Nuggets run to the NBA Finals stirs up memories of wackiness in the ABA
DENVER — Gone, but never forgotten, the ABA is enjoying a curtain call this season — all thanks to the Denver Nuggets.
Nearly 50 years after the breakup of the old, renegade league, with its red-white-andblue basketballs and the 3-point arc that has redefined the modern game, the Nuggets finally broke through to become the last of the four ABA teams — Spurs, Pacers, Nets and Nuggets — who survived the 1976 merger to make the NBA Finals. Denver hosts Miami in Game 1 on Thursday.
One of the nicest compliments those old ABA Nuggets can pay to today’s group: These Nuggets remind them of them.
“The new NBA is like the old ABA,” David Thompson, ‘The Skywalker,’ told The Associated Press in a phone interview from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “This Nuggets team, we’re pulling for them. I want them to finish the job that we didn’t quite get done.”
Thompson’s career with the Nuggets straddled their ABA and NBA days. He is such a fan of the modern-day Nuggets that a signed Nikola Jokic jersey is a coveted keepsake in his trophy room, which includes one of those multicolored basketballs, signature shoes with “DT” on them, along with some memorabilia of Thompson’s national title run with North Carolina State in 1974.
Some say “The Joker” — a mold-breaking big man who loves a fancy pass as much as a score — would have fit in perfectly in the ABA, the league that featured an up-and-down, frenetic tempo pushed by iconoclastic game-changers like Julius Erving (Dr. J) and George Gervin (Iceman), Rick Barry, Artis Gilmore and, of course, Thompson and his teammate, the head-faking, jump-shooting center, Dan Issel.
“It’s really funny that some 50 years later, I think the ABA is more popular now than it was when we were actually playing in it,” said Issel, the Hall of Famer
DUBLIN, Ohio — The catchphrase at LIV Golf seems to have changed in recent months to a bolder tone. Gone is Greg Norman’s tired pitch that “Golf is a force for good.” More common these days is the pronouncement that “We’re not going anywhere.”
That appears to be true. Much to the chagrin of the PGA Tour, there is no indication the Saudi-funded league is about to fold.
But is it going anywhere? LIV Golf in just one year has managed to fit into the golf landscape, even if it remains on an island. The majors have played the most significant role in this process by doing what’s best for them — and for golf — and leaving their criteria alone.
Otherwise, LIV Golf marches on to its own beat, a legitimate league with top players that doesn’t look like any of the other tours except for 14 clubs in the bag. It’s appealing to some, unappetizing to others, and the decision to watch is open to all.
There have been LIV events in Arizona and Oklahoma, Florida and Virginia, the same group of 48 players (with occasional withdrawals for injury and capable substitutes) playing for a $4 million winner’s check, sparkling wine sprayed for the winning team, music blaring and then it’s on to the next town.
Golf as a whole only suffers because a small group of the best players at LIV — such as Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Cameron Smith — don’t get to compete more than four times a year against the much larger group of the best on the PGA Tour.
Koepka winning the PGA Championship — and leading after 54 holes at the Masters — was more about the return of Koepka to good health and major mojo than it was the viability and validation of LIV Golf.
Smith said it best at Oak Hill: “We haven’t forgotten how to play golf. We’re all great golfers out there, and we know what we can do, and I think that’s what we’re trying to do.”
It was one year ago on
Tuesday that an email from LIV Golf announced its initial roster of players, with Johnson being the biggest shock because he was (is) among golf’s biggest talent, who only a few months earlier said he was fully committed to the PGA Tour.
The inaugural event was a week later outside London. More defections followed (Koepka, DeChambeau), and then came the antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour by 11 players — all of whom have removed themselves as plaintiffs and turned it over to LIV.
The lawsuit and the tour’s countersuit are caught up in discovery disputes in federal court. Any trial is more than a year away. To no one’s surprise, attorneys might be making more money than the combined LIV Golf earnings of Danny Lee and Pat Perez. It’s a lot.
Another thing that surprised no one: PGA Tour players are benefitting as much as anyone.
