Best: Fifty years on, first New York Nets to win title recall the fun of it all
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A half-century ago, the New York Nets won their first ABA championship. Neil Best, the veteran Newsday writer, interviewed Dr. J et al for a commemorative piece of history. There is, in this year’s playoffs, a team that despite their accomplishments in the regular season are not seen as contenders for the Larry O’Brien Trophy. The Oklahoma City Thunder are too young, too young to win it, but it could also be argued that they are too young to know they are too young.
That’s how Neil Best of Newsday recently described another group who made it to the top despite birth certificates and faces unmarked by age and wear and tear, the 1973-74 New York Nets, who 50 years ago Friday won the ABA championship at home led by Julius Erving and a cast of kids.
Best notes Erving had recently turned 24. The other starters in that Game 5 clincher vs. the Utah Stars that night at Nassau Coliseum were Billy Paultz, 25, John Williamson, 22, Brian Taylor, 22 and Larry Kenon, 21. Indeed of the 11 players who appeared for the Nets in the Finals, Bill Melchionni, 29, was the only one over 25. Coach Kevin Loughery was 34.
“We were a young, confident team,” Taylor told Newsday.
“On top of the world,” Dr. J told Best recently, recalling the moment a half century later
It was the franchise’s first championship which followed by another, also led by Erving, two years later. The Nets, not on Long Island, not in the swamps of Jersey nor at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic has won the trophy since. They came close in 2002 and 2003, losing in the NBA Finals while in New Jersey but that’s it. So, considering where they are now, outside looking in, it’s worth remembering that first time (even if the franchise apparently isn’t.)
The win that season was as Best writes, “something new, and surprising,” Early on, though, despite the presence of Dr. J, easily the best player in the ABA and arguably the most exciting in all of basketball, the forebear of a generation of high-flying wings that included Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, things did not look good. New York lost nine games in a row early in the season, dropping to 4-10. Then, “come spring,” as Best writes, “they won 22 of their last 25 games, including 12-2 in the playoffs.” Newsday wrote after the final game, “The victory was the culmination of an extraordinary season for the youngest basketball team ever to win a professional title.”
Hopes were high. The Nets under owner Roy Boe, had traded for Erving, a Long Island native, in the previous summer. sending the financially strapped Virginia Squires, George Carter, a solid if not spectacular wing, and, as Squires owner Earl Foreman put it then, “a lot of cash.” The deal also kept Irving in the ABA, away from the Atlanta Hawks of the established NBA.
More than 50 years later, Erving recalled his homecoming to Best, “It had a little fantasy aspect to it, coming back, being around my mom and my stepfather and teachers from school and friends . . . It was surreal.”
But Julius needed help and an undrafted rookie, Super John Williamson, supplied it. Williamson, never short of confidence (remind you of someone on the current Brooklyn roster?) made his case directly.
In a tense team meeting during the Nets early slump, Williamson asked to speak. As Best writes, Erving recalled Williamson saying, “We ain’t winning because I ain’t playing.”
Said Taylor, “ ‘Super John’ was the one who stepped forward and said the reason we were losing games is because he wasn’t starting and that when he does play, we’ve got to get the ball to him.”
Contacted by Best, Loughery laughed when reminded of that meeting.
“John said that every day, every practice,” the coach said. “But one thing about John Williamson: He wasn’t afraid of the moment. He wasn’t afraid to take a big shot.”
And Williamson walked the walk. He started a game in San Antonio on November 11, the day after he turned 22. The Nets won, 106-94.
“Something magical happened after that,” Erving said. “We just felt unbeatable.”
The Nets won 19 of their next 22 games.
“The best decision they made was starting Williamson over me, and me coming off the bench,” said Melchionni, who Williamson replaced. “I was bit older and had had some injuries and I just wasn’t the same player I was when I came there. When you start losing, you try and make a change. That was the right change.”
Added Taylor, “I think once John did come into the lineup and started helping us out, Kenon started playing better, I started playing better, ‘Whopper’ [Paultz] started playing better. We started coming together.”
