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    George McGinnis Dies at 73; Powered His Way to Basketball Stardom

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    He won two titles with the Pacers of the A.B.A. before joining Julius Erving on the N.B.A.’s 76ers, but it was 35 years before the Hall of Fame inducted him.George McGinnis, whose rare combination of size and agility made him a pillar of two early 1970s championship teams in the upstart American Basketball Association, but whose heralded pairing with Julius Erving on the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers failed to fulfill expectations of a title, died on Thursday in Indianapolis. He was 73.The Indiana Pacers, the team with which he won his A.B.A. titles, said his death, in a hospital, resulted from complications of cardiac arrest, which he suffered last week at his home in Indianapolis. McGinnis had struggled to walk in recent years after undergoing multiple back surgeries because of a hereditary condition, the team said.McGinnis played at the high school, college and professional levels in basketball-obsessed Indiana, where he broke Oscar Robertson’s scholastic scoring records while leading Washington High School in Indianapolis to a 31-0 record and a championship in 1969.McGinnis led Washington High School in Indianapolis to a 31-0 title run in 1969.Frank Fisse/IndyStar, via ImagnAs a forward, he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds in his one season at Indiana University before joining his hometown Indiana Pacers. The Pacers immediately won successive A.B.A. championships, though McGinnis, surrounded by the veterans Mel Daniels, Roger Brown and Bob Netolicky, was not the team’s unquestioned star until his second season, when he averaged 27.6 points and 12.5 rebounds per game.At a chiseled 6 feet 8 inches, 235 pounds, McGinnis was a harbinger of basketball’s athletic revolution, featuring taller players who could be brawny around the basket but more agile away from it with each passing decade, navigating skillfully in open space.“Big guys in my era couldn’t handle the ball,” he said in an interview with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame before he was inducted into it in 2017, an honor that many believed was egregiously overdue 35 years after he retired. “But I could dribble with my left hand, my right hand and take guys outside.”He credited those skills to the coaching he had growing up in Indiana, where “fundamentals are well taught,” he said.Len Elmore, a Pacers teammate for one season — McGinnis’s last in Indiana before joining the 76ers in 1975 — said in a telephone interview that he harked back to McGinnis when LeBron James, slightly bigger at 6-foot-9 and 250 pounds, entered the N.B.A. in 2003 with the Cleveland Cavaliers.“Similar size, strength, mobility,” Elmore said, “I remember saying it immediately — George was LeBron before LeBron. You couldn’t believe that with his body he could be that agile.”McGinnis during Game Two of the N.B.A. finals against the Portland Trail Blazers in 1977.James Drake/Sports Illustrated, via Getty ImagesOne distinctive part of McGinnis’s game was his midrange jumper, a right-handed shot-put-like release that made purists cringe. “It was different, but he made it work for him,” Elmore said.After leading the A.B.A. in scoring, averaging 29.8 points, and sharing the league’s 1974-75 Most Valuable Player Award with Erving, his future 76ers teammate, McGinnis left the cash-strapped Pacers, calling his departure “a dollars and cents thing.”In a challenge to the N.B.A.’s constitution, he tried to circumvent Philadelphia’s draft rights by signing with the New York Knicks. But when the league voided the deal, McGinnis joined the 76ers, accepting a six-year contract for $3.2 million (the equivalent of about $18.3 million today). It was one season before the team acquired Erving from the New York Nets as it entered the N.B.A. with three other A.B.A. teams, including the Pacers.“George was the turnaround factor in pro basketball in this town,” Pat Williams, the team’s general manager, told Sports Illustrated in 1982. “Julius put up the walls and a roof, but it was George who built the foundation.”The 76ers’ slogan for McGinnis’s first season in Philadelphia was “Let George Do It.” Led by McGinnis, who was voted to play in the first of his three N.B.A. All-Star games, the 76ers increased their win total to 46 from the previous season’s 34 but lost in the first round of the playoffs.Erving’s arrival electrified the sport, though questions abounded on whether the two prolific forwards could coexist. “It was inevitable that people would say we hated each other, but Julius and I knew it wasn’t true, and we were above it,” McGinnis said in the Sports Illustrated article.The 76ers were within two victories of fulfilling their supposed destiny, taking the first two games against the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1976-77 league finals. But the Bill Walton-led Blazers won the next four. McGinnis struggled with his shot until the last game in Portland, when he scored 28 points.The Western Conference All-Stars in 1979. McGinnis is seated on the left, in the front row.NBAE, via Getty ImagesTrailing by two with one last possession in Game 6, the 76ers’ head coach, Gene Shue, called a play for McGinnis. Erving, who had already scored 40, was bewildered by Shue’s bypassing him and Doug Collins, the team’s best pure shooter.After another disheartening playoff exit the following season, the 76ers dealt McGinnis to the Denver Nuggets, landing Bobby Jones, whose staunch defense better complemented Erving and helped the 76ers win the title in 1983.McGinnis did not have a long career, especially compared with James’s 21st-century standard. His performance declined in Denver, in part because of an Achilles’ tendon injury. He returned to the Pacers during the 1979-80 season, finishing his 11th and final pro season, 1981-82, with an average of 4.7 points over 76 games.George F. McGinnis was born on Aug. 12, 1950, in Harpersville, Ala., about 30 miles southeast of Birmingham, the son of Burnie and Willie (Keith) McGinnis. His father was a carpenter. With a daughter, Bonnie, the family settled on the west side of Indianapolis.During McGinnis’s senior year of high school, his father died after falling off scaffolding at a construction site — days after watching George score 53 points and grab 30 rebounds in an All-Star game. McGinnis, who was also an all-state football player, said he left Indiana University early to help support his mother.He expressed regret that he had missed out on playing for the Indiana coach Bobby Knight by one season, speculating, “I think it would have given me different values.” (Knight died in November.)Many believed McGinnis’s induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017 was egregiously overdue, coming 35 years after his professional retirement from the sport.Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE, via Getty ImagesMcGinnis was married for 43 years to Lynda (Dotson) McGinnis, who had been a high school girlfriend. She died of cancer in 2019, not long after he underwent surgery to address a back issue, spinal stenosis, that forced him to walk stooped with a cane or walker. His survivors include his sister, Bonnie McGinnis.After his playing years, McGinnis worked as a broadcaster in Indianapolis, where he and his wife founded GM Supply Company, a provider of special tooling and abrasives to manufacturers, in 1991.McGinnis remained a popular fixture in the state’s basketball community, and in September was inducted into the Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame.Twenty years earlier, he told The New York Times, “One of the great things about being a basketball player in Indiana is that they never forget you.”Alex Traub More

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      The 1975-76 Denver Nuggets Almost Beat Dr. J to Win a Championship

