American Basketball Association

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Basketball Association scored its first points on a tip-in by Willie Porter of the Oakland Oaks. That happened on the 13th of October 1967. The Oaks defeated the Anaheim Amigos 134-129 that night. The National Basketball Association, already 21 seasons old, had dismissed this new league as a nuisance. The ABA was gone by 1976, lasting nine seasons. But in those nine years, it introduced the three-point shot and ran the first slam dunk contest. It gave second chances to men the NBA had blacklisted over allegations that were never proven. It forced a merger the NBA had spent years resisting. The first commissioner was George Mikan, once among the greatest players in basketball's early history. He arrived not through a front office hire but through a chain of phone calls. Neither of the two men who initiated those calls had ever run a professional sports league. When those calls finally connected, the league they created had eleven teams and a ball nobody else was using. It also played by a scoring rule the NBA would not adopt for years.

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• 2. The Beverly Hills Blueprint

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  Constantine "Connie" Seredin of Professional Sports Management saw an opening in the 1960s: professional basketball had no rival league. The NBA was operating without competition. Seredin reached out to George Mikan, the celebrated former player, about the possibility of starting one. Mikan gave no commitment but left his phone number just in case. Around the same time, Dennis Murphy, a marketing executive and sports fan, had also called Mikan with a similar proposal. Murphy's original interest lay not in basketball but in securing an American Football League franchise for Anaheim, California. His group even sponsored a doubleheader there with the AFL. When the AFL merged with the National Football League and Anaheim was shut out, Murphy turned to basketball, his favorite sport. Murphy then connected with Bill Sharman, who had coached in the short-lived American Basketball League of 1961-62. Sharman suggested using the ABL's three-point play as one of the new league's defining rules. John McShane of McShane Associates helped bring Murphy and Seredin together formally, acting as a go-between. The group arranged a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hilton on the 20th of December 1966. McShane and Seredin leaked the gathering to the press beforehand to attract attention. Murphy arranged for associates to pose as potential investors to fill the room. The working name that day was the "United Basketball Association." By the meeting's end, it had become the American Basketball Association. At the first official press conference on the 2nd of February 1967, Mikan laid out the league's ambitions. He compared the ABA's competition with the NBA to General Motors competing with Ford. Not every franchise listed that day had a committed buyer. Dallas appeared on the roll call without a confirmed owner. Cities including Kansas City, Honolulu, and Cleveland were floated as potential homes but none would ever play in the league. Before the season started, Mikan had already decided something that would shape the league's identity. He chose to admit five players the NBA had refused to allow on its courts.

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• 3. Men the NBA Turned Away

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  Roger Brown's case, as Mikan described it years later in the book Loose Balls, had begun with false accusations. Brown had been banned from the NBA over allegations of involvement in point-shaving, charges that Mikan personally investigated and found to lack any basis. Connie Hawkins and Doug Moe had faced the same accusation and the same ban. Tony Jackson and Charlie Williams had been excluded under the same circumstances. None of the five had been convicted of anything. All five found their way onto ABA courts and built professional careers the NBA had tried to prevent. Brown's standing in the league grew steadily. In 1997, a panel of 50 ABA sportswriters, announcers, referees, executives, owners, and fans selected him to the league's All-Time Top 10. Brown received all 50 votes, one of seven unanimous selections. Larry Brown's path to the ABA came through a different kind of rejection. The NBA had simply judged him too small to compete at the professional level. The ABA gave him a roster spot, and he later became one of the league's prominent coaches. The Indiana Pacers won three ABA championships, the most by any franchise in league history. Their center Mel Daniels was the first player in league history to win the Most Valuable Player award more than once. The talent the ABA had assembled, whether blacklisted or merely overlooked, was good enough to worry the NBA financially. Both leagues were soon spending more on players than either had anticipated.

