The Awkward Teenage
Years
The strangest portion of the NBA’s history came during the
1970s, a time when America widely agreed that they just didn’t give a fuck
anymore. It was a period of transition
for the NBA, with the Celtics fading to the background and new styles and
players being incorporated from the ABA slowly but surely. It was also a time when all sorts of weird
teams won championships, resulting in crazy tidbits like the Seattle
SuperSonics having a title despite not existing anymore, or the Washington
Bullets being considered a franchise that WASN’T to be laughed at openly. Players with names like Campy Russell or Elmore Smith abounded. Every good player was no longer guaranteed to be a center: in fact, some teams were beginning to be built around GUARDS, of all things. Little, tiny guards, no bigger than the biggest person you've ever met in the real world.
The Bullets succeeded in large part thanks to their
franchise center, who went by the name of Wes Unseld and was most certainly not
to be fucked with. Unseld remains the
only player in NBA history to win both Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same
season. The NBA just couldn’t adjust to
his skillset, as no one had seen a live Kodiak bear play basketball so well
before.
Oh yes, Wes Unseld was a live bear. Did I not mention that? I thought it would have been readily
apparent.
 |
| "Hi, I'm Wes Unseld." |
Anyway, Unseld is most remembered for his innate ability to
start a fast break with pinpoint outlet passes.
Unseld had learned as a youth how to snatch a fish out of a stream with
his mouth and then toss it to any family members who were less skillful in
their fishing. He adapted this to
basketball. Unseld would get low in his
stance, putting his 1400 pounds between the opponent and the basketball. As soon as the ball hit the rim, Unseld would
use his three-inch vertical leap to clasp the ball in his jaws. With a whip of his neck, he would toss the
ball the length of the court to a streaking teammate, who was now behind the
defense and ready to score easily. This
sort of play is responsible for every point of Kevin Grevey’s career.
Unseld’s animal ferocity was just one of the many oddities
of the NBA during the 1970s. The league
also featured John Johnson, the league’s first point forward and also its
blandest-named player ever. Johnson was
a new innovation, working as a true small forward yet still running the offense
as if he were the point guard. Johnson
earned this role due to his incredible passing skills and also because
Cleveland’s point guard at the time was Revolutionary War surgeon John Warren, who
really had his hands full with being dead for 155 years. Still, Johnson’s abilities created a whole
new archetype of NBA player, one filled since then by all sorts of athletes who
were just so, so much better than Johnson ever was.
Nothing summed up the 1970s quite as well as the 1974 NBA season,
when Bob McAdoo won the MVP award. This
was confusing to even other players in the league not because of McAdoo’s
abilities but because he supposedly played for a team called the “Buffalo
Braves.” No one had ever heard of a town
called Buffalo before. Stranger still,
not one player could remember having played a road game against McAdoo and his
forgetful band of teammates, who were only remembered as hazy blurs. Ernest Shackleford, the coach of the Houston
Rockets at the time, made several attempts at journeying to this mythical city
in upstate New York, only to be turned back by horrific storms each time. The obsession would be the death of
Shackleford, who froze to death when his ship the Buffalo Soldier (From the Heart of America)[1]
became stuck in the ice for months on end in 1978. Wanting to avoid any further deaths, the NBA
relocated those claiming to be members of the “Braves” to San Diego,
California, where few if any explorers had frozen to death.
 |
| 50/50 chance this is Buffalo. |
This exemplified the entire era for the NBA. The league was still learning what it wanted
to be as a consumer product.
Furthermore, scores of exciting players were entering the league, which
was unable to adapt its pace and style to fit the new skills added every
day. Fans were off-put by how
intimidating the league’s population was[2]. The ABA was an annoying competitor that
worried the NBA. Had they known anything
about the ABA’s business model and the upstanding, well-run franchises contained
within it, the NBA would not have worried.
The lack of a public presence, as well as no dominant
franchise throughout the era, has led to much of the 1970s being forgotten by
basketball fans across the globe. This
is a great travesty, as some of our greatest and most coked-out players thrived
during this time. The parity so many
sports leagues strive for now was in full effect, allowing fan bases like
Portland to taste success for ever so briefly.
Many of the players of the time are spoken of in reverent whispers, lest
the listener realize that the speaker doesn’t know a damn thing about the era
either.
The era’s most reverently-whispered player almost certainly
was Bill Walton. He had had an
unbelievable collegiate career at UCLA, surpassing men like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
and Jamaal Wilkes with his many accomplishments. In his junior year there, he had made 21 of
22 field goals in the national title game, missing one on purpose because no
one knows why Bill Walton does anything.