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      Eight-year-old L.J. Jones thought his grandfather Ralph Simpson had been keeping a secret from him. So he demanded answers.“Grandpa, can I ask you something?” Simpson, 73, recalled his grandson saying, imitating the young boy’s serious tone.“Grandpa,” the boy said. “Somebody told me you was famous.”Simpson had to laugh. After all, he is not the most famous Ralph; that might be Ralph Lauren, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor is he the most famous member of his family; that would be his daughter, the Grammy Award-winning soul singer India.Arie.“Grandpa’s not famous,” Simpson told his grandson. “I played for the Nuggets and played professional basketball.”Still, L.J. wanted to know, “Why you didn’t tell me?”Simpson started on the 1975-76 Denver Nuggets in the American Basketball Association. They were the only Nuggets group to make it to a championship round until this year’s team reached the N.B.A. finals. The 1975-76 squad lost the A.B.A. championship series in six games to Julius Erving’s New York Nets. The A.B.A. and N.B.A. merged before the 1976-77 season, and the Nuggets spent the next 47 years in basketball purgatory, with a few teams that inspired confidence but none that reached the finals.Ralph Simpson said his 1976 Denver Nuggets finals team was better than the Nets team, led by Erving, that won that year.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesNow, the Nuggets are one win away from the first championship in franchise history. As they try to close the series at home Monday in Game 5 against the Miami Heat, they’ll be cheered on by some of the men who played for that A.B.A. title.“It has been so cool because the Nuggets currently making it to the finals has brought out a lot of memories for people that didn’t realize that Denver had an A.B.A. team that went to the finals,” said Gus Gerard, 69, a backup player on the 1976 finals team. He added, laughing: “The only frustrating thing for me is they’re showing all these highlights and it’s always the same ones of Julius Erving, the great Dr. J, dunking on us left and right.”Like today’s Nuggets, the 1976 team routinely demoralized opponents with its near unstoppable offense, but often felt like the underdog. The older Denver team also toiled in obscurity for much of the season.A Sports Illustrated article on May 29, 1976, lamented that “Denver games are not on national television,” and that “Denver box scores do not appear on most sports pages.” The article noted that some “large media outlets” still referred to the Nuggets as the “Denver Rockets,” which had been their name until 1974. The franchise changed its name because it planned to move to the N.B.A., where the name Rockets was already taken by Houston.The 1975-76 Nuggets had the best record in the A.B.A. They were led by three future Hall of Famers: Bobby Jones, Dan Issel and David Thompson. Nicknamed Skywalker, Thompson had been the top draft pick in 1975 in both the A.B.A., by the Virginia Squires, and the N.B.A., by the Atlanta Hawks. But he chose to sign with the Nuggets instead.“David Thompson, man, I used to get myself standing and watching him when I’m in the game,” said Byron Beck, 78, who played for Denver in all nine of its A.B.A. seasons and its first in the N.B.A. “You know, you catch yourself, ‘Oh!’ and he’s already gone doing something spectacular.”They were coached by Larry Brown, who won an A.B.A. championship as a player in 1969 with the Oakland Oaks, a men’s N.C.A.A. Division I basketball championship as a coach at Kansas in 1988 and an N.B.A. championship as a coach in 2004 with the Detroit Pistons.In 1975-76, the A.B.A. was contracting, having gone to seven teams from 10, and had only one division. The All-Star Game pitted the Nuggets against All-Stars from other teams.Claude Terry, then a Nuggets reserve guard, said he remembered going to the All-Star Game with his wife and their two children in a station wagon. He said he was “probably wearing old Levi’s and shoes that didn’t get messed up in the snow.”He added: “I don’t remember even being interviewed during the game.”Denver Nuggets Coach Larry Brown leaped off the bench at the buzzer after his team beat the A.B.A. All-Star team in Denver on Jan. 28, 1976.Sc/Associated PressThat season, the Nuggets packed their new McNichols Arena, which opened in 1975, with the pending N.B.A. merger in mind, and was demolished in 2000. Gerard remembered being swarmed for autographs and invited for free meals at restaurants, like the Colorado Mine Company.“They had, like, the best prime rib you ever tasted in your life,” Gerard said.Amid the excitement, there was also uncertainty. Preparation for the merger with the N.B.A. weighed on the players, who knew that only four of the seven A.B.A. teams would survive it. The Nuggets, Nets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs continued in the N.B.A.“Most of us didn’t have no-cut contracts,” Terry said, adding that players were “not nervous, but just trying to figure out what was next.”Terry said coming changes kept the players from appreciating what it to meant to play in the final A.B.A. season. Had there been social media at the time, Terry said they might have paid more attention to the significance.The Nuggets played the Kentucky Colonels in the first round of the playoffs and won in seven games. Then they faced the New York Nets, who had the best player in the series in Erving. Denver lost Game 1 at home. Facing elimination at home in Game 5, they won despite 37 points from Erving. Simpson and Issel led the team with 21 points each, and Gerard had 12 off the bench.If they could force a Game 7 in Denver, they were sure they could win it. But Erving led a furious fourth-quarter comeback in Game 6 to win the game and the championship.“We should have beat them,” Simpson said. “We had a better team. Even Julius Erving thought we did. But they got out on us.”Denver won Game 2 and Game 5 in the 1976 finals, but the Nets claimed the championship with a comeback win in Game 6.Richard Drew/Associated PressAs the years passed, though they stayed in touch with each other, some members of that Nuggets team became increasingly disconnected from the franchise. Most of them moved out of Denver, and went on to have careers outside of basketball.Thompson and Gerard went through well-publicized battles with drug addiction. Gerard later became a substance abuse counselor. He now works for the Fayette County government in Pennsylvania and still helps people recovering from addictions. Thompson participates in Nuggets fan events and attended Game 2 of the finals in Denver. He and Jones, who played for the Nuggets until 1978, started a religious nonprofit in North Carolina.Issel remained the most connected to the franchise. He played for the Nuggets until 1985, then returned as a broadcaster a few years later. Issel coached the Nuggets twice, the second time also serving as the team’s president. He apologized in 2001 after using a racial epithet toward Mexican people in response to a fan’s taunt, then resigned shortly afterward.This year, with his five grandchildren in tow, Issel went to Game 1 of the finals, which Denver won at home, 104-93.Simpson has been watching the games at home, and invites his grandchildren for a pizza party to watch with him. He didn’t get to play for Denver in its debut N.B.A. season because he was traded to Detroit, but the Pistons traded him back the next season. He stays in touch with A.B.A. and N.B.A. alumni by being active with the National Basketball Retired Players Association.Denver’s 47-year drought before returning to the finals is perplexing to him.“We’ve had some really good players,” said Simpson, who coached at a small school briefly and used to be a pastor in Denver. “I’m really surprised we haven’t won a title yet.”To win the franchise’s first, this year’s Nuggets have tried to focus narrowly on the task before them. Much like how the A.B.A. Nuggets weren’t thinking about history, these Nuggets aren’t using the franchise’s long drought as inspiration.“I don’t know much about it,” Denver’s Bruce Brown said. “Who was on that team?”He said he tries not to think about what a championship would mean for the franchise and for the city of Denver.“Then I’ll get too happy, too anxious,” Brown said. “I just try to stay in the moment.”The 1975-76 team’s try at making history has been obscured by the years, but Brown and his teammates are on the verge of completing the journey they began. More

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      NBA Finals 2023: Denver Nuggets Beat Miami Heat for First Championship

