ABA–NBA merger

• 1. Introduction

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  The ABA-NBA merger was finalized on the 17th of June 1976, in the Cape Cod Room at Dunfey's Hyannis Resort in Hyannis, Massachusetts. Six years earlier, the two leagues had already shaken hands on a deal. But antitrust lawyers, angry players, and a handful of powerful team owners kept tearing it apart. What took so long? And who paid the price when it finally happened? The answers involve a leaked draft document, a lawsuit filed by Oscar Robertson, a pair of polyester millionaires who turned their consolation prize into decades of income, and a league that quietly swallowed almost everything it once dismissed.

• 2. A League Built to Merge

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  According to The NBA Encyclopedia, ABA officials told prospective owners they could get an ABA franchise for roughly half what an NBA expansion team cost, with the promise that surviving owners would see their investment more than double once the leagues united. The ABA had no serious long-term plan for independence; the founders expected the league to last three to five years before either merging or folding entirely.

  By the ABA's second year of existence, in 1968, league officials obtained a leaked internal document from a disgruntled former NBA employee. It detailed the order of the 1968 NBA draft, the players each team would receive, their expected salaries, and most critically, how much each NBA team had contributed to steer college stars away from signing with the ABA. This gave the ABA leverage for a potential antitrust case against the NBA, even though the ABA was quietly running a similar operation of its own.

  On the 18th of June 1970, only three years after the ABA began play, the NBA owners voted 13-4 to seek congressional approval for a merger, while the ABA owners voted 11-0 in favor. The plan envisioned a single 28-team league retaining the NBA name. Seattle SuperSonics owner Sam Schulman was so eager to merge that he publicly threatened to move his franchise from the NBA to the ABA if the deal fell through, and also threatened to plant his ABA team in Los Angeles to compete directly with the Lakers. The owners of the Dallas Chaparrals were so certain the merger was imminent that they suggested the ABA skip scheduling entirely and simply play the 1971-72 NBA season as members of the existing league.

• 3. Robertson v. National Basketball Association

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  Filed in April 1970, the lawsuit now known as Robertson v. National Basketball Association, 556 F.2d 682 (2d Cir. 1977), was led by Oscar Robertson, head of the NBA Players Association. The suit argued that players were essentially bound to whatever roster drafted them, with trades the only mechanism for movement. The Players Association contended that merging the two leagues would remove the competitive pressure that had driven salaries upward across both circuits.

  The existence of the ABA had created a bidding war that benefited players in both leagues. The Robertson suit was finally settled on the 3rd of February 1976, but for the entire period it was active, it functioned as an impassable barrier to any final merger agreement.

  Congress attempted to intervene. In September 1972, a merger bill was reported favorably out of a U.S. Senate committee, but it was designed primarily to satisfy owners and failed to win support from either senators or players. When Congress reconvened in 1973, a second bill was introduced but died without advancing to a vote in either chamber. A revised agreement had already been reached on the 4th of May 1971, which would have cleared most ABA teams into the NBA in exchange for dropping the antitrust lawsuit, each ABA team paying $1.25 million over ten years, and a shared college draft. The U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee approved it, but the NBA's reserve clause was ruled illegal and stripped from the deal. Later amendments were rejected by both leagues, and that was the last serious attempt until 1976.

• 4. A League Falling Apart

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  Before the 1975-76 season, the Denver Nuggets and New York Nets both tried to jump directly into the NBA, bypassing the remaining ABA season. A court order forced them to stay. Their attempt exposed growing financial fractures in the league and created hostility among the teams left behind.

  Three teams vanished before the end of 1975. The Memphis Sounds relocated to Baltimore, briefly took the name Hustlers before changing it to the Claws amid controversy, and folded after only three preseason games, all losses, after failing to post a performance bond. On the 12th of November 1975, the San Diego Sails, formerly known as the Conquistadors, folded mid-season. Their owner had learned that Los Angeles Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke would oppose any ABA team entering Southern California because of its competition with his own cable television system. Only three of the Sails' players were claimed in the dispersal draft that followed.

  On the 2nd of December 1975, the Utah Stars folded after failing to make payroll. Owner Bill Daniels had exhausted his resources in an unsuccessful campaign to become Governor of Colorado and through difficulties with other business ventures. He eventually paid back all Stars season ticket holders in full, plus 8% interest. Most of the Stars' key players, including a young Moses Malone, were sold to the Spirits of St. Louis.

  The Virginia Squires had been selling off players for years: Rick Barry, Warren Jabali, Julius Erving, Swen Nater, and George Gervin, the last of whom departed through a failed court case. In the 1974-75 season the Squires posted a record of 15-69, worst in the league. The following season they nearly matched it. They were folded by the league on the 11th of May 1976, two days before the 1976 ABA Finals concluded, after failing to pay a $75,000 league assessment.

