in my desk wasn't valid, and I put a document in there that said we'd signed him, and the person before being fired passed the information onto the NBA that we had an operation and that we had already signed.
Another tale from the ABA's oral history. Do you remember the whole Operation Kingfish thing with Kareem ad Bill Jabbar. Do you know the story of the ABA trying to get lou Elsender?
Well, yeah, of course, I mean because he was drafted by the Nets right, and he was drafted by Milwaukee, right, and so he said, and he was obviously serious, I'll accept one bid from each team and that's it. And the Nets lowballed them. Now they tried to come back and make them another offer, and he said no. Years later, this is fact I heard from Ray Patterson, who was the president of Milwaukee at the time. So look before I go there. So the Nets, of course, the whole league was willing to pool their resources to get out there, so they had the money. Then if Ray tells me that the NBA pooled its resources also, and I never knew that at the time when I was writing about it, I wish I had.
He said, yeah, we couldn't afford to pay you know what we paid. So it was a you know, it was it was a group It was a group issue on both sides of the of the of the Ledger.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I just, oh, I don't know.
My dad used to love telling this story and he's like, George Miken had a million dollars of cash and a briefcase and was so convinced that Louel Sinder was going to come to the ABA that I didn't give him the money and left town. And then El Sinder took the money and went. Now I don't know that any of that is true. Though I want to say, I have no idea.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, you don't believe your father.
Well, he's pretty good at spending toil.
I don't know. I think it was true. I think there must have been some truth to that.
By the mid seventies, it became evident that it was in everyone's best interest to forge some sort of merger. The NBA had grown from nine franchises to eighteen and was looking to get stronger.
Here's my dad.
With the progression of time, not getting a big television contract, with the economic failure of many teams, and the escalating price for players, having ownership in the league became increasingly difficult. As the ownership became conversant with the NBA ownership, a merger became a reality, and four teams did in fact merge with the NBA.
Those teams were the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs, and.
New York Nets. Here's Peter Carry.
I think the NBA finally realized that, better than fighting this war, well, we'll get together with these guys. They have pieces of terrif for already marked out. They have some pretty attractive players, and the ABA teams as I recall, I don't think the ABA teams did all that badly right from the gun.
How about players specifically like Doctor J, George Gervin, Moses Malone. I mean, these are among the greatest players of all time.
I mean, is he a human highlight film or is he?
Yes? He is.
How do you think the ABA contributed to their development?
Well, Moses is such an allone.
Off college but he gets it.
That's the bill collar job.
But most.
You can put Moses in wrestling match and the bear he would have won. It gave me chance to play, to really show off in a way they probably couldn't of the day they arrived in the NBA. So when they did get in the NBA, they were pretty fully developed.
Players had all sorts of reasons to choose one league or the other, and for Doctor J, it was a seminal choice central to who he would become as a player.
So that period, you know, being League MVP and winning to championships, you know, winning seventy four, seventy six, you know, winning the ABA titles during its he is having Kevin Lockery as a coach, he gave me the freedom to be.
Doctor J, which meant what the freedom to be doctor j What did that mean?
I think you know, you go over a game plan in the locker room and then you know, sometime late in the form first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth for the coach kind of looks at you and says, Okay, we've stuck with this plan long enough, and now we're down five points and I want you to do something.
You know, So that type of trust and you know, and the team, the team rallying is okay, we got a leader who's done make the right play and make the right decisions out here, and whether it's him scoring or getting somebody else set up, you know, the trust worthiness of the feeling that this is what's going to happen next, and it happens. I look back and it's probably one of the better things about the ABA that has stuck with me all these years. That type of trust was given to me and I succeeded.
With Here's Bob Costas.
What's the most important legacy of the A B A and your estimation?
First of all, fun craziness of the stories can be told and some cannot. But also the three pointer, the improvisational nature or just let these players be creative. Let them do what their talent allows them to do, as opposed to what some guy put on on the x's and oh's on a chalkboard.
The ABA was flawed, but it was exciting. It was really every night was exciting.
Why do you think it was flawed? Why didn't it survive?
In the end, they were under financed and they could never get a true national television contract. You know, the NBA was in most of the preferable markets for a lot of folks. The ABA was just a rumor, but the rumors turned out.
To be true.
You know, the skeptics just said, let's see how good these guys are. The first year after the merger, half of the starters in the final between Philadelphia and Portland, five of the ten had played in the ABA, And that first year in the All Star Game, ten of the twenty four All Stars had played in the ABA.
That's how good the league was.
A half dozen ABA teams folded before the merger or accepted a buyout. My family's beloved Kentucky Colonels were one of them, while Bob costas Is Spirits of Saint Louis cut one of the greatest business deals of all time.
The NBA wants to make sure that there are no anti trust suits file. They've got to indemnify these others somehow, And I think they led John Y Brown, who then owned the Colonels buy in with Buffalo. They took care of the Squire's debts in Virginia. And so the Spirits say, wait a minute, if we got in, we'd be entitled to a slice the TV money.