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      It took 56 years and 38 playoff appearances for the basketball team nestled in the high plains just east of the Rocky Mountains to finally reach the peak of its sport.It took an unheralded center from Serbia who turned into the most formidable player in the game and a Canadian point guard who found himself again after a long and arduous recovery from a career-threatening knee injury. It took patience, collaboration and a discipline born of trying, failing and learning how to keep climbing just a bit higher.The Denver Nuggets are finally champions.They clinched the first title in franchise history Monday night on their home court at Ball Arena, 5,280 feet above sea level — the highest altitude at which any N.B.A. championship has been won. They beat the Miami Heat, 94-89, in Game 5 to seal the victory. They were led by center Nikola Jokic, who stood quietly at the back of the stage holding his 1-year-old daughter as his team celebrated during the trophy presentation, and by point guard Jamal Murray, who cried as he looked up at the thousands of fans roaring for him. The rest of Denver’s indefatigable eight-man rotation bolstered the team’s two biggest stars until the end.“I got news for everybody out there,” Nuggets Coach Michael Malone shouted, as the crowd erupted and confetti swirled in the air around him. “We’re not satisfied with one! We want more! We want more!”Bruce Brown celebrating.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesJokic was named the most valuable player of the finals, a nice complement to his two regular-season M.V.P. Awards. He finished Game 5 with 28 points, 16 rebounds and 4 assists, becoming the first player in N.B.A. history to lead the playoffs in points, rebounds and assists.“If you want to be a success, you need a couple years,” Jokic said. “You need to be bad, then you need to be good. Then when you’re good you need to fail, and then when you fail, you’re going to figure it out.“I think experience is something that is not what happened to you. It’s what you’re going to do with what happened to you.”The clinching game was neither pretty nor easy. Through the first three quarters, the Nuggets struggled to make 3-point shots and convert free throws. They turned the ball over carelessly. Had they lost, they would have had to play Game 6 in Miami on Thursday. The pressure on Monday may have frayed their nerves.“You want to end it on your home court with all the fans there, your family there,” Murray said. “You want to end it on the home court so bad.”The Heat had a 7-point lead at halftime, and led by just 1 point at the end of the third quarter.Jamal Murray heading to the locker room after winning.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesBut in the fourth quarter, the Nuggets found the resolve to take the title. With about 10 minutes 59 seconds remaining, Murray hit a 3-pointer — only the Nuggets’ third of the game — to give the Nuggets a 4-point lead. He pranced down the court as the Heat called a timeout. It was Denver’s largest lead since the first quarter.Later, Murray struck again. This time, Aaron Gordon blocked a jumper by Heat guard Kyle Lowry, leading to a transition basket for Murray to give the Nuggets a 5-point lead.And with less than 30 seconds remaining, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope stole a pass by Jimmy Butler and made both free throws after Lowry fouled him to give Denver a 3-point lead.“I’m grateful, man, that we made it here,” Butler said afterward. “Came up short, but I’m blessed. I’m fortunate.”With the win, the Nuggets departed a dubious club. There are now only 10 teams in the league that have never won an N.B.A. championship. Five have made it to the finals and lost, including the Phoenix Suns, who have come up short three times, most recently in 2021.But the Nuggets had never even gotten that far, at least not in the N.B.A. Not since 1976, when they lost to the New York Nets in the American Basketball Association finals, had they reached a championship series.Fans celebrating in downtown Denver.Max Paro/Getty ImagesThe long drought helps explain why the Nuggets were underestimated all season. Pundits and oddsmakers questioned their ability to win, even after they took hold of first place in the Western Conference in December and never let go.People wondered if Jokic, despite his superlative play, could lead a team this far — after all, he had never taken the Nuggets past the conference finals. Those questions may have cost him a third consecutive M.V.P. Award — an accomplishment that many said should be reserved for champions.Some wondered if Murray would ever return to the elite level he had been playing at in 2021, when a knee injury just before the playoffs set him and Denver on a two-year journey to fully reset.Along the way, some role players found their stride, even if they mostly went unnoticed.Caldwell-Pope, whom the Nuggets traded for last off-season, added defense, shooting and championship experience. For a few playoff games, he brought in the ring he had won in 2020 with the Lakers and let his teammates hold it. None of them have one.“They gave me an opportunity here, because of my championship, to be that leader — be vocal, let them know about my experience and how hard it is to get to this point we’re at now,” Caldwell-Pope said after Game 1. “I’m just trying to keep them motivated.”Jokic had never been past the conference finals until this season. Denver drafted him in the second round, 41st overall, in 2014.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesGordon, whom the Nuggets traded for in March 2021, happily became a defensive stopper after being the offensive star of the Orlando Magic.“I’m not here for the credit,” Gordon said. “I’m here for the wins.”Bruce Brown provided offensive sparks; Jeff Green added veteran calm; Christian Braun, a rookie, offered a youthful fearlessness that would pay off in the finals.The Nuggets blasted through the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round and then beat the Suns in six games. They swept the Lakers in the conference finals and then sat around for a week waiting to find out whom they would meet in the finals.Like the Nuggets, the Heat had taken a 3-0 lead in their conference finals series. But they faltered as the Boston Celtics fought back in the East and won the next three games, forcing a decisive Game 7.“When Boston won Game 6, we’d been sitting so long it almost felt like we wasn’t in the playoffs anymore,” Green said. “Because the only thing we was doing was watching them.”Miami, propelled by its relentless star Butler, won Game 7 for the franchise’s seventh trip to the finals, this time as the No. 8 seed. A victory would have given Miami its first championship in a decade, one far more unexpected than the three it had won.If people overlooked Denver this season, they ignored Miami outright. The Heat barely made the playoffs and then gave even ardent believers reason to doubt when they wavered against Boston. They had an us-against-the-world mentality heading into the finals when, for once, Denver seemed to have the world on its side.And who could blame the Nuggets if that surge of confidence flowed to their heads?Caleb Martin of the Miami Heat, center, battling with Jokic.Pool photo by Kyle TeradaDenver took Game 1, and Jokic notched a triple-double. Afterward, the Nuggets began to celebrate as if they could feel their championship parade rumbling already. They lost focus and allowed Miami to steal Game 2, even as Jokic scored 41 points. Malone, Denver’s coach, scolded the Nuggets and questioned their effort. He wouldn’t have to do that again.Jokic and Murray each had triple-doubles in Game 3 in front of a raucous crowd in Miami. In Game 4, Brown scored 11 points in the fourth quarter, stoking Miami’s desperation.The Nuggets had some unusual visitors in their locker room after Game 4. The Nuggets owner E. Stanley Kroenke and his son, Josh Kroenke, the team president, grinned brightly, each holding a can of Coors. The Nuggets had just taken a 3-1 lead in the finals, and they could feel that the franchise was closing in on its first championship. Only one finals team — the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers — had ever been able to dig itself out of that deep a hole.But the Nuggets players and coaches refused to acknowledge how close they were. They remembered what had happened after Game 1.“We need to win one more,” Jokic said after Game 4. “I like that we didn’t relax. We didn’t get comfortable. We were still desperate. We still want it.”Murray offered a bit more confidence. “We’re just ready to win a championship,” he said. “We have the tools to do it. It’s been on our minds for a while.”Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesA fan with face paint or makeup in the style of the comic book character the Joker — Jokic’s nickname — at Game 5 in Denver.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesWhen Murray stood on the stage after Game 5, having finally won, ESPN’s Lisa Salters asked him about his journey, about how he couldn’t even walk two years ago today because of his knee injury. As she spoke, the crowd’s cheers drowned out her voice. Murray paused and looked up at them. Tears filled his reddened eyes.“Everything was hitting at once,” Murray said later. “From the journey, to the celebration with the guys, to enjoying the moment, to looking back on the rehab, to looking back at myself as a kid.”Malone’s mind was already on the next championship.Pat Riley, the president of the Miami Heat, who has won nine N.B.A. championships as either a player, assistant coach, head coach or executive, once shared with Malone a message that Malone used to have displayed in his office.“It talked about the evolution in this game and how you go from a nobody to an upstart, and you go from an upstart to a winner and a winner to a contender and a contender to a champion,” Malone said. “And the last step is after a champion is to be a dynasty.”But his players weren’t ready to think about that yet. As he spoke, they were dousing the locker room and each other with champagne, drops of which sprinkled from the Nuggets logo on the ceiling. The players lit cigars, adding the heavy scent of cigar smoke to their celebration.Denver’s role players, such as Aaron Gordon and Michael Porter Jr., played a key role in their playoff success.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesJokic popped in and out of the locker room, sometimes spraying champagne on his teammates, sometimes pouring it right on their heads. He said many times during the playoffs that he was most proud of the success they’d had together.He had been the first player off the court after the trophy presentation, and had walked to the locker room by himself holding his finals M.V.P. trophy. He had been their best player throughout the season, but he wasn’t swept up in the ecstasy that had engulfed his teammates.“It’s good,” Jokic said, when asked about his emotions after winning the championship. “We did a job.”Another reporter tried again a few minutes later, this time asking if he was excited for the parade the city would have to celebrate the championship.“When is parade?” Jokic said, turning to a Nuggets staff member in the room.He was told it was Thursday.“No,” Jokic lamented. “I need to go home.”Then he finally relented just a little bit, and acknowledged that winning a championship felt “amazing.”“It’s a good feeling when you know that you did something that nobody believes, and it’s just us, it’s just the organization, Denver Nuggets believing in us, every player believing in each other,” Jokic said. “And I think that’s the most important thing.”Daniel Brenner for The New York Times More

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      The Nuggets Are in the Playoffs Again. Hold the Champagne.

