YouTube Gold: The Best Dunks By Connie Hawkins

They called him the Hawk, but they should have called him a prophet.

When you look at basketball videos from the 1960’s, it’s clearly from another era: people don’t play the same and they don’t move the same.

There are some exceptions. You can see video of Wilt Chamberlain blocking a shot near the top of the backboard. That’s a level of dominance we don’t see very often even today. If you see good video of KC Jones, you realize that the former Celtic was a superb natural athlete and a dynamic defender.

We linked to some video of Elgin Baylor the other day that was incredibly clear. Yet even there you could see some details that you’d never see today. Ball handling wasn’t as advanced. He didn’t go to his off-hand very well. And almost everyone in that era appears to be seriously limited by Chuck Taylor’s, which were the dominant shoe of the era. They’re fine for fashion, but you try running and cutting in them today. Can’t do it.

So this video of Connie Hawkins dunks is pretty eye-opening. Hawkins was recruited by Iowa but banned after the gambling scandal of the early 1960’s. And not just college - the NBA too.

So he played in the ABL while it lasted, then with the Harlem Globetrotters before moving on the ABA when it started up in 1967. He didn't arrive in the NBA until 1969, when he was already 27.

If he had been able to start in the league in 1964, he would have almost certainly have been taken by the New York Knicks as either a territorial pick or the first pick in that year’s draft, and he would have been playing against Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Baylor and the rest. He might have changed the game in the same way that Julius Erving did in the 1970’s.

Because basically, Hawkins was a prophet of where the game was heading. The talent here is just supreme.