Probably because he was ranting about jazz or something.
 |
| Former NBA MVP Bill Walton |
Like many of the stars of his time, Walton was a flawed
diamond. He was rarely able to stay on
the court due in large part to his paraplegia.
The lack of any legs whatsoever did not hinder him much when he was
healthy enough to play: indeed, he was the MVP in 1978 and finished second the
year before in voting. Sadly, the strain
that his condition put on what remained of his body was just too much for
him. Walton played over 70 games just
once in his career, and never as a starter.
When he did play, he was a whirling dervish, a cloud of marijuana smoke
that defended like no one had ever seen and passed like a point guard. Sadly, Walton is remembered as just another
in a long line of “what ifs” from the 1970s.
That is perhaps the longest lasting legacy of the NBA in
that time: that its brightest stars burnt out too quickly for any number of
reasons. Walton had his leg troubles (or
lack thereof), but he was far from the only one. Connie Hawkins was banned from entering the
NBA for the prime of his career. The
Hawk was finally allowed in by the time he turned 27, but by then was already a
shell of his former self. He still
managed to make four consecutive all-star teams before his body betrayed him
further and he was forced to an early retirement.
The reasoning behind Hawkins’ ban is controversial and
widely regretted nowadays. Hawkins was
kicked off the University of Iowa’s basketball team and banned from the NBA due
to a point-shaving investigation of which he was not even considered a
suspect. As a freshman at the time of
the incident[3], Hawkins
was never charged in any way, yet was still punished alongside a handful of
other collegiate players, all of whom happened to be African-American with the
exception of Doug Moe, who was just kind of thrown in for the fun of it[4].
 |
| Fuck this guy, right? |
Hawkins was considered as exceptional a talent as men like
Julius Erving, a contemporary of his who found great success in the ABA and
NBA. Hawkins’ ABA numbers (28 PPG, 12.6
RPG, 4.3 APG) compare favorably to Erving’s (28.7/12/4.8). Without the horrible twist of fate barring
Hawkins from competition, the two could have been their generation’s Magician and
Big Bird, destined to face off in epic clashes that shook the heavens every
season. Hawkins may also have been worse
than Erving and nothing would have come of their clashes. One of those two things was probably true.
Confusion like this reigned supreme in the 70s. The youth of the day didn’t have the time for
basketball, instead choosing to perform highly choreographed dances in night
clubs while dealing with the trials and tribulations of a poor upbringing in
Brooklyn. A league dominated by (let’s
be honest) mostly boring play had to reinvent itself to survive. The ABA helped with this. As a rival league to the NBA, the ABA had
always gone out of its way to try new things to make itself different. Many of these innovations were added to the
NBA following the merger, like the three-point shot and the slam dunk
contest. Other rules failed to carry
over for good reason: nobody wanted to see a game with no foul outs, then
considered the most exciting part of basketball.
Before this drastic shift, however, the NBA was forced to
play with the hand it dealt itself, not realizing that they could deal
themselves a different hand anytime they felt like it. Size was at a premium like no other time:
there was almost no way for shorter players to effectively score with the
exception of Calvin Murphy, a 5’9” guard who would pelvic thrust his way
through traffic to the hoop. Murphy was
an anomaly though, one that spend every hour of every day practicing his drives
and/or siring more children. Otherwise,
it was a game of post play, with the largest players bullying their way to the
hoop for layups and standing dunks, the worst of the dunks[5]. There was stylish play, to be sure, but it
was often lost in the morass that surrounded it.
What polish the play lacked, however, was more than covered
by the haircuts of the players and the ridiculous uniforms they were forced to
squeeze into. This was before the invention
of loose-fitting shorts, meaning that every player had to go through a
20-minute process of being vacuum-sealed inside of their uniforms before
tip-off. For most players, this was
merely a nuisance: after a few minutes, they lost all feeling in their
extremities anyway, lessening the damage done by errant elbows on the
court. For men like Wendell Ladner, this
was more problematic. Ladner was known
to simply have his uniform painted onto his body, to allow for freedom of
movement on the court. Ladner also
considered himself to be another entry in the long line of great Scottish
warriors, as evidenced by his propensity to elbow his opponents to death while
screaming his family’s traditional sluagh-gairm[6].
Teams tried to innovate as much as they could in uniform
design as well, hoping to draw in fans and/or moths who were just interested in
bright colors. The Atlanta Hawks
inexplicably put racing stripes down one side of their jerseys, while the 76ers
ran out of red dye halfway up theirs and had to pretend it was on purpose. Meanwhile, teams like the Bullets and Nets
competed to see who loved America more, cramming their uniforms with stars,
stripes, and the occasional full reprint of the Constitution.
 |
| The natural colors of nature's hawks |
The Boston Celtics also changed their look drastically by
giving their mascot white shoes instead of black. The city of Boston celebrated this change for
wholly racist reasons.