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      DENVER — It was 1976, 39 years before the arrival of Nikola Jokic, when the Denver Nuggets had their last best chance to win a championship.Hair was big, shorts were small. The ball was red, white and blue. The Nuggets had the American Basketball Association’s best record, again, and a roster with three future Hall of Famers.But the New York Nets had Julius Erving, who led them to an upset in the finals. As the fans at the Nassau Coliseum rushed the court, the announcer shouted, “It’s pandemonium!” Because it was the 1970s, and of course he did.Not to worry, Nuggets fans. There would be more chances. Oh, so many chances.The Nuggets are up to their 38th postseason chance now. No current team in major American pro sports has been to the playoffs so many times without winning a championship, according to Elias Sports Bureau.That might make the Nuggets the best franchise to never win it all.There are sadder teams in American sports, some with longer championship droughts and in decaying cities that could use more luck than Denver. For most of their titleless years, the Nuggets were good, and they were fun. They just cannot get the ending right.The next best chance for the Nuggets comes now, eight years after the Denver arrival of Jokic, the two-time reigning most valuable player. Behind the 6-foot-11-inch human Swiss Army knife, the Nuggets earned the No. 1 seed in the N.B.A.’s Western Conference for the first time.Rocky, the team mascot, has been a well-known part of the Nuggets since 1990. These days, though, the most beloved Nugget is Nikola Jokic. Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesMaybe this is the year. A city awaits.For now, the ghosts of “almost” are everywhere.They are in Lot C next to the football stadium. They are at the downtown performing arts center at 13th and Champa.And they are in the current arena, near the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, where 19th-century miners set off the Colorado gold rush that would shape a city and a state and, one day, give a basketball team its name: Nuggets.A Miner With a PickaxStart in 1974, or 41 B.J. (Before Jokic). That’s when Carl Scheer arrived in Denver as general manager, with a friend and coach named Larry Brown. They came to invigorate a seven-year-old A.B.A. franchise called the Rockets.“Larry and I both felt that Denver was like a sleeping giant,” Scheer told a Denver magazine in 1979. “It was just beginning to shed its Old West, cowtown image.”The Rockets played downtown, at Auditorium Arena. It was part of a massive blond-brick complex completed in 1908, in time for that year’s Democratic convention. (William Jennings Bryan, if you must know, was on his way to losing the presidential election a third time.)The arena might be most famous as the site of Led Zeppelin’s first American concert in 1968. (A newspaper reviewer was not impressed by Robert Plant’s singing or John Bonham’s drumming.) Less famously, two nights later, the Rockets beat the Los Angeles Stars.The Nuggets were a middling American Basketball Association team in 1972 when they hosted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks in an exhibition game. Four years later, the Nuggets were a powerful force in the N.B.A. Associated PressThe Rockets had some good players, like Spencer Haywood his rookie year, but went through five coaches in five seasons. By 1974, they needed a reboot. And the name had to go, if Denver hoped to ever play in the N.B.A. There already were Rockets, in Houston.Where to find a name? In the 1930s, Denver had a top amateur team called the Nuggets. That team eventually became part of the National Basketball League, which combined with the Basketball Association of America in 1949 to form the N.B.A. The Denver Nuggets were one of the 17 original N.B.A. teams — the worst one. They did not return for a second season.But in August 1974, Scheer unveiled a new/old name and a logo: a bearded cartoon miner holding a pickax in one hand and a basketball in the other. He wore tube socks and a prospector’s hat with a flipped-up brim sporting a “D.”The groovy new Nuggets struck gold. That first team went 65-19. It lost the division finals.But things moved fast, and the Nuggets moved up. In 1975 came a new home, McNichols Arena, named for a mayor. The first show was a Lawrence Welk concert; the best show was the Nuggets. They a-one and a-two’d their way to a 28-game home winning streak on their way to the league’s best record.They had Dan Issel, a charging, gaptoothed forward they called the Horse. They had the rookie David Thompson, a gravity-testing guard they soon called Skywalker, like the hero in “Star Wars.” They had Bobby Jones, the slick defensive forward with shooting touch. All three would go to basketball’s hall of fame.Denver hosted the 1976 A.B.A. All-Star Game, and Scheer created a slam-dunk contest. (“To take the pressure off the backboards and rims, we’re going to alternate sides,” the public-address announcer said, in perfect Barnum-ese.) Artis Gilmore, George Gervin, even Thompson couldn’t keep up with Dr. J.That spring, Erving led the Nets to an upset of the Nuggets in the last A.B.A. final.In 1976, the Nuggets had three future Hall of Fame players and the A.B.A.’s best record, but they were upset in the league finals by Julius Erving and the New York Nets. Weeks later, both franchises were invited to join the N.B.A. Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated via Getty ImagesIt would be hard to fathom that the Nuggets would never return to a league finals. That off-season, the summer of the nation’s bicentennial and Colorado’s centennial, the N.B.A. added four A.B.A. teams. Denver was the prize.They were 52-30 during their first N.B.A. season, including 36-5 at home. They lost their first playoff series. But they made the postseason 11 more times in the next 13 years.Every time, they fell short.“There are 22 teams in this league,” Scheer said in 1979, “and to be the champion you need good luck and good fortune. The most important thing is to stay competitive year after year, and then hope that you get luck and momentum going for you at the right time.”The right time never seemed to come.Issel, Several Other Guys, and IsselLot C is on the southwest corner of the second-generation football stadium that everyone still calls Mile High.There is no sign that McNichols Arena once squatted here. Big Mac, people called it, and it was kind of shaped like a burger.There is no foul line where Dr. J took off for his most momentous dunk in 1976, no marker stating that this was the home of the original Colorado Rockies (an N.H.L. franchise that left to become the New Jersey Devils), no hint of the sideline that Nuggets Coach Doug Moe patrolled for more than a decade in his disheveled, profanity-laced glory.There is no plaque commemorating the 1990 Final Four (U.N.L.V.) or the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993. Nothing to note all the big-name rock concerts, the indoor-soccer franchise (the original Avalanche), the arena-football team.Just pavement.But there is a view. Looking east from Lot C is the Denver skyline — the gold-domed state capitol, 17th Street’s “Wall Street of the Rockies” lined with towers built of oil money, the skyscraper on Broadway meant to evoke a cash register.The skyline looks nothing like the Lego-like one on the Nuggets’ rainbow-colored uniforms from the 1980s. Divisive at the time — Where is the miner?— they are now the N.B.A.’s coolest throwbacks, evoking the go-go era of Moe’s high-scoring teams.Caramia Casias and Carter Beller wear Nuggets gear inspired by the 1980s versions of the Nuggets jersey.Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesTheo Stroomer for The New York TimesAll nine of Moe’s teams, through the 1980s, made the playoffs. In 1982-83, they averaged 123.2 points per game despite making only 24 3-pointers. The next season, they played the highest-scoring game in league history.“No one believes that we had zero plays on offense, but Doug would just scream at you, ‘Don’t hold the ball!’” Bill Hanzlik, who played on those teams, said. “It was pass, move, cut. That style of ball was fast, up and down, and we dominated at home. Fans really loved it.”Great players came and went. Alex English arrived to become the team’s career leading scorer. Thompson was traded amid headlines of cocaine addiction. Kiki Vandeweghe was traded for Fat Lever, Calvin Natt and Wayne Cooper. Through it all was Issel, the Horse, the best-known Denver athlete before Elway got rolling in the stadium next door.“The Nuggets were as popular as the Broncos,” said Vic Lombardi, who grew up in Denver, was a Nuggets ball boy in the 1980s and became a local sportscaster and radio personality. “They were just as successful, just as competitive and got just as much attention.”The teams shared a habit of being great to watch but not good enough to win in the end. The Broncos rattled the old stadium in the fall, aspirations crumbling in January. The Nuggets raced down the court on cold winter nights, their hopes melting in the spring.In 1990, they finished 43-39. Things seemed fine, in a Groundhog Day kind of way.But the Nuggets fired Moe — the start of 12 coaching changes in 15 years. If you believe in sports jinxes, Moe’s firing might be one.Or if you believe in phantoms, consider the gutting of the old Auditorium Arena about the same time.The interior was turned into the lavish Buell Theater. And on the same snowy November Friday night that the theater opened to rave reviews with “The Phantom of the Opera,” the Nuggets were at McNichols, opening the season with the first of 58 losses — 120 losses over a two-year stretch. They were more cursed than Carlotta.Dikembe Mutombo was a bright spot for the Nuggets in the 1990s, when the long-stable franchise had eight coaching changes and a string of forgettable seasons. Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE, via Getty ImagesThe rest of the 1990s did not go well. The skyline jersey was ditched. There was an anthem flap, a brief Dikembe Mutombo-led resurrection, and eight coaching changes that began and ended with Issel.But the 1990s were great for other Denver sports. A top N.H.L. team came gift-wrapped from Quebec, was christened the Avalanche and immediately won a Stanley Cup — the first major championship for the city. The Broncos and Elway finally won a Super Bowl, then another. The expansion Rockies arrived and attracted big crowds at a gem called Coors Field.And in 2001, early in a seventh-straight losing season for the Nuggets, Issel called a postgame heckler a “Mexican piece of (expletive)” and soon skulked away.Denver was rolling, without the sad little Nuggets.Jokic Is Here. What Can Go Wrong?Nikola Jokic was 4 when Pepsi Center opened in 1999. (Named then for a canned beverage, it is now Ball Arena, named for a canning company.) It went up on the west edge of downtown, near Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, named for the original mining-camp settlement along Cherry Creek.The lane that leads to Ball Arena is called Chopper Circle, for the longtime Nuggets trainer Chopper Travaglini. That’s how popular the Nuggets were: even the trainer had streets named for him. He also opened a sports bar that is still there.Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesTheo Stroomer for The New York TimesInside the arena, in the rafters, the Nuggets are represented on one end, the Avalanche on the other.The Avs, as they’re called, have three Stanley Cup banners, including one from their first season in Denver and one from last season. They hope to repeat this spring.The Nuggets have no championship banners, but nine division championships and a lot of retired numbers: Issel, Thompson, English, Lever and Mutombo among them. And there is a banner for Moe, marking his 432 victories.George Karl was hired as the coach in 2005. He led the Nuggets on a Moe-like run of nine consecutive postseasons, the first six with Carmelo Anthony. They were good, fun to watch and almost always lost in the first round.Karl’s last team, 10 years ago, had a mishmash of talent that somehow got to 57 wins, a franchise high in the N.B.A., and were 38-3 at home. Only in hindsight does a first-round upset by the Warriors, with kids named Curry, Thompson and Green making their first playoff appearances, make any sense. Karl was fired.Karl fell in love with Denver as a visiting A.B.A. player in the 1970s — the oil-booming downtown, the vociferous fans, the fast-paced style of the early Nuggets, even their logo and colors. He still lives in Denver, and fans revere him, despite years of almosts and not quites.“Fans do get anxious, they do get angry, they do get fanatical,” Karl said. “But they have a lot of respect and love for the game of basketball here in Denver.”A year after Karl’s firing, in 2014, the Nuggets used a second-round draft choice, the 41st overall, on a 19-year-old from Serbia named Nikola Jokic. He was 6-foot-11 and played in the Adriatic League.Draft experts shrugged. Nuggets fans barely noticed. Jokic quietly joined Denver in 2015, the same time as another new coach, Michael Malone.Jokic made the all-rookie team and eased into superstardom — his game and humility draw comparisons to Tim Duncan — and by 2019, he had ARRIVED, in all caps. He was a do-everything All-Star leading the Nuggets to the Western Conference’s No. 2 seed. (They lost in the second round.)In 2021, Nikola Jokic became the first Nuggets player to win the league M.V.P. This year, he could be the first N.B.A. player since Larry Bird to win it three times in a row. Dustin Bradford/Getty ImagesMomentum has been building since. In 2020 came an unexpected playoff run. (Denver lost to the Lakers, again, in the conference finals.) In 2021, Jokic was named the league’s most valuable player, the first in Nuggets history. (The team lost in the conference semifinals.) In 2022, he was M.V.P. again. (The Nuggets lost in the first round.)This season, Jokic nearly averaged a triple-double — double figures in points (24.5), rebounds (11.8) and assists (9.8). The team that revolves around him has gelled, especially guard Jamal Murray and forwards Michael Porter, Jr., and Aaron Gordon, all in their mid-20s.And now, for the first time since joining the N.B.A. in 1976, the Nuggets will have the top seed in the Western Conference playoffs — home-court advantage for every round before what would be their first-ever N.B.A. finals.Not since that last year in the A.B.A., that first year in McNichols Arena, right after Lawrence Welk opened a squatty little paradise since paved into a parking lot, have they been so well positioned for a postseason.Expectations are tempered. These are the Nuggets, after all. No basketball team spoils the promise of spring quite like them.But Lombardi, the ball boy turned sportscaster, is adamant.“If the Denver Nuggets win a championship,” Lombardi said, “I contend it would produce the largest downtown parade this city has ever seen.”Could it be in 2023? Jokic is 28. The Nuggets are the best team never to win a title. There is gold to be mined, if they can finally discover it.The Nuggets share a city and an arena with the N.H.L.’s Avalanche, who won a Stanley Cup in their first season in Colorado in 1996 and their third championship last season. The Nuggets, with a far deeper history, are still looking for their first title. Theo Stroomer for The New York Times More

