A Forgotten Decade: Reminiscences of the 1970s

The off-season is a good time for looking back.  NBA history has largely been defined by its great dynasties: first George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers in the ’50s, the Russell’s Celtics (11 championships in 13 seasons!) through the ’60s, Magic’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics in the ’80s, Jordan’s Bulls in the  ’90s, and finally Duncan’s Spurs and Shaq’s Lakers/Heat between ’99 and 2007.  For that reason, people tend to forget the decade of greatest parity in NBA history, the 1970s.  In that decade, eight different teams won NBA titles—the next closest decade for parity was the 50s with six different champions (yet Minneapolis won four of them, whereas no team in the 70s won more than two). 

People tend to think of the 70s as having been a weak decade, and I guess television ratings were down before Magic and Bird revived them, but I came of age as a basketball fan and young player in the 1970s, and those guys were my heroes.  Come 1980, I was as entranced as everyone else by the Magic v. Bird show (and sided with Magic), and while I was never as enamored of Jordan (I felt he shifted the game from the team focus of Magic and Bird to more of an individual taking over type of game), I was as duly impressed by the guy’s iron will to win as anyone.  But for me it was not a question of reviving a flagging interest.  I had found plenty of dramatic basketball to watch in the 70s, and this article is for those of you who remember those years fondly as well (I suppose you have to be about my age, approaching 50). 

The best player of the decade, far and away, was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  And yet Jabbar’s teams won just one title in the decade.  Why?  That’s part of the fascination of basketball.  If you saw this season’s Cavs v. Magic Eastern Conference Finals, you got a perfect demonstration of how the team with by far the best player on the court can nevertheless lose because the rest of his team gets outplayed and possibly the opposing coach has a better game plan.  It’s the same reason Chamberlain’s teams didn’t win the title every season in the 60s.

But if you only remember the Kareem of the Lakers in the 80s, you have no idea what Kareem was like in his heyday (and I know he was good in the 80s).  He was just a phenomenally gifted basketball player.  There’s never been anyone that tall with that combination of agility, wiry strength, quickness, and above all shooting accuracy.  The skyhook was unstoppable.  And if anyone thinks it’s an easy shot, I invite him to go on the court and shoot it from 10 to 15 feet out (where Kareem would hit almost every time).  Jabbar was just awesome in the 70s, a giant among boys, and more dominant than Jordan ever was in the 90s (sorry, Jordan fans, but if you didn’t see the 70s Jabbar, you don’t know).

The two teams that managed to win more than one title in the 70s (with two apiece) were the Knicks and the Celtics.  Both were beautiful examples of the team concept.  The Knicks are remembered as Willis Reed’s team, and certainly Reed was great in 1970 (much less so in 1973).  But it was Walt Frazier who was the really skilled, sometimes even dazzling player.  People tended to overlook it because Clyde the Glide was so adept at getting the fullest possible contributions from the Knicks’ assortment of role players: DeBusschere, Bradley, Lucas (in ’73), etc.

The Celtics were another great collective unit, and it’s remembered for the great John Havlicek (as it ought to be), the Rip Hamilton (non-stop movement player) of the 70s (only better).  But their key guy was actually a 6’7” center, left-handed, red-headed Dave Cowens.  Theoretically, the Celtics should never have been able to beat the Bucks with 6’7” Cowens matched against 7’4” Kareem, but if you saw the way Kendrick Perkins slowed down Dwight Howard this post-season, by pushing him farther out from the basket than his comfort zone, you know the way Cowens played Kareem.  Cowens was a sort of brute, who could really push people around (I remember him decking Julius Erving in a fight, flat out cold), and used his strength to get rebounds and set nasty picks, but then could step out to about 20 feet and swish a surprisingly feathery jumper, pulling the bigger centers away from the hoop.  He was also an excellent passer, as were all of the Celtics.  Cowens really had a unique combination of skills.

The 70s also saw the second best team in NBA history: the 1972 Lakers, with Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West.  They won 69 games in the regular season, the most ever until Jordan’s Bulls won 72 in ’96.  That team was sort of the last push of 60s talent into the decade of the 70s, given a chance now that Russell had retired from the Celtics.  Of course West was just a phenomenal scorer, but what was really interesting was to watch the way Chamberlain had completely changed his game in the interest of winning.  In the 60s, of course, Chamberlain was the most unstoppable scoring machine the NBA has ever seen, yet he won just one title, in ’67.  He was also leaner and faster in those days.  By ’72, he’d bulked up, and was just incredibly strong.  With West on his team as the go-to scorer (not to mention Gail Goodrich), Chamberlain contented himself with relentless rebounding, shoot-blocking, picking and passing, and while he shot a lot less, he scored at an incredibly efficient rate, giving the Lakers 14 or 15 points a night while using up just 8 or 9 shots.

So far, we’ve mentioned players and teams from six of the first seven champions of the decade: the Knicks in ’70 and ’73, Kareem’s Bucks in ’71 (with an aging but still great Oscar Robertson!), Wilt’s and West’s Lakers in ’72, the Celtics in ’74 and ’76.  What about 1975?  That was the year that Rick Barry took the underdog Golden State Warriors and beat the much-favored Washing Bullets (much to my chagrin—the Bullets were my favorite team … we’ll get to them later). 

Barry was the Michael Jordan of the 70s, without all of Jordan’s abilities.  Here’s what I mean by that.  If you stripped away Jordan’s jumping ability, his speed and strength, his turnaround jumper, etc., he’d still have been a winner, because at the core what you had with Jordan was an absolutely iron will, almost manic, to compete and to win.  Barry didn’t have Jordan’s jumping ability, his speed, etc., but he had that same manic drive at the core.  People remember him as something of a jerk, because he could be highly critical of teammates, coaches, refs, opposing players, etc.  But in 1975 he took a team that had no business winning it all and just pushed them to the title. 

