John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Vindication of the ABA

It’s never too early—or too late—for vindication: The ABA.

The old American Basketball Association (ABA), with all its quirkiness. eccentric characters and hilarious stories, was also home to the greatest basketball players and basketball prowess on the planet during the league’s hey day in the mid 1970s.

The NBA nervously sneered at the league that played with a “beach ball.” But as the stuffy NBA tried to marginalize it’s competitor league struggling with ticket sales and fiscal viability, the inevitable was happening. A merger. The nimble, dynamic but financially strapped ABA would merge 4 of its teams into the vaunted NBA in 1976.

Many in the NBA privately believed none of the 4 teams would be around 4 years hence.

What was the result? The first year after the merger almost half the NBA’s leading scorers were former ABA players from the merger. As well as the player who led the league in assists and steals. Nearly half the All-Stars were from the much ridiculed ABA. Even in that year’s championship series between two traditional NBA teams, 5 of the 10 starters were former ABAers.

Most notably, however, was as the old NBA league adopted the playing style of the former upstart ABA league —shorter shot clocks, run-and-gun scorning, high-flying slam dunks a la Dr J, pressing defense, and the ABA signature 3 point shot—something remarkable happened. The NBA which seemed always to be playing in black and white, began playing basketball in technicolor. The league that looked like it learned the game of basketball from an Army training video, integrated the spirit and heart of the game of basketball that was so flamboyantly nurtured in the ABA. Thanks to what the NBA borrowed and learned from the ABA. TV revenue soared and professional basketball in the US became as beloved as pro baseball and football, perhaps ever more so. And pro basketball emulating this playing style exploded on to the international scene.

And how about those 4 teams that merged with the NBA 37 years ago but weren’t expected to make it into the 1980s? All four of them are now staple NBA franchises. And two of them, the San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers, could be battling it out for the NBA championship this year!

And our hometown team in Kentucky, the Kentucky Colonels, was the ABA’s all-time winningest team.

Many of us, of course, wish the Colonels had stayed put. I certainly did and wish a better business case could have been made for the Colonels to merge with the NBA. We have debated for years and can continue to debate the merits of that decision, but one thing that is beyond debate anymore is that the American Basketball Association was truly as great as many of us secretly imagined.

And each passing year further vindicates that belief. Even 37 years later!

I’m pulling for the Spurs and the Pacers to have a brilliant NBA championship series, ABA -style!! The way great basketball was played back in the 70’s in our little bush league—the bush league that transformed how the rest of the world plays basketball.

37 years later I believe that vindication for the ABA can’t come too early or last too long. And the world of sports is better for it.