Fights, drugs, racial tension: ’70s spelled trouble for NBA
Even the biggest games were on tapedelay. Anyone who sat through what the NBA had to offer in the 1970s could see this was a league that struggled with the spotlight.
If there was a decade when the NBA, which turned 75 this season, nearly disintegrated under the weight of its own problems, the 1970s was that decade. It was a fight-filled, drug-addled operation that had made Black players an integral part of the show, only to be left wondering if those players were chasing away the fans.
It featured a plodding brand of basketball that looked even worse when compared to the game being played by the upstart ABA — a free-flowing, 3-point-shooting funfest that wasn’t above using trumped-up contract deals to poach away some of the sport’s most promising talent.
The NBA’S 17 teams at the start of the decade were mostly in America’s largest markets and were mostly well-financed, which gave the league the bankroll and heft to carry on despite dwindling crowds and a product that, more or less, nobody wanted to watch.
During an era in which the NFL was taking off and Major League Baseball still held a tight grip on the imaginations of American sports fans, chunks of the NBA playoffs and finals were relegated to late-night, tape-delayed broadcasts — a surefire signal of trouble, and a reminder to us now that the league’s bright future in the 1980s and beyond was anything but preordained.
Early in the ’70s, average attendance hovered at around 8,000 fans a game.
The NBA finals received a 7.2 rating in 1979, a time when there were three networks and a 20.0 was only good for 30th place in the Nielsen ratings.
“The fan base was like, ‘Ehhh, I don’t know if I like this,’” said Spencer Haywood, who won a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1971 that opened the door for players to enter the league before completing college.
“There was so much chatter about it becoming a Black league,” Haywood said. “And we Black players didn’t help the matter. We weren’t refined. It was like, big fur coats, big fur hats. It was like Superfly in the NBA.”
The league also had its share of fighters and drug abusers.
Haywood himself used cocaine while with the Lakers in the late ‘70s — a stint that came to an unceremonious end when he was kicked off the team after falling asleep during practice for a finals matchup against the 76ers.
John Lucas. David Thompson. Bernard King. Michael Ray Richardson. Walter Davis. These were a few of the players who had problems with drugs in a
league where, the Los Angeles Times estimated, up to 75% used cocaine and one in 10 smoked, or freebased, the drug.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Haywood said he became addicted at a Hollywood party, when someone took him into a kitchen where they were heating up cocaine for freebase.
“I took a hit off that ball that night at around 10:30,” he said. “Next thing I knew, I left there at 4:30 to get home and go to practice. It grabbed me just like that.”
In some ways, the proliferation of drugs, along with the integration of the league, reflected changes that were playing out across society in America. Not all of it could be labeled as progress.
In 1979, the New York Knicks became the first team to have an all-black roster — an achievement celebrated in some corners but one that also led racists to pervert the team’s full name.
“It wasn’t so much New York attitudes, but fans around the league let you know how they felt about you as an opponent and as a Black man as well,” Knicks star Earl Monroe told Newsday in a recent interview.