Any title or deep trip through the playoffs by any of those teams has always been met with excitement among that prideful group of ABA alumni. Of the teams, only the Spurs have won it all - five times, to be exact.
Until this season, all but the Nuggets have played in at least one NBA Finals. The ABA took in the teams in San Antonio, New York, Indiana and Denver.
The next season, the ABA and NBA agreed to a merger of sorts. Erving and the Nets beat Issel, Thompson and coach Larry Brown, 4-2.
J and the New York Nets in the last ABA final. To close out the season, the Nuggets faced Dr. Some might remember the pre-game concert at McNichols Arena featuring Glen Campbell (“Rhinestone Cowboy”). J took off from the free-throw line for an era-defining dunk that won the title. Possibly the most memorable day came in the last season, 1976, when the All-Star Game in Denver was highlighted by a first-of-its-kind slam-dunk contest. In addition to starting a talent war with the NBA, the ABA entertained America with nine seasons of wonderful wackiness. “Since I knew nothing about hockey, and basketball was my favorite sport, I figured I’d pursue the idea of a basketball league.” “I thought, ‘There’s only one basketball league and one hockey league, so why not have another?’” Murphy said in the 1990 book ‘Loose Balls’ by Terry Pluto that recounts the history of the ABA. By the time Murphy came up with that plan, the AFL and NFL were already moving toward a merger. It began, oddly enough, out of a failed attempt by sports entrepreneur Dennis Murphy to place an American Football League (AFL) team in Orange County, California. It’s a lot of what the league looks like today.” “It’s really funny that some 50 years later, I think the ABA is more popular now than it was when we were actually playing in it,” said Issel, the Hall of Famer who is a member of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. J) and George Gervin (Iceman), Rick Barry, Artis Gilmore and, of course, Thompson and his teammate, the head-faking, jump-shooting center, Dan Issel. Some say “The Joker” - a mold-breaking big man who loves a fancy pass as much as a score - would have fit in perfectly in the ABA, the league that featured an up-and-down, frenetic tempo pushed by iconoclastic game-changers like Julius Erving (Dr. He is such a fan of the modern-day Nuggets that a signed Nikola Jokic jersey is a coveted keepsake in his trophy room, which includes one of those multicolored basketballs, signature shoes with “DT” on them, along with some memorabilia of Thompson’s national title run with North Carolina State in 1974. Thompson’s career with the Nuggets straddled their ABA and NBA days. I want them to finish the job that we didn’t quite get done.” “This Nuggets team, we’re pulling for them. “The new NBA is like the old ABA,” David Thompson, ‘The Skywalker,’ told The Associated Press in a phone interview from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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