The Nets also traded for Wendell Ladner and Mike Gale in a January deal with the Kentucky Colonels, Taylor told Best the two became critical, Gale for his defense, Ladner “as Doc’s protector.”
“We needed that,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t until we put our pieces together in January where we knew we were a force.”
The Knicks were still the dominant force in New York ... as they are today but the Coliseum was then new and shiny and Dr. J was ... Dr. J.
“[Erving] had a certain way about him,” Melchionni said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m the best guy here, so whatever I want to do I can do.’ He went out of his way to help, to talk to guys. And it made it a lot easier for Kevin. Doc basically put his ego on the shelf and did what he thought was best for the team.”
Loughery, who later became Jordan’s first NBA coach with the Bulls, said, “Doc was by far of all the players I’ve been around, the superstar players, the easiest to coach . . . He just loved to play basketball, and loved to compete.”
Still, in a foreshadowing of their future, the Nets couldn’t sell out the Coliseum.
“It was sometimes a little depressing when you realized we had one of the better teams in the world and we had a hard time getting people come out to watch us play,” Melchionni said.
Said Loughery, “We didn’t have cable TV, and we didn’t have social media that we have today. If we had that, people could have seen how good we were.”
But there buzz.
“They were an athletic group, and they played a wide-open style,” said Al Skinner, who played for the Nets, then went on to coach at Rhode Island and Boston College. “It allowed them to be not only a good team, but also very entertaining.”
Skinner also watched that team to learn what it took to play as a pro. Seeing how Erving got physically stronger since his rookie season was his first lesson.
It wasn’t just the players who went on to bigger and better careers from that crucible, spurred by their relationship with Erving. Rod Thorn, recently retired from playing, was the assistant coach. Tony Kornheiser covered the 1973-74 Nets for Newsday and former MSG Network announcer Al Trautwig was a teenage ballboy.
“Julius was the coolest dude,” Trautwig told Newsday. “He had me over his house to babysit. It was unbelievable. He was such a legend at that time.”
The Nets possibilities, he said, took a while to show, but when they did...
“Larry Kenon was awesome,” Trautwig said. “Wendell Ladner was a real personality. He taught me how to blow dry my hair. It was just a fantastic team.”
The Nets finished with the best record in the league, 55-29, then exploded in the post-season, besting Virginia in five games, Kentucky in four and Utah in five after taking a 3-0 series lead. In Game 5, all five starters scored between 15 and 23 points.
“I don’t care if they’re babies,” the Stars’ Gerald Govan said after the clincher. “They came to play.”
As Erving told Best, “Kevin and Rod [Thorn, his assistant] pulled it together and made us believe. It was really an organizational success all around, top to bottom . . . We just adopted this one-for-all-and-all-for-one mentality, and it paid off.”
Could they have beaten the Celtics or Bucks, the two NBA finalists? As Best writes, every NBA coach contacted by Newsday said no, while every ABA coach gave them a chance.
Fifty years later, Loughery said, “It would have been very interesting. I’m not saying we beat them or not, but it would have been very competitive.”
Erving wouldn’t choose between his 1974 and 1976 championship squads but told Best the ’74 team had more “grit,” fueled in part by Ladner, who died at 26 in a June, 1975, plane crash near Kennedy Airport. His body was identified by the ABA championship ring he was wearing. Since then, Gale, Williamson and Willie Sojourner have died, but you can still find remnant of the team at NBA games. Erving, Taylor and Melchionni made appearances at Barclays Center this season.
Erving was a star in Philadelphia and won an NBA championship in 1983, but most who saw him in his Nets days regard that as peak Dr. J. As Sport Illustrated once wrote, Erving’s NBA vintage was the most underrated of any pro player.
“It’s a blessing to still be alive to be able to talk about it,” Taylor told best. “Super guys. We had so much fun.”
Julius Erving, Nets reminisce about magical ABA championship run 50 years ago ($) - Neil Best - Newsday
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