Road to title in 1975 a quirky one.
Warriors forced to play ’75 Finals home games at old arena
The Warriors had no business making the NBA Finals in 1975. When they defied prognosticators and simple logic by miraculously doing so, the Coliseum Arena’s leaders said hosting Finals games would be bad for their business.
So the Warriors couldn’t play in the NBA Finals at their Coliseum home. “Sorry,” they were told, the Ice Follies were already booked there and, besides, it was much more lucrative opening the doors for Sesame Street characters on ice skates than it was having the Warriors there.
That’s right. Just when the
Warriors finally unseated the Lakers to win the Pacific Division after four straight years of second-place finishes, and then ended L.A’s string of Western Conference titles they ran into another yellowclad 7-footer they couldn’t beat: Big Bird.
“The Ice Follies have appeared here every year since 1967,” Coliseum general manager Bill Cunningham told the Oakland Tribune in 1975. “That’s 60,000 to 70,000 people coming to the Oakland Arena for one week. We can’t suddenly decide to bump these people.”
The Warriors scrambled to arrange to play their Finals games at their old home, the Cow Palace in Daly City. There was a catch, though. The Warriors had to schedule their games around a karate tournament the Cow Palace would be hosting.
That meant the Warriors, a scrappy bunch already prohibitive underdogs against the Washington Bullets, had to allow the Eastern Conference champs to decide how they wanted to split up the first four games of the series. Washington opted to host Game 1 and Game 4.
Exactly 45 years ago tonight, while they packed the Coliseum for Big Bird and his furry friends, the Warriors were across the country in Landover, Maryland to face the Bullets in Game 1 of the NBA Finals.
The Warriors, who earned their nickname of “The Cardiac Kids” with a series of jaw-dropping comebacks throughout their magical season, were immediately up to their old tricks in Game 1. They overcame a 16-point second-half deficit — these were the days before 3-pointers, mind you — to stun the heav
ily favored Bullets 101-95 behind 29 points from star Rick Barry and 20 more from rookie Phil Smith from USF. Barry’s jumper with 38 seconds left clinched Golden State’s upset win in the opener.
The stunning results were just starting as the Warriors then came back “home” to beat Washington twice at the dusty old Cow Palace before retuning to D.C. to finish off a shocking four-game sweep.
“To this day it’s the most overlooked championship in any sport in America,” Barry said. “It never gets the credit it deserves.”
The arena madness before the series only served to further motivate the Warriors, who had already felt disrespected throughout the season since they were a consensus pick to finish last in the Pacific Division — after all, they’d lost four of their top seven players in the off-season.
Truth be told, the Warriors front office was also caught off guard by the team’s success in 1975. How else do you explain not even tentatively blocking out postseason dates at the Coliseum?
“That’s why it’s the biggest upset in the NBA Finals.” Barry told The New York Times. “Even in our own arena, they were scheduling other things in the spring. They didn’t even think we would be there.”
“Calling it disrespect may be a little strong, but we all noticed it, that our own organization didn’t expect us to go that far,” Jamaal Wilkes, the Warriors’ NBA Rookie of the Year in 1975, once Fox Sports Radio. “But it was part of our motivation. We played with a chip on our shoulder the whole year.”
In retrospect, the Coliseum Arena’s decision was certainly a reasoned one. The Warriors had not been very profitable in the 1970s, usually averaging around six or seven thousand fans per game. During the 1974-75 season they averaged a still modest 8,500 fans per game, two thousand more per game than the previous season.
“We don’t like losing business. But when you have a multipurpose arena, you’ve got to please the greatest number of people,” Cunningham said.
Besides, if anyone understood the sometimes delicate balance between making money and making tough decisions, it was the Warriors’ old owner, Franklin Mieuli. He had spent too many years teetering on the wrong end of a profit margin in the Bay Area.
Mieuli, who was relatively poor compared with his NBA counterparts, wasn’t able to sign any of the Warriors’ top draft picks for four straight seasons. He was outbid by teams from the rival ABA for his top picks from 1970 through 1973.
Heading into their championship season, finances played a huge role in the decimation of the Warriors team that finished 44-38 the year before.
To wit:
• Warriors All-Star center Nate Thurmond, the team’s most popular player among fans, was shockingly traded to the Chicago Bulls a month before the season for Clifford Ray. Mieuli not only got rid of Thurmond’s big contract — which included long-term deferments stretching into retirement — he also received $100,000 from the Bulls.
• All-Star forward Cazzie Russell, the Warriors’ secondleading scorer at 20.5 points per game, became one of the NBA’s first free agents when he left to sign with the Lakers after he felt the Warriors were low-balling him in negotiations.
• Fan favorite Jim Barnett — yeah, that Jim Barnett — was making relatively good money and wound up in New Orleans after he and his contract were left unprotected in the expansion draft.
• Clyde Lee, the team’s best rebounder and its sixth man, was lost to the Hawks two weeks before the season after a league ruling that resulted in a bizarre and embarrassing trade for Golden State.
• Here’s the setup: Four years earlier, the Warriors traded a No. 1 pick plus considerations to the Hawks for the rights to solid center Zelmo Beaty, who was playing in the ABA. Atlanta used the Warriors’ pick in 1970 — No. 3 overall — to draft future Hall of Famer Pete Maravich. (Can you imagine if “Pistol Pete” played alongside Rick Barry?) The Hawks would also get Lee if the Warriors
ever signed Beaty.
But Beaty was never tempted to leave the ABA because the Warriors weren’t willing to meet his salary demands. Flash ahead to 1974, when the cashstarved Warriors executed a sign-and-trade deal sending Beaty to the Lakers for cash considerations and a secondround pick. Because the Warriors technically signed Beaty — if only long enough to trade him — the Hawks demanded they also get Lee. The NBA agreed, so essentially the Warriors traded Pete Maravich and Clyde Lee to the Hawks for a guy who never played with them and a future secondround pick.
Put all those player losses together and you begin to understand how coach Al Attles’ innovative formula for success that year — an unheard of 10-man rotation and a constant pressure defense — wasn’t just an act of ingenuity. The moves were moreso a means of survival.
And boy did they survive. They proved better than any team in the world in 1975.
Well, except for those guys down on Sesame Street.