One who got away
McGinnis, whose addition would have changed Knicks history, dies at 73
THIS was it. This was the one. This was exactly the kind of player who would allow the Knicks to remain in the Boardwalk/Park Place segment of the NBA’s Monopoly Board, and avoid backtracking to Marvin Gardens and St. James Place on the way to Baltic. This was the kind of move that would announce they were no two-hit wonders, content with the twin banners they’d just hung across the past few years.
This was it. This was the one. George McGinnis was the one. In both 1972 and ’73, he’d led the Indiana Pacers to the ABA Championship, winning playoff MVP the latter year. In ’74 he’d blossomed into one of the league’s five best players, averaging 25.9 points and 15.0 rebounds. By August of that year, still just 24, he was looking to get paid.
The Pacers were reluctant to empty their wallets, knowing too well the ABA’s tenuous fiscal future. The 76ers, thigh-deep in an enormous rebuild, held his NBA rights, but McGinnis had stated all summer that he dreamed of playing for the Knicks, pairing up with Clyde Frazier and Earl Monroe.
The Sixers agreed to allow the Knicks to negotiate with McGinnis in exchange for a seven-figure sum, but the Pacers got an injunction forbidding those talks, McGinnis re-signed with the Pacers, and in 1974-75 became the only player other than Julius Erving to win any of the ABA’s last four MVP Awards.
By the following May, the Knicks were done waiting. They’d suffered their first losing season in nine years. They were aging. They’d stopped selling out the Garden. They needed fresh blood. And Knicks president Michael Burke had eaten his heart out all year watching McGinnis light up empty arenas all across the ABA.
On May 30, 1975, he pounced: The Knicks agreed to buy out McGinnis’ contract with Indiana for $85,000 — that was 100 percent legal. Then they signed McGinnis to the richest deal in team history: four years, $2.4 million. That was a little more problematic. Philly owner Irv Kosloff went berserk. “This,” he declared, “is piracy!” He declared war, and of course he had a case. Burke was a worldly gentleman of the city, whose fatal flaw when he’d previously run the Yankees was a thin but stubborn strand of hubris. He knew how badly the NBA had enjoyed a New York champion, and presumed the league wanted to keep the good times rolling.
“We’ve jumped out of the plane,” he said. “We’ve pulled the cord. Will the chute open? It was a most felicitous action, and we took it on the advice of counsel.”
They stuck the landing about as well as did Vinko Bogataj — the Slovenian ski jumper who for 37 years served as the universal symbol for the agony of defeat in the “Wide World of Sports” opening. A week later, NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien voided the trade, fined the Knicks $400,000 and stripped them of their first pick in the ’76 draft.
“For a week, I dreamed about what it would like to play in Madison Square Garden, to play with Clyde and Pearl, to be a prince of the city,” McGinnis said a few years back, when he was at Barclays Center for a Nets-Pacers game. “That was a good week.”
McGinnis, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017, died Thursday a week after suffering a cardiac arrest. It tuned out his best days would be his ABA days, though he did team with Erving to lead the 76ers to the ’77 NBA Finals, where they lost to Portland.
And though he never played in New York, the domino effect of his failed pursuit was pronounced, still symbolized by those two dusty banners. Not long after O’Brien’s ruling, the Knicks also lost out on trading for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — and the biggest problem was the lack of that ’76 draft pick when the Bucks were pondering trade partners.
A year later, still gun-shy over the McGinnis fiasco, Burke refused to take Erving from the Nets when the Nets basically begged him, asking only for forgiveness of the Nets’ $4.8 million indemnity. If this all gets you dreaming of what a Jabbar/ Erving/McGinnis/Clyde/Pearl fivesome might’ve looked like … well, you aren’t the first.
Chances are, the Knicks might never have strayed so far off Boardwalk and Park Place.