The American Basketball Association existed for nine seasons, lost money almost continuously, and folded. It also introduced the three-point line, the slam dunk contest and a style of play that the sport eventually adopted wholesale. Very few failed businesses have won their argument this completely.
It launched in 1967 with a simple competitive problem: the established league had the best players, the biggest cities and the television contracts. Competing on the same terms was impossible. So the ABA competed on different terms, by being louder, faster and more willing to try things.
The ball, and the line
The most visible decision was the ball itself: red, white and blue instead of orange. It was pure showmanship and it worked, because the ball was instantly recognisable in a photograph or on a television screen of the period. Children wanted one, which was precisely the point.
The more consequential decision was the three-point line, borrowed from an earlier failed league. In the ABA it was not a curiosity but a weapon, and teams built plays around it years before the older league would admit that long shooting had a place.
A faster, higher game
ABA basketball was built around open floors and players who played above the rim. The league had no interest in the deliberate, physical half-court style that dominated elsewhere, partly out of conviction and partly because spectacle sold tickets in cities where nobody had any reason to turn up otherwise.
It also signed players the older league would not touch, including young men who had not completed college, which forced a long-overdue argument about whether an adult should be barred from earning a living at his profession.
Julius Erving
No player defined the league more than Julius Erving. He played with a grace that made the dunk look like a decision rather than an act of force, and he was the reason a great many people bought a ticket to see a league they otherwise knew nothing about. When the ABA ended he was already one of the most famous athletes in the country.
The first professional slam dunk contest was staged at the ABA's final All-Star gathering in 1976, and Erving won it with a dunk launched from the free-throw line. The image became one of the most reproduced photographs in the sport, and the contest itself was adopted by the surviving league within a decade.
The ABA lost the business argument and won the basketball one.- How the merger is usually summarised
The merger
By the mid-1970s both leagues were exhausted by the bidding war for players. In 1976 four ABA clubs were absorbed into the NBA, and the rest were wound up. The teams that crossed over paid heavily for the privilege and arrived with no share of television money for several seasons.
Their players, however, arrived in force, and the following season was visibly different from the one before it. The pace increased, the dunk became ordinary rather than exceptional, and several of the new arrivals were immediately among the best players in the combined league.
One ABA franchise, the Spirits of St. Louis, did not join the merger. Its owners negotiated a share of the other teams' television revenue instead, an arrangement that paid out for decades.
Teams that came and went
The league's map changed almost every year. Franchises moved cities, changed names, merged and folded, sometimes mid-season, and players occasionally learned where they would be living next from a newspaper. Several clubs played in arenas far too large for their crowds, and a few in buildings that were far too small.
Four of them survived into the merged league and are still playing today, which is a better outcome than most sporting start-ups achieve. Their histories before 1976 are counted separately in the record books, a bureaucratic decision that keeps a good deal of excellent basketball slightly out of view.
Players the other league had passed over
The ABA's recruiting strategy was simple: sign anyone good, regardless of whether the established league considered him acceptable. That included very young players, players from small colleges nobody scouted, and veterans who had been discarded elsewhere. A surprising number turned out to be excellent, which says more about the narrowness of conventional scouting than about the ABA's judgement.
It also meant that when the leagues combined, the arriving players were not making up the numbers. Several were immediately among the best in the sport, and one of the merger's quieter effects was to raise the overall standard of play in a single off-season.
A business that never worked
None of this made money. Television coverage was thin, several owners were undercapitalised, and the bidding war for players drove salaries up faster than revenue. The league spent its final seasons visibly running out of road, with teams folding and schedules improvised.
Judged as a business it was a failure. Judged as an argument about how basketball should be played, it won so comprehensively that most people watching a modern game have no idea they are watching the ABA's ideas.
What survived
Almost everything that made the ABA look eccentric is now standard. The three-point line decides modern games. The dunk contest is an institution. Playing fast, spreading the floor and entertaining the crowd are not alternatives to winning basketball but the current definition of it.
The red, white and blue ball is the exception. It went out of use after the merger and survives as a nostalgia item, which is a fitting memorial for a league that was serious about basketball and never stopped behaving like a travelling show.
Nine seasons is not long. The league was gone before many of the people who now play its style of basketball were born, and its surviving records are kept in a separate column. But a sport is defined by the ideas that stick, and on that measure the ABA did better in nine years than most competitions manage in a century.