Right.
Well, the TV money then was relatively inconsequential, less than a million dollars per team annually from network television. So they say, how about this. There were seven ABA teams at the time that the league folded. Okay, so how about if we take one seventh of the total that the four teams would take one seventh and the NBA just wants them to go away. They say, okay, but the Spirit's attorney inserts an important clause in perpetuity man, and then it all explodes. Bird Magic, Jordan, the Dream Team, David Stern takes it global. If they had put an NBA franchise on Jupiter in the twenty third century, the Silma's airs would still be collecting. But eventually, after collecting hundreds of millions of dollars. On the basis of this deal, the NBA came back to them for like the fifth or sixth time and said, couldn't we possibly close this out? So nobody infefitted from the ABA like these two dudes did.
The ABA's merger with the NBA also helped change the course of East host basketball for decades. As Doctor j ended up with the Philadelphia seventy six ershame.
Up in Walton space, and Walton said had to be offense that Julius is unbelievable.
In a wide open situation.
Four ABA teams had to pay three point two million dollars, but for the Nets for your team it was worse because they were Knicks territory, so they had to pay an additional four point eight million. And then all these teams were kind of vying for your services, you know, Milwaukee, in LA and Philly, and the Nets actually offered your contract to the Knicks and returned for waiving the fee, and the Knicks declined. Is that true because they wanted the money instead of like one of the greatest players of all time?
Is this is this how it went down?
I have no idea that I wasn't a party to the conversation.
Wow.
And when it came down to the two leagues merging, you know, they're like, you're not making You're making the money.
The top players make it, right. And so now we got back into the financial discussion and the Nets wouldn't do it or couldn't do it, and they still owed the Knicks money. I just bought a.
House Long Island, upper Brookville, and you know, had started a family. I didn't really want to go too far from Long Island, so it was the Knicks or the Sixers or maybe Washington. I wanted to be back home, so I wanted to live in my house, and I thought that I would be able to still commute to any one of those places and be a player there and live there in an apartment, you know, and do part time. And that's exactly what happened. I was happy with the geography because I had cousins in Philadelphia, so I had relatives in Philadelphia, and Long Island.
Was commutable bringing up for the Lord, so we thought.
So that first year in Philly world, be Free was commuting from Brooklyn that I was commuting from Long Allan, so I would spend by and pick him up.
Oh my goodness.
Really, we come rolling in, we come rolling into practice, rolling in the gays.
We're coming from New York, like to New Yorkers were holding onto holding.
On to ash.
Oh wow. And then and then that.
That went for a year, and then the second years he said, man, you got to move to Philly.
We need to.
What kind of car were you guys driving back and forth from New York to Philly.
I had a van.
It was like a you know van, customized vans in those days they were they were all stricked out.
So it wasn't a sports car. It was a van.
Now, oh oh, man, it was a man and I'm driven Sometimes he built other times.
As Doctor J's fame and fortune continued to grow in the NBA, his game was now on display for all to see and to reckon with, and he wasn't alone. In the first All Star Game after the merger. Ten of the twenty four players had played in the ABA, including Doctor J, who was named the game's MVP, and seventeen ABA players, along with two coaches, would be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. In the front office, times were changing too. In nineteen seventy eight, just two years after the merger, an ambitious young lawyer by the name of David Stern took a job as the NBA's general counsel. As my dad would later tell it, from day one, everyone knew Stern was a star.
And as David came in and took over, David recognized that professional basketball is first and foremost an entertainment vehicle, and the people that are entertaining in basketball are the star players. And David was one of the first people to acknowledge and recognize the wide open I say, the wide open style of play that the American Basketball Association brought to the NBA and therefore its growth and popularity throughout not only the United States but the world.
David Stern would become my mentor and everything that the ABA brought to the table that was my father's basketball it would shape my life for decades to come.
Next, on NBA DNA.
They had us out at them all. One day we had a couple of.
Players and they have a banner meet producton LOTE that's an elderly lady comes up, Oh my god, I love you guys.
How do you fit in those space yifts? She thought we were with Massop For some strange reason my father accused of taking the year.
The Euston Rockets select.
I came elied you one.
It's totally the truth, because we're going keylie when I've played right there in town ivers he used it.
NBA DNA with Hannah Storm is a production of iHeart Podcasts, the NBA and Brainstorm in Productions. The show is written and executive produced by me Hannah Storm, along with Julia Weaver and Alex French. Our lead producer and showrunner is Julia Weaver. Our senior producers are Peter Cowder, Alex Wrench, and Brandon Reese. Editing and sound design by Kurt Garren and Julia Weaver. The show's executive producers are Carmen Belmont, Jason English, Sean Ttone, Steve Weintraup, and Jason Weikelt