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• 4. War Over Players

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  Under the Dolgoff Plan, first used by the Indiana Pacers, the ABA built contracts the NBA had not seen before. A player would receive a lump sum in the short term while the team deposited a smaller annual amount into a deferred fund, to be paid out much later. Jim Ard's contract with the New York Nets illustrates the structure. His deal was written at $1.4 million total, with $250,000 paid to him between 1970 and 1974. The team then deposited $8,000 per year into a deferred account for ten years. Ard was set to receive $1.15 million spread over 24 years, beginning in 1989. Dan Issel and Rick Mount signed contracts built on similar arrangements. NBA executives found these structures infuriating. Some believed the ABA was paying off player agents to steer clients toward these deals; in select cases that belief turned out to be correct. Both leagues sent representatives to spy on each other's contract negotiations. The ABA also recruited four of the NBA's most experienced referees: Earl Strom, John Vanak, Norm Drucker, and Joe Gushue. The pitch was higher pay and better benefits. Strom wrote about the experience in his memoir Calling the Shots. He described the initial excitement of being courted by a rival league willing to pay well. He also wrote about the depression that followed when he arrived to officiate ABA games in smaller arenas before sparse crowds. Merger talks opened between the two leagues by 1970. The two sides actually reached an agreement that would have brought ten ABA teams into the NBA, excluding only the Virginia Squires. Oscar Robertson then sued the NBA in 1970, arguing that the reserve clause violated antitrust law. The United States Senate Antitrust Subcommittee approved a merger framework on the 8th of September 1972, but declared the reserve clause illegal. Both leagues returned to competing against each other for players and filing suits in court. Their ongoing conflict left the door open for one player's legal case to permanently reshape basketball's eligibility rules.

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• 5. The Haywood Exception

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  In 1969, Spencer Haywood left the University of Detroit after his sophomore year and signed with the Denver Rockets. The ABA's position was that genuine financial hardship or family need should allow a player to turn professional before finishing four years of college. The NBA and the NCAA initially contested Haywood's right to play. Courts ruled in his favor. His legal victory opened the ABA to players who had not completed their college careers. George McGinnis and Julius Erving both entered the ABA before finishing college, following the path Haywood's case had established. The NBA eventually adopted a relaxed version of the four-year rule. Players could leave early on the basis of what the rules called "financial condition...family, or academic record." The modern NBA's one-and-done rule traces back to the ABA's decision in Haywood's case. That rule requires players to be only one year removed from high school graduation before declaring for the draft. Erving finished his final ABA season averaging 29.3 points per game for the New York Nets. The following spring, he would take part in a competition the league was staging for the first time.

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• 6. Denver, 1976

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  The final ABA All-Star game drew a sellout crowd of 15,021 fans to Denver. The league and the NBA were already discussing a merger, and ABA owners wanted the event to demonstrate the league's vitality. The dunk contest was staged at halftime. The five contestants were Artis Gilmore, George Gervin, David Thompson, Larry Kenon, and Julius Erving. Erving won by completing a dunk from the free throw line. The winner received $1,000 and a stereo system. The NBA adopted the slam dunk contest for its 1976-77 season as a year-long competition. In 1984, it became a permanent standalone event as part of the NBA All-Star Weekend.

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• 7. The Price of the Merger

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  The final ABA game was played on the 13th of May 1976. The New York Nets defeated the Denver Nuggets in six games to claim the last ABA championship. Four ABA teams were absorbed into the NBA: the Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, and the San Antonio Spurs. All four were barred from the 1976 NBA draft. All four were also denied national television contract money for the next three seasons. The Nets faced the hardest adjustment of any of the four. The New York Knicks held firm to Madison Square Garden and refused to share dates there. The Knicks charged the Nets $4.8 million for drawing audience away from their market. The Nets settled for a new arena in Piscataway, New Jersey, and sold Julius Erving's contract to the Philadelphia 76ers to cover expenses. The Knicks had declined when Erving was offered to them first. Two other clubs, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis, were dissolved rather than absorbed. The Colonels' owner, John Y. Brown, Jr., received a one-time buyout and used the proceeds to purchase the NBA's Buffalo Braves. The Spirits' ownership group, most significantly lawyer Donald Schupak, negotiated a cut of the surviving ABA teams' television revenues in perpetuity. Over nearly four decades, that arrangement paid the Spirits' ownership group more than $300 million. In 2014, the NBA agreed to a one-time payment of $500 million to phase out future obligations. The total value of the deal exceeded $800 million. The Virginia Squires, the seventh team still operating before the merger, received nothing. They had ceased operations before the deal was finalized, and their players were placed into a dispersal draft. In North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, the ABA had planted professional basketball in markets the NBA had treated as college territory. The NBA at the time had no plans to put franchises south of Washington, D.C., other than in the Atlanta area. Three years after the merger, in autumn 1979, the NBA adopted the three-point shot. As of 2026, the NBA still treats the ABA as a separate league and excludes its statistics from NBA record books. The Basketball Hall of Fame takes a different view: it recognizes ABA history and statistics for all inductions and honors.

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