Over and Back: How did Spencer Haywood change everything?
By Jason Mann
We look at how Spencer Haywood changed the world of basketball and paved the way for underclassmen to join the pros in the latest edition of Over and Back’s Basketball Mysteries of the 1970s.
We are joined once again by Reinis Lacis of The Handle podcast to discuss Haywood signing with the ABA as a sophomore, then breaking the NBA’s ban of underclassmen, the many lawsuits that followed, the “three-front war” he was forced to fight and the toil that Haywood was under as he played for the Sonics while his case was in court.
Listen: What were the ABA’s first shots at the NBA?
We also talk about the infamous Dolgoff Plan of deferred payments and how it changed the business of basketball, the rise of unscrupulous agents, NBA referees jumping to the ABA, the first serious NBA and ABA merger talks, how much salaries rose compared to franchise values, the ABA begin to win the talent battle out of colleges by signing Julius Erving, Artis Gilmore and George McGinnis, an NBA-ABA merger derailed and what it might have looked like, the Oscar Robertson lawsuit on behalf of the NBA players union, accusations of NBA owners having ties to organized crime, and much more.
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