You Tube Gold: Gorgeous NBA Video From 1964

Whoever restored this should make it a career.

The game of basketball has evolved mightily in whatever time period you’d like to look at. Bill Russell retired in 1969; Julius Erving showed up in the ABA in 1971. Magic and Bird showed up nine years later. Michael Jordan came along a few years after that. Steph Curry came along in 2009 and revolutionized offense. Positionless basketball. Globalization.

It keeps changing and sometimes, when you look back on old video, it looks beaten up and grainy and it’s easy to think that the players really weren’t that great.

Every so often though a piece of pristine game footage turns up and you have to re-evaluate what you think about older players. Video like this one, for example.

Here we see beautifully restored video of a game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the San Francisco Warriors, just two years in the Bay Area after leaving Philly.

Chick Hearn tells us that he’s in his third season of doing Lakers games and we see Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Hal Greer, Wilt Chamberlain and the highly promising rookie Nate Thurmond.

Plus much of the camera work is courtside so you get a tremendous perspective too.

This one is pretty special. Enjoy.