• 5. Who Got In and Who Got Out

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  When final negotiations concluded, the NBA announced it would accept exactly four ABA teams: the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, New York Nets, and San Antonio Spurs. Each paid a $3.2 million expansion fee by the 15th of September 1976. The NBA refused to recognize ABA records. The four teams received no television money for their first three seasons and no votes on gate receipts or division alignment for two years.

  The Kentucky Colonels had ranked sixth in attendance across all of professional basketball and had just defeated the Indiana Pacers in the 1976 ABA Playoffs before losing a seven-game semifinal to the Denver Nuggets. They appeared to be the logical fourth team. The Chicago Bulls, however, held the NBA rights to Colonels star Artis Gilmore and fought hard to block the Colonels' entry. Owner John Y. Brown, Jr. had already sold center Dan Issel for $500,000 to the Baltimore Claws, a transaction undone when the payment never arrived and Issel was redirected to the Nuggets. Brown also sent defensive standout Teddy McClain to the New York Nets for $150,000. On the 17th of June 1976, Brown agreed to fold the Colonels in exchange for $3 million. He used those funds to purchase the NBA's Buffalo Braves for $1.5 million, and later parlayed that into ownership of the Boston Celtics.

  The New York Nets were forced to pay an additional $4.8 million indemnity directly to the New York Knicks as compensation for sharing the market. The Nets offered Julius Erving to the Knicks in exchange for waiving the fee. The Knicks declined. Erving was sold to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million. Nets owner Roy Boe said of the merger: "The merger agreement killed the Nets as an NBA franchise....The merger agreement got us into the NBA, but it forced me to destroy the team by selling Erving to pay the bill".

• 6. The Silna Brothers' Perpetual Revenue

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  Brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna had built their fortune manufacturing polyester. After failing to purchase the Detroit Pistons, they bought the ABA's Carolina Cougars, moved the franchise to St. Louis because it was then the largest American city without a professional basketball team, and renamed them the Spirits of St. Louis in 1974. The Spirits upset the reigning ABA champion New York Nets in the 1975 Eastern Division Finals before falling to the Kentucky Colonels.

  In May 1976, attendance problems led the Silnas to announce plans to move the franchise to Salt Lake City as the Utah Rockies, but the Utah Stars folded before a formal lease could be completed. The Silnas also considered moving to Hartford, Connecticut, but the Boston Celtics objected. When the Spirits were excluded from the merger entirely, the Silna brothers negotiated something extraordinary.

  In June 1976, the remaining ABA owners agreed to pay the Silnas $2.2 million in cash and a one-seventh share of the four surviving teams' television revenues in perpetuity. As the NBA's television contracts expanded through deals with CBS, NBC, TNT, and TBS, league revenue soared into the hundreds of millions. The Silnas collected a share of all of it for decades. They continued receiving those payments until April 2014, when a revised agreement included a $500 million lump sum from the four former ABA teams.

• 7. What the ABA Left Behind

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  In the first NBA All-Star Game after the merger, 10 of the 24 players selected were former ABA players. In the first post-merger NBA Finals, five of the ten starting players came from the ABA: Julius Erving, Caldwell Jones, George McGinnis, Dave Twardzik, and Maurice Lucas. Of the 84 players in the ABA at the time of the merger, 63 played in the NBA during the 1976-77 season. Four of the NBA's top ten scorers that year were former ABA players: Billy Knight, David Thompson, Dan Issel, and George Gervin.

  The three-point field goal, which the ABA had used since its founding, was adopted by the NBA in the 1979-80 season. San Antonio Spurs owner Angelo Drossos recalled the resistance: "Red Auerbach hated it and said the Celtics would never go along with it....Of course, a few years later Red drafted Larry Bird and suddenly he was all for it".

  The ABA held the first slam dunk contest at the 1976 ABA All-Star Game. The NBA held its first one in 1984, and the event has been a fixture of All-Star Weekend since, with the exception of 1998, 1999, and 2021. The ABA also introduced statistical categories now universal in basketball: blocked shots, steals, individual turnovers, and separated offensive and defensive rebounds, all from its inaugural 1967-68 season. The NBA did not adopt defensive and offensive rebounds, steals, and blocks until 1973-74, turnovers until 1977-78, and three-point statistics until 1979-80.

  When the ABA dissolved, its pension fund disappeared with it. In 2014, a class action lawsuit on behalf of 204 former ABA players, organized under the name Dropping Dimes, was settled for $800,000 total, less than $4,000 per claimant. The players have continued to seek a larger share of NBA profits.