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      Red McCombs, Car Salesman Turned Media Mogul, Dies at 95

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      A Texas entrepreneur, he co-founded the media giant Clear Channel, owned pro sports teams and created more than 400 businesses in a variety of industries.Red McCombs, a former Texas used car dealer who became a billionaire entrepreneur by venturing into an array of successful businesses, including the media giant Clear Channel Communications and several professional sports teams, died on Sunday at his home in San Antonio. He was 95.His family announced his death but did not state the cause.Mr. McCombs was a flamboyant wheeler-dealer who created more than 400 businesses across an array of industries, including oil, real estate, cattle, insurance, movies and racehorses, often selling them at a substantial profit. At various times he owned a pro football team, the Minnesota Vikings, and two pro basketball teams, the San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets.But his heart was in the automobile business, where he began as a standout car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1950. He went on to start his own dealership, and then expanded it into a network that at its peak in 1998 included more than 100 outlets, making it the largest car dealership in Texas and sixth largest in the United States.“I was an entrepreneur before I knew what the word was and certainly before I could spell it,” Mr. McCombs said in a 2006 radio interview. “New deals, new opportunities, new ventures are always a part of my life.”A University of Texas alumnus and a passionate Longhorns football fan, Mr. McCombs parlayed his love of sports into ownership of a minor-league baseball team in Corpus Christi in the 1950s.Then he bought the Dallas Chaparrals of the old American Basketball Association in 1973, relocated the team to San Antonio for the 1973-74 season and changed its name to the Spurs.When the A.B.A. and N.B.A. merged in 1976, he played a key role in having the Spurs included in the merger. He sold the team in 1982 and acquired the Nuggets, only to sell that franchise in 1985 for $19 million, nearly twice what he’d paid for it. He then repurchased the Spurs for $47 million before selling it in 1993 for $75 million (about $157 million in today’s money).In a statement on Monday, the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, called Mr. McCombs “a driving force in creating the modern N.B.A.”In 1998, Mr. McCombs purchased the N.F.L.’s Minnesota Vikings for $246 million, but grew impatient with futile attempts to build a new stadium for the team in the Minneapolis area. He sold the Vikings for $600 million in 2005.He also played a key role in bringing Formula One racing to Austin by investing in the Circuit of the Americas, the Austin track where the annual U.S. Grand Prix race has been held since 2012.In a statement on Monday, the Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, called Mr. McCombs “a true Texas titan across sports, media, business and philanthropy” who had “followed his dreams.”Mr. McCombs’s most lucrative venture was Clear Channel, which he co-founded with Lowry Mays in 1972, when they purchased a local radio station in San Antonio, KEEZ-FM, for $125,000. (Mr. Mays died in September at 87.)The two men continued to acquire radio stations, then television stations and billboards around the country. Aided by the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act, which allowed media conglomerates to own an unlimited number of stations, they built the company into the world’s largest owner of radio stations; by 2000, Clear Channel owned more than 1,200.The company eventually expanded into event promotion, live music and sports management. Mr. Lowry oversaw the business, but Mr. McCombs was instrumental in seizing opportunities to expand, according to John Hogan, the company’s former chairman and chief executive.“He was steadfast in support of the notion that when the telecommunications regulations changed in 1996, we had to move quickly and aggressively, and that those who were slow and hesitant would get left behind,” Mr. Hogan said in an interview for this obituary.Though the company was often criticized for homogenizing radio programming in a way that eliminated much of the local flavor of independent radio stations, the formula was extremely profitable. When Mr. Lowry began to see signs that the internet would disrupt its well-oiled strategy, he and Mr. McCombs sold the company in 2006 for $17.9 billion to a private equity group led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners. As part of the deal, the group agreed to take on more than $8 billion in the company’s debt.The timing was perfect for selling. Clear Channel’s fortunes plunged almost immediately. In 2014, the company split into Clear Channel Outdoor, for the billboard business, and iHeartMedia, for the radio stations and other media properties.Red McCombs, left, arrived in Denver in 1983 after buying the Denver Nuggets basketball team. At right was Carl Scheer, the team’s president and general manager.Duane Howell/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesBilly Joe McCombs was born in the tiny West Texas town of Spur on Oct. 19, 1927. His father, Willie Nathan McCombs, was a sharecropper and later an auto mechanic. His mother, Gladys McCombs, came from a family of farmers.Billy, whose shock of red hair earned him the lifelong nickname “Red,” showed an entrepreneurial bent as early as age 9, when he began selling bags of peanuts to migrant cotton pickers. He was 15 when his family moved to Corpus Christi, where he became a standout high school football player, eventually winning a scholarship to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He left college to serve in the Army for two years before returning and enrolling at the University of Texas in 1948 on the G.I. Bill.But he dropped out to start a business career. He landed a job at the local Ford dealership in Corpus Christi and realized that he had found his calling. Just 22, he set a goal of selling a car a day and, by his account, managed to accomplish that feat for three years straight.In 1950, he married Charline Hamblin, who died in 2019 at 91. He is survived by their three daughters, Lynda McCombs, Marsha Shields and Connie McNab; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.After selling new cars for several years, Mr. McCombs realized that he could make more money selling used cars, he wrote in his autobiography, “Big Red: Memoirs of a Texas Entrepreneur and Philanthropist” (2010). New cars, he thought, were all alike, but “every used car is unique” and had a story to tell.“People like stories about the things they might be interested in buying,” he wrote.In 1957, at 29, he opened his first new car dealership, in Corpus Christi. But it sold Edsels, a Ford brand that would become synonymous with automotive failure. Though he sold many cars, he said, he knew that the brand would not survive. (The Edsel was discontinued in 1959.)“I was selling it myself and I could see the resistance,” he said. “We had to shoehorn everyone into it, and after I’d sold them to all my friends, I had nowhere to go. It was time to move on.”He moved to San Antonio in 1958 and there befriended Mr. Mays. The two soon began buying up radio stations, ultimately turning Clear Channel Communications into a behemoth. Mr. McCombs knew the power of radio and outdoor advertising from his experience with auto dealerships.He did his own radio and television commercials for 25 years, becoming a Texas celebrity along the way. He struggled for years with alcoholism and nearly died at age 48 after a serious case of hepatitis. He gave up alcohol then, and often spoke candidly about his addiction.In 2000, Mr. McCombs and his wife gave a gift of $50 million to the University of Texas business school — the single largest donation in the school’s history at the time. It was renamed the McCombs School of Business. He and his wife also donated $30 million to the university’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.Mr. McCombs was a major donor to Republican politicians, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and President Donald J. Trump.Of all of his business achievements, Clear Channel was his most significant, Mr. McCombs declared in his autobiography. “I would never have thought I could ever have had a chance to do something like Clear Channel,” he wrote. “That’s why I don’t really believe in long-term plans. There was no way I could have ever planned Clear Channel.” More