Scoring 30-plus a game, Barry shot rapid-fire because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that every shot he took, outside, slashing, running one-handers, you name it, was going in.  Barry played fast—forget all these isolation one-on-one players of today who look to freeze the defender on the perimeter—Barry did everything in the flow of the offense, and made the decision to shoot from outside, drive, or pass in a split second.  It was relentless.  As well as being a scorer, he was also a brilliant passer, and I believe he also led the league in steals that year.  I think his teammates were afraid not to do their best (with Clifford Ray rebounding, blocking shots, and dunking; a rookie Jamaal Wilkes hitting his smooth jumpers and guarding his man like glue; Butch Beard playing solid guard, etc.).

So the Warriors were champs in ’75; in ’76 the Celtics took their second title since Russell’s retirement.  In 1977, the year Bill Walton’s Portland Trailblazers won the title, NBA fans were granted their single glimpse of what might have been had Walton’s body been durable enough to sustain a full NBA career.  One of the greatest college basketball players ever, Walton could have been a top-10 ever NBA player, but his body never let him play more than 60 or so games in his prime.  But man, was he good.  He was a ferocious rebounder and shot-blocker, and with mean tough Maurice Lucas as the enforcer at power forward, Portland was scary.  Walton could score quite niftily when needed, but was just as happy having the offense whirl around him, and those who saw him back then will remember the iconic image of Walton directing the offense, his hands above his head rotating to say, “let’s keep it moving.”  Before I move on, I have to relate one other image of Walton that sticks in my mind: he had the ability to go up and grab a defensive rebound high off the boards and while still in the air, rotate his body and fire an outlet pass to start the break before he’d even come down with the ball.  Amazing to see.

The final two seasons of the decade belonged to the Washington Bullets and the Seattle Supersonics, who played each other in both finals and who traded championships, the Bullets winning in ’78 and the ’Sonics in ’79.  The Bullets were led by Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld.  Hayes had played Kareem in one of the most famous basketball games in history, January 20 1968, between the Houston Cougars and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s undefeated UCLA Bruins (Jabbar was then known as Lew Alcindor), in the first nationally televised basketball game, before 52,693 fans.  Though Hayes was really a 6’9” power forward, he outplayed the 7’4” Jabbar in that game, with 39 points and 15 rebounds, holding Kareem to just 15 points as Houston won.  (Jabbar and the Bruins would get their revenge in the NCAA tournament semi-final game, when the thumped Houston 101-69 and Kareem held Hayes to 10 points.) 

Hayes went on to play his NBA career essentially out of position, most often matching up with 7-footers (and never complaining about it, unlike Amare Stoudemire).  How did he do it?  He had long arms and great jumping quickness, and he had a turnaround jumper that was almost impossible to block.  As a kid of about 12 or 13, I spent countless hours in my driveway, working on my Elvin Hayes turnaround.  It still serves me well when I play ball at my gym.  In addition to the turnaround, Hayes was the best defensive power forward I’ve ever seen (I’d put Tim Duncan about tied with him).  He had absolutely phenomenal anticipation, like Duncan, that allowed him to harass an opponent’s shot just about every time, even much taller opponents.

The Bullets did their thing essentially with no center but with two power forwards—Hayes and Unseld.  Unseld was a great wide-body.  He didn’t score much, but he could set picks that would crush defenders, sometimes two at a time, and he had the most amazing outlet pass I’ve ever seen: a two-hand, over-the-head rocket that he could throw three-quarters of the length of the court.

The Bullets had been a very good team since Hayes joined Unseld in the frontcourt in 1972, but it took the pickup of small forward Bob Dandridge to get them over the top.  The smooth Dandridge was a highly skilled swingman who’d won a title in ’71 beside Kareem.  In the 1978 post-season, the Bullets had to play the much lauded Philadelphia 76ers, who had a notorious forward duo of Julius Erving and George McGinnis, both of whom had been superstars in the ABA.  Those Sixers clubs were so confident that they were the best team that when they didn’t win titles in the 70s, they kept telling Philly fans, “we owe you one,” then “we owe you two,” and so on, until they finally won a title with the addition of Moses Malone in ’83.   Before the ’78 series with the Bullets, McGinnis had bragged that the Sixers forwards would dominate the Bullets forwards, and that he, McGinnis, would embarrass Hayes.  Hayes and Dandridge didn’t say anything, but Hayes ate McGinnis alive, just really punked him, and, perhaps surprisingly, Dandridge outplayed Erving, as the Bullets put away the Sixers on their way to the title.

The Supersonics that won the ’79 title did it with a very nice three-star combination.  They had 7-footer Jack Sikma, who had a bizarre-looking but unstoppable step-back, wrong-foot, turnaround jumper.  They had Dennis Johnson, who would later be a key contributor to the Celtics’ great 80s teams, and who with the Sonics might have been the best, toughest defensive guard in the league (I remember when I heard that Bird’s Celtics had picked up DJ: that’s it, I said, they’ll win several more titles for sure).  And the Sonics had point-guard Gus Williams, who was the fastest player I’ve ever seen with the dribble in the open court (maybe LeBron now matches him).  He was a sort of one-man fast break, and when Sikma, a very good rebounder, dropped the outlet off to Williams, the other team knew that it had better sprint all-out to get back on defense or Williams would just take it end-to-end.

So that’s it.  For me, the 70s were far from a lost decade.  They gave me great memories, great inspiration, and I hope that there are a few readers at B/R whom this article helped to recall the 70s fondly as well.