Rublee 1 The NBA ABA Merger By Dylan Rublee Interviewee: Kevin Grevey Instructor: Michael Chapper Date: February 22, 2010 Rublee 2 Table of Contents Statement of Purpose…………………………………………………………………….3 Biography………………………………………………………………………………..4 Historical Contextualization…………………………………………………………….6 Interview Transcription…………………………………………………………………13 Time Indexing Recording Log…………………………………………………………..41 Interview Analysis………………………………………………………………………42 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...47 Rublee 3 Statement of Purpose The purpose of this oral history interview and project is to better understand the ABA NBA merger and the affect it had on the game of basketball. The perspective of Kevin Grevey gave an in depth look on how a player at the time of the merger was affected. Although he was not negatively affected by the merger he knew players, who were not fortunate enough to play in the NBA or to move from the ABA to the NBA. Rublee 4 Kevin Grevey Biography Kevin Grevey was born May 12th, 1953 in Hamilton, Ohio. Mr. Grevey was one of six siblings; he had one older sister and four younger brothers and sisters. As a child Mr. Grevey spent his time playing all sorts of sports with his siblings and friends within the community. However he was definitely more driven to play basketball more than the other sports he played. Mr. Grevey played for Hamilton Taft High School and was on the varsity team all three years of his high school career. Hamilton Taft High School made it Rublee 5 to the state tournament all three years he was there and his senior they made it to the state championship and lost by two points. Mr. Grevey attests his success and growth in basketball during his high school basketball coach Mark McCullum. Mr. Grevey went to Kentucky to go play college basketball. Mr. Grevey played for both Adolph Rupp and Jo Hall during his time at Kentucky. His senior year they made it to the NCAA championship game where they lost to UCLA. All three years that he was eligible to play Mr. Grevey made First Team All South-Eastern Conference, and All – American his junior and senior year. In 1975, Kevin Grevey was selected 18th by the Washington Bullets. He played with the Bullets on the 1977-1978 championship team. Mr. Grevey played for the Bullets for four more years until he was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks for two more years until he retired. After Mr. Grevey was done with playing basketball he gained a business degree at the University of Connecticut. He married in 1984 and is the father of three children. He currently owns a restaurant called Grevey‘s that has been open for 30 years. He also works as a regional talent scout for the Lakers, and also broadcasts basketball games for CBS radio. Rublee 6 The NBA ABA Merger The National Basketball Association has gone through many transformations throughout history to stand where it is today The NBA now is one of 4 professional sports in America that dominate the sporting industry The thing that separates the NBA from the National Football League, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball is the fact that the NBA is on the verge of going global. Throughout the preseason, NBA teams play each other in Europe and Asia, in the hope that one day the NBA will become the International Basketball Association. According to the official NBA website the League has over 50 international players currently playing in the NBA, who come from Africa, South America, Europe, and Asia. It is undeniable that the NBA has grown an incredible amount since its emergence in 1949. What would determine the fate of the NBA is the merger that took place between it and the American Basketball Association, more commonly known as the ABA, in the summer of 1976. The National Basketball League came about through a merger between two other basketball leagues, the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League. The NBL was expanding since its creation, generating strong revenues year in and year out. It had a dedicated fan base and a lot of good players coming into the league every year. The league had 42 teams across its 12-year existence from 1937 till 1949 when it merged with the BAA to become the NBA. The BAA was a much smaller league and had only been around for 3 years before it merged with NBL. At the point of the merger, it was a struggling league on the verge of being shut down because there was not a large enough fan base to generate the necessary revenue for its operation. Also, the league had a lower talent pool because the better players were signing with teams in the Rublee 7 NBL. The one are in which the BAA had an edge over the NBL was the cities and stadiums: NBL games could only support on average a crowd of about 3,000 fans, whereas BAA stadiums could hold up to 20,000 people. In an attempt to stay afloat the BAA began to make calls to NBL team owners hoping that they would move their franchises into the BAA. This, however, did not happen and on August 3rd, 1949, the BAA and NBL merged together and became the National Basketball Association (Kirchberg 60). As the years went on, more and more teams began to join the NBA. In October of 1961 the American Basketball League was created as a competitor to the NBA. It consisted of 8 teams from Hawaii to Los Angeles to New York. The league only lasted for two years and on December 31st 1963, the league was shut down, all the players became free agents, and some were signed to NBA teams (Kirchberg 101). There would be one league, however, that would bring the NBA its greatest challenge yet and ultimately force it to change and move toward a completely different direction than it had intended to be heading: the American Basketball Association. The creator of the league, Dennis Murphy the mayor of Orange County Buena Park, had originally intended to create an AFL team in his county. Due to his bad timing, however, the AFL had just merged with NFL, which made it impossible to create a team because it would have conflicted with the territory rights of the Los Angeles Rams. He therefore decided that he would create his own basketball league because he knew he could not create a NBA franchise because that to would conflict with the territory rights of the Los Angeles Lakers. Dennis Murphy began to make calls and joined forces with John McShane and they began to iron out the details to make the league a contender with the NBA. After Rublee 8 finding several buyers who would be interested in creating ABA teams the two men contacted George Mikan, a prominent basketball figured, and asked him to become commissioner of the league. Mikan agreed to become commissioner of the ABA with a yearly salary of $50,000 for three years. The key differences between the ABA and the NBA were as follows. The ABA ball was red, white and blue, verses the regular brown one of the NBA. The attire of the referees officiating ABA games was also red, white, and blue and the names of the officials were printed on the back of their shirts. The league also instigated the 3-point line, which had first been proposed by the ABL but none of the coaches had approved of it. Adding the 3-point line would cater towards the fans who were more interested in an offensively minded game. Another key difference between the ABA and the NBA had to with the statistics of both individual players and teams. The NBA only concerned itself with points and rebounds, however the ABA now had decided to hire people to mark down players‘ steals, offensive and defensive rebounds, assists, and turnovers. This made the game a lot more interactive between the game and fans because now fans knew more about the teams and the players (Kirchberg 109). The NBA began to hurt the ABA‘s potential to grow as time went by, because the NBA was now signing newly drafted players with large, lucrative deals that the ABA could not match. This hurt the ABA greatly because they couldn‘t match what the NBA was paying players, giving the NBA the better selection of players. The ABA did the next best thing and drafted players out of high school and non-seniors out of college. The first player to get signed out of high school and join the ABA was Spencer Haywood, however he was soon bought over by the NBA and left the ABA, ―In the absence of a Rublee 9 merger, bidding between the ABA and NBA for playing talent has reached unprecedented heights. Johnny Neumann, a University of Mississippi sophomore, signed with the ABA's Memphis Pros for $2 million; Spencer Haywood jumped from the ABA's Denver Rockets to the NBA's Seattle SuperSonics for $1.5 million‖(Worsnop). The NBA could not do anything about it because of their requirement that all players in the draft must be in college for four years. The ABA now could select anyone they wanted before the NBA and this gave them the edge over the NBA. With the NBA sensing that they were in a dangerous situation with the ABA‘s drafting younger players, they decided to merge the two leagues in May 1971. The NBA would allow ten ABA teams to merge into the NBA with an entry fee of $125 million over ten years, and they lost all money earned from TV broadcasting until 1973.