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      Herb Turetzky, Nets’ Official Scorer for 54 Years, Dies at 76

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      He recorded the statistics of more than 2,200 home games for the team in both New York and New Jersey, and in both the American and National Basketball Associations.Herb Turetzky, a passionate basketball fan who was the official scorer for nearly every home game played by the nomadic Brooklyn Nets franchise from its inception in 1967 until his retirement last year, died on Monday at his home in Whitestone, Queens. He was 76.His wife, Jane, said the cause was primary lateral sclerosis, which causes nerve cells in the brain that control movement to fail. In recent years, he attended games in a wheelchair.Over 54 years of meticulously keeping statistics, Mr. Turetzky recorded the field goals, rebounds, assists, fouls and free throws of Nets stars like Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Buck Williams, Jason Kidd and Kevin Durant. He became a forever Net, the team’s de facto historian and a gregarious friend to players and the news media.He took his seat at center court with his scorebook for more than 2,200 Nets home games, first when the team was in the American Basketball Association and later in the National Basketball Association, after the leagues merged.“He brought so much class and care to the scorer’s table, not a place where you necessarily look for that,” said Mr. Erving, who led the New York Nets to A.B.A. championships in 1974 and 1976. “The job is drudgery for some people, but not for Herb. He cared so much for it, and his reputation preceded him everywhere.”Mr. Turetzky was a senior at Long Island University in Brooklyn in 1967 when he took his future wife, Jane Jacobs, to the Teaneck Armory in New Jersey to see the first game in the team’s history. Then called the New Jersey Americans, they were playing the Pittsburgh Pipers in a matchup of two storied forwards from Brooklyn: the Pipers’ Connie Hawkins and New Jersey’s Tony Jackson, who, like Mr. Turetzky, was from the Brownsville neighborhood.“We had no money and he had free tickets, and we were going to watch the game,” Mrs. Turetzky said by phone.Before the tip-off, Max Zaslofsky, the Americans’ coach and general manager, noticed that the scorer’s table was empty and spotted Mr. Turetzky. He knew Mr. Turetzky from his attending games of an Amateur Athletic Union team that Mr. Zaslofsky had coached. He asked him if he could keep score.“Max, I’d love to,” Mr. Turetzky recalled saying, as quoted in a Sports Illustrated profile last year. “I’m here, so why not?” He added, “I’ve never left that seat since.”After one season in Teaneck, Mr. Turetzky followed the Nets to Long Island, where they played in three arenas, including the Nassau Coliseum; then to three homes back in New Jersey, including the Prudential Center in Newark; and finally to Barclays Center in Brooklyn.Between 1984 and 2018, he scored 1,465 consecutive games.“When I did my 900th straight game, they covered it on NBA TV,” he told the New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2012. “Charles Barkley was on, and when they made that comment to Barkley, all he said was: ‘Nine hundred straight Nets games? Boy, that man’s seen a lot of bad basketball.’”“I have seen some bad games,” he added, “but I’ve seen some great ones.”In 2020, when all the bad and great games — and those in between — added up to 2,206, Guinness World Records certified them as the most by an official scorer in N.B.A. history.Mr. Turetzky was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.Herbert Stephen Turetzky was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 19, 1945. His mother, Rose (Pearl) Turetzky, was a bookkeeper for the maker of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. His father, Sam, was a plumber. Herb played basketball at the Brownsville Boys’ Club (now the Brownsville Recreation Center), where he also learned how to run a scoreboard and maintain a scorebook.After he graduated from L.I.U. in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he was a teacher and then a principal at a Brooklyn elementary school. After that, he worked as a grants writer for the New York City Board of Education and owned a trophy business. He earned two master’s degrees, in education and in administration and supervision.All the while, Mr. Turetzky was traveling to Nets home games. His longest break from his scoring duties began in November 1968, when he was driving to a game in Commack, on Long Island. He lost control of his car on the Long Island Expressway, crossed a grass divider and crashed into an oncoming car. The driver was killed.“I was in a coma for about six weeks and broke my entire left side up, creating some muscular damage, had a concussion, broke my jaw,” he told The Asbury Park Press in 2005.He returned to the Nets the next season and rarely missed a game after that. Along the way, he and his family became part of the fabric of the team.He was pushed, fully clothed, into the showers at Nassau Coliseum and doused with champagne as the team celebrated its 1976 title. His family hosted the guard Levern Tart, known as Jelly, at their Thanksgiving dinners. The team’s mascot, Duncan the Dragon, was a guest at the bat mitzvah of Mr. Turetzky’s daughter, Jennifer. His son, David, was a Nets ball boy.In addition to his wife, Mr. Turetzky is survived by his daughter, his son and two grandchildren.Jennifer Turetzky recalled listening to her father call in the box scores of Nets games to the Elias Sports Bureau, the N.B.A.’s longtime official statistician.“A box score has a certain direction, and he delivered it in the same cadence, with each player on both teams, starting with minutes — say, 37 — then 5-for-12 and 6-for-9,” she said by phone, describing the field-goal and free-throw statistics. “Then the big number at the end, 45 points. He did it all through my childhood.” More

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      He Thought He Made N.B.A. History. All He Got Was 3 Points.

