The Legacies of the ABA and WHA Shine Bright in the NBA & Stanley Cup Finals

Franchises born from the upstart leagues of the 1970s compete for the 2025 NBA and NHL championships.

Coinciding with the Edmonton Oilers run to the 2024 Stanley Cup Finals, I read Ed Willes’ terrific book on the history of the World Hockey Association, The Rebel League.

I picked up The Rebel League during a book-buying frenzy, having loved Willes’ excellent history of the Canadian Football League’s brief but pivotal expansion into the United States during the 1990s. The Rebel League suffered the unfortunate fate of many titles that arrive during one of these purchasing sprees, joining an ever-increasing queue that becomes harder to shorten with each passing year.

But after finishing Stephen Cole’s Hockey Night Fever — another highly recommended title here at Press Break, which details the NHL of the 1970s — I moved The Rebel League head in the line. Plus, Connor McDavid’s otherworldly play in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and Edmonton making its first trip to the Finals since 2006 further fueled my curiosity of the WHA.

Hockey Night Fever touched on the league briefly, but only in an aside. Growing up a budding young sports fan in the ‘90s, my WHA exposure was limited to surface-level anecdotes: Such as when my then-home state, Arizona, welcomed the Phoenix Coyotes, the incoming franchised had been the Winnipeg Jets.

With the Jets transformation into the Coyotes, the NHL indirectly forced out the Phoenix Roadrunners of the IHL, named for the Valley of the Sun’s franchise in the WHA.

As to any specific details about the WHA’s Phoenix Roadrunners or any version of the Winnipeg Jets predating the Sega Genesis, I probably knew more about the Franco-Prussian War. Speaking of Sega, ‘90s pop culture taught me the Hartford Whalers only beat the Vancouver Canucks once, maybe twice in a lifetime¹.

Sega played a critical role in introducing me to hockey, and perhaps subconsciously planted the seeds for my WHA fascination. That’s because on EA Sports’ NHL ‘95, my go-to team was the Quebec Nordiques.

Never mind Wayne Gretzky and the Kings, Joe Sakic and the Nords were unstoppable once I got that six-button Sega controller in my adolescent hands. And I wasn’t alone. Just days before publish of this newsletter, I wore a Nordiques t-shirt to a birthday party for a classmate of my preschool-aged daughter.

The unique choice sparked conversation with another father in attendance who could rattle off Sakic, Peter Forsberg and Owen Nolan from his own Sega memories seeing that logo triggered.

Sega provided a platform for long-suffering NHL franchises, doomed to move in the latter half of the ‘90s, to recapture WHA glory. And for Hartford, Winnipeg and Quebec, the WHA years were indeed glorious.

The Whalers won the first Avco World Trophy in 1973, beating the Bobby Hull-captained Jets in the inaugural WHA finale.

The Golden Jet’s WHA run turned out just fine, however. Winnipeg claimed three Avco World Trophies in 1976 and the WHA’s final two seasons, 1978 and 1979.

With a trio of championships, the Jets merged into the NHL as the most decorated of the WHA imports. Winnipeg flew to such heights on the wings not only of Hull, but with Swedish imports Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg playing key roles.

Reading Hockey Night Fever before The Rebel League was an unintentionally savvy move, because the former helped me to understand mainstream qualms about hockey’s inherent violence in the ‘70s — and The Rebel League’s detailing of the Winnipeg Jets international roster provided importance contrast to understand one of the WHA’s most significant impacts on the sport.

The WHA had its proverbial black eyes when it came to unmitigated violence — the St. Paul Fighting Saints, for example lived up to their nickname’s adjective with Goldie Goldthrope on the roster. Goldthorpe provided inspiration for the film Slap Shot’s chief antagonistic goon, Ogie Ogilthorpe.

But the Jets’ success with Swedes Nilsson and Hedberg, combined with the legendary Summit Series pitting Canadian stars against the Soviet Red Army, helped introduce a more free-flowing, skillful game to North America.

