Julius Erving of the New York Nets is chased by Darrell Elston of the Virginia Squires during the Nets’ American Basketball Association glory days, at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., in 1975.
Julius Erving of the New York Nets is chased by Darrell Elston of the Virginia Squires during the Nets’ American Basketball Association glory days, at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., in 1975.JOYCE DOPKEEN/NYT
The ABA entered the sports world in a time that was ready for a more wide-open brand of professional basketball. Something faster. Something funkier. Something more expressive.
Something Blacker.
The league’s impact isn’t “a little known secret,” as the narrator Common says in the new documentary series “Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association.” But it’s still fun to revisit. Premiering Thursday on Prime Video, “Soul Power” has no trouble making the case that without the ABA, the high-flying, fast-paced, perimeter-oriented NBA of today would simply not exist.
Just as important, the league, which lasted from 1967 to 1976 before a contentious merger with the NBA, was a perfect cultural match for a rebellious era. As James Brown and Sly Stone were bringing the funk to the airwaves, the ABA was bringing it on the court. Players like Julius Erving, Darnell Hillman, and Artis Gilmore sported ski-high afros. The three-point shot was a staple of ABA play; it didn’t enter the NBA until the 1979-1980 season, and didn’t become a consistently utilized weapon until much later than that. And where the NBA had an unofficial cap on the number of Black players allowed on a team as late as the ‘60s, the ABA had no such restriction, and a much more racially diverse league resulted.
The NBA was fully aware of its little sibling’s appeal. As Boston Globe sports columnist emeritus Bob Ryan says in the series, “Their little world was very much upset by the presence of a competitor.” The upstart league poached star NBA players, including Rick Barry, who went from the NBA’s Warriors to the ABA’s Oaks and Nets before going back to the Warriors. The ABA allowed college underclassmen into its ranks. And it featured prime Dr. J, whose above-the-rim game was a major draw for a league that could struggle to fill arenas.
“Soul Power” spends most of its time on the court, but it also ventures into court, especially as the inevitable merger approaches. Executives from both leagues wanted a merger early on, but the players, in the spirit of free market competition, resisted. When the merger finally went down, in 1976, it was messy: Before the 1975-1976 season, two of the ABA’s premiere franchises, the Denver Nuggets and the New York Nets, applied to join the NBA without approval from the ABA. The rest of the junior league fumed, and the whole enterprise fell into chaos. The league was down to six teams before the Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs joined the NBA with the Nets and Nuggets. The two remaining franchises, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis (who had a wunderkind sportscaster named Bob Costas), folded up shop. And the ABA was no more.
But you can see its legacy every time you watch an NBA game. The ABA showed an intuitive understanding of sports as entertainment. Will Ferrell paid homage in the (not very good) 2008 movie comedy “Semi-Pro.” Authors like Pete Croatto (“From Hang time to Prime Time”) and Theresa Runstedtler (“Black Ball”), both of whom appear in “Soul Power,” have provided valuable insight. Now it’s TV’s turn to bring the ABA back.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.