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      The N.B.A. introduced the 3-point shot in the 1979-80 season. Six players made 3s opening night, and for a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he’d made the first.For more than a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he was the first player in N.B.A. history to make a 3-pointer.“It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t make the first one,” Grevey, 68, said recently. “Because I think the first time I touched the ball I caught it in the corner and toed behind the line, shot it and made it.”It was Oct. 12, 1979, and Grevey’s Washington Bullets were opening their season against the Philadelphia 76ers. After the game, a reporter told him he’d “just set a record that would never be broken.”All these years later he still isn’t totally sure he didn’t.The league produced a news release, but only three days later to recap the first weekend of N.B.A. 3-pointers. It said Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics made the first 3-pointer in league history, by virtue of playing against the Houston Rockets in “the first games according to start time” that season. While it’s unclear exactly at what time each 3-pointer occurred, Ford’s game started 35 minutes before Grevey’s.It would be a while before the news reached Grevey.The 3-pointer was a novelty at the time. No one knew it would someday change the game. Decades later, Golden State guard Stephen Curry turned it into magic. This week he became the N.B.A.’s career leader in 3-pointers made, eclipsing Ray Allen, who had been the record-holder since 2011.“It’s an event, just watching him,” said Mike Dunleavy Sr., who took his grandchildren to watch Curry shoot 3s before a game this fall.The shot’s history in the N.B.A., though, began unceremoniously.“At one point I was on the rules and competition committee and everybody had different thoughts about it,” Dunleavy said. “But the very beginning, I think people were leery of it.”The 1979-80 season was intended to be a one-year trial for the 3-pointer in the N.B.A. The American Basketball Association had used it from its inception in 1967 until its merger with the N.B.A. in 1976.In the book “Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association” by Terry Pluto, Pat Boone, a part owner of the Oakland Oaks, recalled the team’s introductory news conference.“We had a demonstration of the 3-point shot and introduced a couple of the players we had signed, although I can’t recall who,” Boone said. “We then had a shooting contest and I won, which I guess should have told me we were in real trouble. Actually, the players weren’t used to shooting from 25 feet.”Boone liked 3s, he said, because he was too short to go inside. Curry recently told USA Today that he, too, initially began working on 3s because of his smaller stature.The A.B.A.’s adoption of the shot, though, wasn’t motivating for the N.B.A. The A.B.A. had all sorts of trappings then considered too absurd for the N.B.A. In addition to the 3-point shot, the A.B.A. had musical effects, a red, white and blue basketball, and cheerleaders.“The N.B.A. for years frowned on the 3-point shot because it was going to tell guys to go outside as opposed to historically it was, ‘Get as close to the basket as fast as you can for the easy shot,’ ” said M.L. Carr, a former Celtics forward. “That was what they did in that funny league called the A.B.A.”An article in The New York Times from June 21, 1979, about the N.B.A. instituting the 3-point shot.The New York TimesCarr started his career in the A.B.A., and felt proud when the N.B.A. finally accepted the 3-pointer. He played for the Celtics from 1979 to 1985 and remembered resistance, including from Red Auerbach, then a Celtics executive.Grevey said he remembered that some coaches were “appalled about it.”“They were like, ‘Well, the next thing they’re going to do is we’re going to be playing with that red, white and blue basketball,” he said.In some arenas, Grevey said, the 3-point line was taped onto the court, making it temporary. Sometimes, that tape was in the wrong place.“Somebody would say that looks farther,” said Rudy Tomjanovich, who played for the Houston Rockets throughout the 1970s and is now in the Hall of Fame. “They’d tell the coach or somebody. They’d look into it, have a measure and say, ‘Sure enough, it’s a foot longer than it used to be.’”It took a while before players became proficient at the shot; it took eight years before the league average improved to 30 percent. By contrast, today’s players make about a third of their 3s, with the best shooters converting better than 40 percent of their attempts.That meant rarely did teams run plays designed to end with a 3. Only in cases of double-digit deficits — desperate times — were 3-pointers acceptable to some coaches.“If you had taken it under normal circumstances, most coaches would put you on the bench,” said Rick Barry, who spent four seasons in the A.B.A. and attempted 237 3-pointers in 1971-72, his final year in that league.Barry, a Hall of Famer who was playing for the Rockets in 1979-80, said he remembered “nothing” about the first official 3-pointer, even though he played in that game against Ford’s Celtics. He hardly remembered his own 3-pointer that day. He was one of six players to make one on Oct. 12, 1979.Tomjanovich, when told recently that he was on the court for the first-ever N.B.A. 3-pointer, was delighted to learn that bit of trivia.Dunleavy knew.“For the guys that could shoot, it was kind of cool,” said Dunleavy, who led the league in 3-point percentage in the 1982-83 season, at 34.5 percent. “Like, OK, you’re going to come into the game and be the first guy to make the shot.”When Tomjanovich was told recently about Dunleavy’s plans, he quipped: “That ambitious son of a gun.”Dunleavy was guarding Boston’s Tiny Archibald, who passed the ball to Ford behind the arc. Ford elevated above the outstretched hand of Robert Reid and sank a 3-pointer with 3 minutes 48 seconds left in the first quarter.Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics shooting from the 3-point line in its first season in the N.B.A.Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images“The team was pretty excited that Chris opened a new era,” Carr said. “I guarantee if you interviewed Chris now he would say, ‘I didn’t realize what I was starting.’”The game, better known for Larry Bird’s N.B.A. debut, didn’t stop. Newspaper accounts barely mentioned the first 3. There weren’t daily N.B.A. shows or podcasts to debate the rule change.The Boston Globe noted the shot in a parenthetical, saying that “the Celtics led from 19-17 until the final buzzer (the lead coming on Ford’s history-making three-point bomb, the first ever for the Celtics).”Willie Smith also made one for the Cleveland Cavaliers against the New Jersey Nets, and Paul Westphal and Don Buse made two each for the Phoenix Suns against Golden State. The reports of their feats by The Associated Press and The Daily News made no mention of their historic nature.Grevey’s 3-pointer was described as “the first three-point play” by The Evening Sun, a Baltimore paper.Grevey said he didn’t think about his first N.B.A. 3-pointer again until more than a decade later when he ran into the reporter who had told him he’d made history in 1979. The reporter shared that Ford was being credited with the first N.B.A. 3-pointer and that he planned to investigate.Grevey shrugged.“I swear I don’t care,” Grevey said in a recent phone interview.He laughed, and then he marveled at how, at the time, few others cared much either. More

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      Dennis Murphy, Impresario of Alternative Leagues, Dies at 94

