YouTube Gold: The Greatest Players Of The ABA

A fun look back at an amazing era

Back in the day, NBA types sneered at the ABA. It was too gimmicky, too flashy, too...not the NBA.

Which was sort of the point.

The ABA started up in 1967 and it was always a dicey operation. They never had a TV contract and constantly struggled to draw fans so they had to do things to draw fans.

As things evolved though, while the ABA always had one foot in the grave, the game itself was nothing like the NBA.

In the ABA, you had the three point line. You had a level of offensive brilliance that was incredible. And you had a lot of talent that, while occasionally flaky, lived up to the hype.

This video looks at the ABA’s greatest stars - players like David Thompson, Connie Hawkins, Rick Barry, George Gervin, Artis Gilmore and of course, Julius Erving.

The merger happened in 1976, largely because of rumors of other-worldly play by Julius Erving and the NBA took in Erving’s New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets (because of David Thompson), the Indiana Pacers (probably because they were a legitimately great, championship-level team that drew well in basketball-crazy Indiana) and the San Antonio Spurs (no one is quite sure about the Spurs, but possibly because of George Gervin).

In the end, those teams were absorbed into the greyer, more corporate NBA world, but the joke was on the league: in less than a decade, the ABA’s style had re-emerged in the NBA. It wasn’t just Erving, either: everyone started dunking in flashier ways and the old walk-it-up and look for the high percentage shot gave way to the game as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird would redefine it. It was fun, it was flashy, and it was cutthroat.

Even today, the NBA owes an awful lot to the ABA.