The NBA has abandoned former ABA greats who helped shape the game

Lost to time and disorganization, former ABA players struggle to make ends meet without the pension promised in the NBA merger. It’s time for the league to resolve the situation.

A measly $16. Roughly 0.04 percent of what the median-salaried NBA player makes on a nightly basis. It’s less than two postgame Chipotle burritos (sans guacamole) or about the equivalent of sitting inside 1OAK for 20 minutes without actually ordering anything.

That’s the share of each game check it would take to fund the annual pensions of every surviving ABA player.

When the competing leagues struck the deal in Hyannis in 1976 to fold four teams into the NBA bouillabaisse, it assured pensions for all those who didn’t make the merger. Becoming eligible for those future retirement checks required three years of ABA service and players would receive $300 per month for each year in the league.

Whether due to the nature of the backroom agreement or perhaps not having the right legal representation or the plans simply getting lost to the time, most players never saw a penny. Now 44 years later, whatever the pact guaranteed sits well outside the statute of limitations.

“Once we merged in 1976, man, the word was that the NBA was gonna be responsible for the ABA guys’ pension,” George Gervin said in an interview. “But for some ways, it fell through. I don’t know why man. We’re talking about the ’70s.”

Gervin spent 14 years between the ABA and NBA, making the Hall of Fame and providing poetry in motion with his iconic finger roll. The Iceman still lives in San Antonio and gives back to the community he joined over four decades ago through a charter school and low-income housing. In addition to working for the Spurs in an advisory role, he sits on the board of the Dropping Dimes Foundation — an organization dedicated to funding an ABA retirement account.

The board does whatever the foundation needs to help spread the message and hopefully achieve its goal. Gervin’s star status grants him opportunities others he played with didn’t have the fortune of receiving.

“One of my old teammates, Bird Averitt, had a stroke and he can barely walk. Dropping Dimes provided him a mobile wheelchair,” Gervin said. “The things we think are little are big for somebody in that kind of situation. George Carter fell down on his luck and they helped him out with housing. It’s just good to have a foundation looking out for these ABA guys who helped build this league up, because a lot of them are suffering. Nobody likes to be forgotten, man, and Dropping Dimes gives these guys hope.”

Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of sad stories with this group. Averitt suffered his stroke recently but already languished through poor living conditions that led to a tragic accident.

“Bird’s living in a shack and he couldn’t afford his heating so it was shut off,” Bob Netolicky said in an interview. “He had a little kerosene heater keeping him warm and he went outside to get some gas for it and slipped on the ice. He laid there for four or five hours and ended up having to have his toes cut off because of frostbite.”

Under the agreement, Averitt’s five years in the ABA would have entitled him to $1,500 per month, a life-changing sum and one that would have prevented tragedy.

What could the NBA do to fulfill it’s ABA pension commitment?

“The NBA gives over a hundred million dollars a year in charity and they can’t afford to give us half a million?” Netolicky said. “It sure wouldn’t hurt them at all. How much longer is Bird gonna be around? Hell, how much longer am I going to be around?”

The NBA does incredible outreach and its charity goes to truly worthy causes. But supplementing the ABA pensions would be chalkdust from its ledger and, from a cold, business perspective, a descending investment as more players, unfortunately, pass away.

When Netolicky applied for the nonexistent pension in 2009, 195 guys would have been eligible. That total dwindled to 114 in the 11 years since. Netolicky also serves on Dropping Dimes’ advisory board. He played nine seasons in the ABA, winning two championships and making four All-Star teams.

While the league isn’t legally bound to fulfill a deal signed during the Ford administration, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t remedy the situation. It even set a precedent of doing something similar.

In 2007, the NBA opened its coffers to the pre-1965 players who had previously been left out of the retirement plan due to five-year eligibility requirements. While it can be refuted that a different league shouldn’t be permitted the same benefits, anyone who’s watched old footage or read Loose Balls knows the ABA shaped basketball as currently constituted.

Its legacy lives on through the 3-point line, Slam Dunk Contest, and high-octane, pace-and-space offenses. The competition between the leagues also derived larger player contracts, the hardship rule and the option of early college entry.

The ABA ran from 1967 up to the merger in 1976 with guys like Dr. J, Iceman, the Hawk and Skywalker barnstorming through a constantly shifting and financially shaky league.

“In the second year, we got to Game 7 in the first round of the playoffs against Kentucky. We’re a 10-point underdog,” Netolicky waxed. “The morning of the game, our owners had a meeting with bankruptcy attorneys. If we lost that night, they were folding the team the next day, done deal. That would have ended the ABA.”

However, those financial hardships also produced an us-against-the-world brotherhood apparent both on and off the court.

“Over time, you forget the prop plane trips in coach and the motels opposed to hotels. I think more fondly of my years in the ABA than I do over my years in the NBA,” Dan Issel — the ABA’s all-time leading scorer — said in an interview. “There was a real comradery. Guys on different teams would go out and have a beer after the game together and it was a much closer-knit group. Of course, we got down to seven teams in the last year so you were seeing everybody almost every other week.”

Issel is another member of DDF’s advisory board. His Hall-of-Fame career spanned 15 seasons, six in the ABA and nine in the NBA, plus two separate coaching stints with the Nuggets. Issel takes a lot of satisfaction in the immediate success the Nuggets found, winning the Midwest Division the first two years in the NBA. He credits the ABA’s entertaining style of wide-open, guard-oriented play as to why.

In addition to flair and panache, the ABA brought color — both literal and figurative — the NBA severely lacked. The ABA pioneered a majority Black league during a time when professional basketball was predominantly white.

“The NBA before 1965 had an unwritten law; maximum two Black players per team. Our guys are 85-to-90 percent Black,” Netolicky said. “When the ABA came along in 1967, there was no prejudice. It was basketball. It wasn’t about race or anything like that.”

In a time when light shines on racial injustice more than possibly ever before, a group consisting of 85 percent Black men should get what they were promised. It’d be a win-win move for the NBA, one that wouldn’t need to navigate the arcane red tape because the Dropping Dimes Foundation already did the legwork.

Normally, starting a pension fund requires big sums of money upfront. But by running it through a 501(c)(3) charity as a grant program, it would only cost the NBA and the players a total of $500,000 per year, which would be a 100 percent write-off, according to Scott Tarter, president of Dropping Dimes and partner at Bose McKinney & Evans. Plus, the league wouldn’t be liable since the Foundation will take on all the legal and administrative work.

If this seems like a no-brainer for a multibillion-dollar corporation, it’s because it is. Supporting players who paved the way for one of the most recognizable products worldwide would cost next to nothing (by NBA standards) and help correct a past injustice.

No matter how relatively minuscule, the goodwill would provide a mostly Black group of proud, older men a higher quality of life for their remaining time. That’s bigger than basketball and would show the NBA cares.