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      He founded the American Basketball Association, which revolutionized the game, and participated in other imaginative, sometimes zany sports ventures.Dennis Murphy, the impresario of alternative athletic leagues, including the American Basketball Association, who also shook up tennis and ice hockey and launched imaginative, sometimes quixotic ventures in other sports, among them indoor roller hockey, died on Thursday at an assistant living facility in Placentia, Calif. He was 94.His son, Dennis Jr., said the cause was congestive heart failure.Mr. Murphy’s most lasting achievement was the A.B.A., which he conceived, and which he started in 1967 as a cheeky competitor to the National Basketball Association. The league was known for its wide-open offenses; its red, white and blue ball; and the salary war it ignited against the N.B.A. to bring stars like Rick Barry and Zelmo Beaty into the upstart league.Mr. Murphy’s rationale for starting the A.B.A. was simple, as was his research into its viability: There were only 12 teams in the N.B.A.“There’s only one basketball league and one hockey league, so why not have another?” he was quoted as saying in Terry Pluto’s oral history “Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association” (1990). “Since I knew nothing about hockey, but basketball was my favorite sport, I figured I’d pursue the idea of a basketball league.”The A.B.A. thrived as a freewheeling hoops spectacle. It nurtured stars of its own, like Julius Erving and David Thompson, and generated excitement with the three-point shot and the All- Star Game slam-dunk contest, which eventually became staples in the N.B.A.“He wasn’t responsible for them, but he recognized their value and he went with it,” said Jim O’Brien, a reporter for The Sporting News who covered the Miami Floridians when Mr. Murphy was the team’s general manager. In an interview, he recalled Mr. Murphy’s promotional prowess and his willingness to make players accessible to the media.“He was fun and creative,” Mr. O’Brien said, “and he was always hustling somebody.”Mr. Murphy, center, at an A.B.A. meeting in Miami 1971. He was the general manager of the league’s Miami Floridians at the time.Arthur Hundhausen CollectionMr. Murphy had left the A.B.A. by 1972, four years before the league shut down and four of its teams — the New York Nets (who now play in Brooklyn), San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets and Indiana Pacers — were absorbed into the N.B.A.Soon he was in the midst of itinerant league creation.He and Gary Davidson, another sports entrepreneur, in 1972 started the World Hockey Association, which challenged the dominance of the National Hockey League; in 1974, he and a group of partners, including the lawyer Larry King, who was then married to the tennis superstar Billie Jean King, formed World Team Tennis; and in 1976, he and Ms. King were among the founders of the International Women’s Professional Softball League.“He was a great cheerleader, a good manager and a skillful orchestrator at getting big egos to agree on things,” Mr. King said by phone.Of those three leagues, the W.H.A. probably had the greatest impact: It brought the Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe out of a brief retirement to join the Houston Aeros, persuaded Bobby Hull to leave the Chicago Blackhawks for the Winnipeg Jets and signed the 17-year-old Wayne Gretzky to the Indianapolis Racers.Its level of play challenged the N.H.L.’s, just as the A.B.A.’s had challenged the N.B.A.’s. But its teams had financial difficulties, and the W.H.A. died in 1979. Four of its teams — the Edmonton Oilers, the New England Whalers, the Quebec Nordiques and the Jets — joined the N.H.L.“Murphy had a couple of things going for him,” the hockey writer Stan Fischler wrote recently in his column on Substack. “One was that N.H.L. president Clarence Campbell never took the W.H.A. seriously — until too late.”Another, Mr. Fischler said, was chutzpah. Before the W.H.A. started, Mr. Murphy showed up at a minor-league hockey meeting in the Bahamas, posing as a reporter, and started asking Emile Francis, the general manager of the New York Rangers, about the N.H.L.’s plans for expansion.Soon after, Mr. Francis was watching television and saw Mr. Murphy being interviewed by another reporter about the league he planned to start.Dennis Arthur Murphy was born on Sept. 4, 1926, in Shanghai, where his father, Arthur, was an engineer for Standard Oil. His mother, Adele (Gurevitz) Murphy, was a homemaker. The family moved to Brentwood, Calif., in 1940.After serving in the Army in the Philippines, Mr. Murphy attended the University of Southern California, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics.For most of the 1950s and the early ’60s, Mr. Murphy worked at an engineering firm. For two years during that period, he was the part-time mayor of Buena Park, in Orange County.His fascination with sports leagues continued with the creation in 1981 of Team Tennis, also with Mr. King, after World Team Tennis failed in 1978. Team Tennis would later adopt the name of its predecessor and rechristen itself World Team Tennis. And in the early 1990s, Mr. Murphy, Mr. King and Ralph Backstrom, a former N.H.L. player, formed Roller Hockey International, an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of in-line skating.“We believe we can be the No. 1 hockey sport,” Mr. Murphy told The New York Times in 1994.But the league played its last season in 1999, when the champion St. Louis Vipers won the Murphy Cup. One of his mistakes, Mr. Murphy told The Hockey News in 2019, had been expanding to 24 teams in the league’s second season.“We should have kept it smaller and then expanded,” he said. “But we did it for money. I had a lot of contacts through my other leagues. Everybody wanted to get in because of our success in the other leagues. So they put pressure on me, and I fell for it.”Besides his son, Mr. Murphy is survived by his daughters, Dawn Mee and Doreen Haarlamert; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.The A.B.A. did not have a national television contract and struggled for attention. The Floridians, for example, had bikini-clad cheerleaders, an idea that came from a publicist.“The idea was that we needed to get attendance at the games,” Mr. Murphy told The Reno Dispatch, a blog, in 2013. The cheerleaders, he added, were always on the visitors’ side of the court “so the visiting players would look at girls rather than pay attention to the game.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Bobby Leonard, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Dies at 88

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      He coached the Indiana Pacers for 12 seasons and took them to three A.B.A. titles. The governor of Indiana called him “the embodiment of basketball.”Bobby Leonard, an All-American guard for Indiana University’s 1953 N.C.A.A. basketball champions who later coached the Indiana Pacers to three American Basketball Association championships, died on Tuesday. He was 88.Leonard’s family said in a statement that he had experienced many ailments in recent years, but they did not provide the cause of death or say where he died. He had been living with his wife, Nancy (Root) Leonard, in suburban Indianapolis.Leonard was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2014 for taking the Pacers to A.B.A. titles in 1970, 1972 and 1973. He coached the team for 12 seasons, eight in the A.B.A. and four in the N.B.A. after the two leagues merged.“He has meant as much as anyone in the state of Indiana when it comes to the game of basketball,” Mike Woodson, who played for Indiana University in the late 1970s and became its head coach this season after many years in the N.B.A., said in a statement. “He played the game with great flair. He coached with undeniable passion.”Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana called Leonard “the embodiment of basketball.”Leonard was known as Slick. A 6-foot-3-inch guard, he was a fine playmaker in his seven seasons in the N.B.A. But his nickname wasn’t derived from his savvy on the court.As he once told the story to Carmel magazine, an Indiana monthly, while playing for the Minneapolis Lakers in the 1950s he was involved in a game of gin rummy with the team’s star center, George Mikan, on a preseason bus trip. “I blitzed him,” Leonard recalled, “and one of the players said that I was too slick. It stuck.”Leonard was an analyst and color commentator on Pacers broadcasts for some 35 years, beginning on television in 1985 and later moving to radio. He injected a colorful note with his exclamation “Boom, baby!” after an Indiana player hit a three-point shot.William Robert Leonard was born in Terre Haute, Ind., on July 17, 1932, one of three children of Raymond and Hattie Leonard. His father dug ditches during the Depression. “We used to stand in commodity lines, and they would give you a few cans of food and some flour,” he recalled in “Boom, Baby! My Basketball Life in Indiana” (2013, with Lew Freedman).Leonard was an outstanding basketball and tennis player in high school and then played for three seasons at Indiana University. His free throw with 27 seconds remaining gave the Hoosiers a 69-68 victory over Kansas in the 1953 N.C.A.A. championship game. He was named a third-team All-American in 1953 and a second-team All-American in 1954 by The Associated Press and was chosen for Indiana University’s all-century team.Leonard was selected by the original Baltimore Bullets as the 10th pick in the 1954 N.B.A. draft, but the Lakers obtained his rights in a dispersal draft later that year when the Bullets franchise folded. After serving in the Army, he joined the Lakers in 1956. He played for them for four seasons in Minneapolis and one season, 1960-61, after they moved to Los Angeles.His best season came in 1961-62, when he averaged a career-best 16.1 points and 5.4 assists with the expansion Chicago Packers. He was a player-coach in 1962-63 with Chicago, which had changed its name to the Zephyrs.When the team moved to Baltimore and became the Bullets (the second franchise by that name) in the 1963-64 season, he was the full-time coach. But he resigned after posting a losing record.Leonard watched as a banner in his honor was hung during halftime of a game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis in October 2014, shortly after he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.Aj Mast/Associated PressLeonard’s Pacer teams won 529 games and lost 456. He was voted the A.B.A.’s all-time most outstanding coach by a national sportswriters and broadcasters association.A banner at the Pacers’ Bankers Life Fieldhouse honors Leonard with the number 529.In addition to his wife, Leonard’s survivors include five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.The Pacers and three other A.B.A. teams that joined the N.B.A. before the 1976-77 season were stymied by financial burdens imposed by the league — essentially the cost of their entry. Leonard and his wife turned to TV to boost ticket sales.“If it weren’t for Slick, this franchise wouldn’t be here,” the Boston Celtics’ Hall of Fame forward Larry Bird, who had played for Indiana State in Terre Haute and later was a coach and president of basketball operations for the Pacers, told The New York Times in 2000. “I can remember in 1977, he had a telethon. I can remember being glued to the TV watching him. He was singing ‘Back Home in Indiana,’ trying to do everything to sell season tickets. I know the history behind the Pacers, and most of the history is Slick Leonard.” More