The Memorial was an elite tournament with a $12 million purse last year. Now it’s one of eight elevated events that offer $20 million in prize money, and that doesn’t include $20 million prize funds at the FedEx Cup playoff events or a bump to $25 million at The Players Championship.
Jordan Spieth was among those who saw this coming, even if he didn’t know the details.
It was at Kapalua in January 2022 when Spieth said, “For us players ... it’s been something that has kind of helped the PGA Tour sit and say, ‘Hey, where can we look to satisfy our membership and potentially make some changes going forward?”
The tour returns to a traditional calendar schedule in 2024 — January to August, with a choice to play the rest of the year without the risk of starting too far behind. There will be eight elevated events (not including the majors or postseason) with smaller fields that are still determined by performance, keeping the crucial meritocracy in golf.
None of this would have happened without LIV.
Golf is a force for good, all right. With three months left in the season, Scottie Scheffler ($14.9 million) and Jon Rahm ($14.5 million) already have set the record for single-season earnings.
The issue for LIV Golf is measuring its relevance beyond money.
The problem is not a 48man field. The Tour Championship only has 30 players, and the BMW Championship this year will have a 50-man field. But on the PGA Tour, those fields are derived from a membership of more than 150 players who start each year with no guarantees.
Sports Illustrated reported LIV’s plans for relegation in which the top 24 and all the captains are safe. The next batch of players through the 44th on the points list can switch teams or leave if they don’t have a contract. The others have to earn their way back through a qualifier.
And then they start all over again, 14 tournaments with the same fields, $4 million payoffs for the winner, sparkling wine showers, music.
LIV Golf is not going anywhere. who is a member of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. “It was an exciting brand of basketball. It’s a lot of what the league looks like today.”
It began, oddly enough, out of a failed attempt by sports entrepreneur Dennis Murphy to place an American Football League (AFL) team in Orange County, California. By the time Murphy came up with that plan, the AFL and NFL were already moving toward a merger.
“I thought, ‘There’s only one basketball league and one hockey league, so why not have another?’” Murphy said in the 1990 book ‘Loose Balls’ by Terry Pluto that recounts the history of the ABA. “Since I knew nothing about hockey, and basketball was my favorite sport, I figured I’d pursue the idea of a basketball league.”
In addition to starting a talent war with the NBA, the ABA entertained America with nine seasons of wonderful wackiness.
Possibly the most memorable day came in the last season, 1976, when the AllStar Game in Denver was highlighted by a first-of-itskind slam-dunk contest. Dr. J took off from the free-throw line for an era-defining dunk that won the title. Some might remember the pregame concert at McNichols Arena featuring Glen Campbell (“Rhinestone Cowboy”).
To close out the season, the Nuggets faced Dr. J and the New York Nets in the last ABA final. Erving and the Nets beat Issel, Thompson and coach Larry Brown, 4-2.
The next season, the ABA and NBA agreed to a merger of sorts. The ABA took in the teams in San Antonio, New York, Indiana and Denver. Until this season, all but the Nuggets have played in at least one NBA Finals. Of the teams, only the Spurs have won it all — five times, to be exact. Any title or deep trip through the playoffs by any of those teams has always been met with excitement among that prideful group of ABA alumni.
“We had more of a chip on our shoulder than most of the teams in the NBA because we had come from the ABA,” said Bobby Jones, the Nuggets’ defensive specialist in the 1970s who would go on to win an NBA title with a Philadelphia 76ers team led by Dr. J and Moses Malone in 1983. “We really felt like we had we had a score to settle for that, to show that the ABA teams were good.”
This year, Jones & Co., are celebrating the fact that it’s the Nuggets who are good. It took 47 seasons in the NBA to make their first Finals. Making it more sweet was that they did it against the establishment — the Los Angeles Lakers, a team that had beaten them in seven of seven playoff series over the decades before Denver swept LeBron James and his Lakers out of the playoffs.
Thompson said he was in bed watching the closing seconds of the clincher. The player known for his explosive vertical leap jumped out of bed as the horn sounded and his former team reached new heights.
“I used whatever’s left of my 44-inch vertical leap, just yelling and screaming,” Thompson said. “I started getting thousands of texts from all my friends all over the country. Everybody’s rooting for the Nuggets.”