And finally, and middling in importance, was a continuous
turnover in just what teams existed. New
teams came and went and, just to confuse people more, old teams changed their
name all the time like a gay man coming out and moving to New York to make it
in show biz. The Braves became the San
Diego Clippers near the tail end of the decade, then became the Los Angeles
Clippers a few years later upon the realization that everyone was confused and
kept showing up for games in San Diego despite the team never even once having
been based there. That’s right, the San
Diego Clippers were in Los Angeles. Even
more confusingly, the Rockets, who actually had been in San Diego, moved to
Houston in 1971, keeping the name thanks to Houston’s history of loving a
specific type of popsicle.
The Hawks also switched cities, moving to Atlanta from St.
Louis, though this move was down in 1969 instead of 1970 because 69 bro. The ABA was absorbed into the league, adding
to the NBA the New Jersey Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the San Antonio Spurs, and
the Hartford Whalers.
The Warriors changed their name without moving, going from
the San Francisco Warriors to the Golden State Warriors. This was because the owners planned on
playing half of their home games in Oakland and half in San Diego, which people
were just really drawn to in the 1970s, a significant difference from nowadays,
when San Diego is known as the disgusting apocalyptic wasteland that it has
always been. The Warriors ended up
playing all of their games in Oakland instead of spreading them across the
state but kept the name. To make sure
the name still made sense, every player on the Warriors was painted with gold
flake, killing most. This tradition
continues today.
Perhaps the strangest odyssey was that of the Kings
franchise. At the beginning of the
decade, the team was known as the Cincinnati Royals, only to move in 1973 to
Kansas City-Omaha and renaming themselves the Kings. The team split its games between Kansas City
and Omaha despite only being recognized as royalty within he famous Nebraskan
monarchy. In 1976, the team decided to
play only in Kansas City. Jimmy Walker,
a noted Kings all-time great who had played for the team for all of two years,
grew tired of Omaha after the 1974-75 season.
To make sure he would never have to play there again, Walker consumed
the city through fire and brimstone, with all residents who laid their eyes
upon the Kings turning to pillars of salt.
The curse of Jimmy Walker remains on the franchise, which has not
allowed any fans to watch them in the decades since.
And then, of course, there was the New Orleans Jazz. The Jazz, fed up with the damn kids next door
never turning their music down at night, packed their bags and left Louisiana
for greener pastures for the 1980 season.
James McElroy, the leader of the Jazz, had tried to build New Orleans
into a haven for basketball players by doing the only reasonable thing:
murdering all the past residents and insisting that the city was the holy land
that Jesus visited after he was crucified.
An angry mob, angered by McElroy’s polygamy, angrily murdered McElroy in
anger before his dream could come to fruition.
McElroy, who had averaged 17 PPG, 5.7 APG, and 1.9 SPG in 1978-79, would
see his corpse play another three seasons but never again even reach double
digits in scoring.
Now without a leader, the Jazz turned to young Adrian
Dantley. Dantley was new to leadership,
having served as a secondary scoring option for the Los Angeles Lakers the year
before. Knowing not what else to do,
Dantley led his charges to Utah, where there was nothing to stand against them
except a thriving Native American culture that they quickly wiped off the face
off the Earth. Dantley insisted that the
team keep their nickname, as he did not understand what “jazz” was and thought
it meant they would get to keep the polygamy.
Instead, all Dantley got was scoring: in his seven seasons in Utah,
Dantley would average 29.6 PPG in 39 MPG, even adding six rebounds on accident
when the ball bounced so hard off the rim that Dantley had no choice but to
catch it and record a statistic that did not include points.
The Jazz’s forced migration was the last of the team
city/name changes of the decade, allowing the NBA to take on some semblance of
continuity for the 1980s. It was exactly
what the league needed: that, and the gigantic influx of talent that began
almost immediately.
[1]
Its sister ship, the Oh Yoyo, Oh Yoyoyo,
Oh Yoyoyoyoyoyoyo, had been forced to turn back weeks later.
[2] By
intimidating, I mean black.
[3]
And thus ineligible to play on the varsity team, where the point-shaving
allegedly took place.
[4]
Everyone hates Doug Moe. Pick a first
name and stick to it, Doug.
[5]
Followed closely by any dunk involving Bryant Reeves.
[6]
That’s a Scottish war cry. Or do you not
bother researching anything?
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