This was one way in which the WHA’s lasting impact on the NHL parallels its basketball contemporary, the American Basketball Association.

Long before purchasing The Rebel League, as a ‘90s youngster growing up in rural Arizona, I saw a copy of Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls on my dad’s bookshelf. I became a hardcore hoophead very early into my sports fandom, so the image of a young Julius Erving soaring through the air spoke to me on a personal level.

My knowledge of the ABA went much deeper far earlier than my appreciation for the WHA. My dad grew up in San Antonio and entered adulthood around the time the Spurs debuted in the ABA.

He had the iconic George Gervin “Iceman” poster, and regaled me with stories of seeing Gervin’s finger-roll in person at the Hemisfair Arena.

Dad also said the greatest play he ever saw live came courtesy of Dr. J, then with the Virginia Squires, scoring on a reverse layup from behind the backboard.

Knowing these stories — and raised a Spurs fan, both from my dad’s connection and the ‘90s teams featuring David Robinson and Sean Elliott — I had to learn more about the Spurs roots. Furthermore, Doc on that book cover palming that gorgeous red-white-and-blue basketball called to me.

Loose Balls remains among my favorite sports books to this day — so much so, I vehemently believe to this day that Will Ferrell and Scot Armstrong would have ended up with a much better version of Semi-Pro had they used real anecdotes from Loose Balls.

And for those who’ve never read it, fascinating, funny and unbelievable anecdotes make up the entirety of Loose Balls. Oftentimes, I find oral histories to be hack, eschewing the effort required to build a narrative from interviews including adding further context, then just hitting publish on transcriptions².

However, Pluto’s oral history was so painstakingly crafted, and the stories he unearths from his interview subjects are so incredible, Loose Balls could not have captured the essence of the ABA as effectively in narrative form.

That’s all to say Loose Balls remains the quintessential resource to understand why the ABA failed after 1976…but also why it was so instrumental in transforming basketball.

In an era when the NBA grew increasingly stodgy, the ABA introduced transformative elements with its innovation of the 3-point line and Dunk Contest. Embracing the dunk not merely as a high-percentage shot, but its own artform, positioned the NBA for its boom in popularity in the 1980s.

The ABA developing the 3-point line, meanwhile, provided the foundation on which the present-day game is played.

The Indiana Pacers advancing to the 2025 NBA Finals provides a poetic little subplot that nicely captures the ABA’s legacy as the more free-wheeling, high-scoring brand of basketball. While the defensive styles aren’t exactly comparable to the grind of the ‘70s NBA, Indiana whizzed past a New York Knicks team that employed as much of an old-school philosophy as exists in the modern NBA.

The Pacers now face this year’s best overall defensive team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, in the 2025 NBA Finals. Indiana went longer before Finals appearances — 25 years — than the 24-year gap between the end of the ABA and the 2000 Pacers facing the Los Angeles Lakers.

Indiana’s lone, previous trip to the Finals came amid a five-year run of former ABA franchises advancing. San Antonio’s championships in 1999 and 2003 bookended Indiana and the New Jersey Nets representing the East in three straight postseasons.

While the Spurs continued to return to the Finals beyond that initial ABA Renaissance, it wasn’t until Denver’s trip to the 2023 NBA Finals that any of the other three red-white-and-blue-ball alumni made it to this stage.

With Nikola Jokic leading the Nuggets to the 2023 title, the ABA deviated from the WHA in a clear way by producing multiple championship-winning franchises post-merger.

The Edmonton Oilers — the only WHA import into the NHL that didn’t win an Avco World Trophy — is the only former WHA franchise to claim a Stanley Cup. McDavid gets another crack at bringing Edmonton its first since the end of the Oilers’ dynasty run in the 1980s, when they won the Cup five times in seven seasons from 1984 through 1990.

Edmonton will also forever be the only WHA franchise to hoist the Stanley Cup. While the Carolina Hurricanes bested the Oilers, coincidentally enough, to win in 2006; and 10 years earlier, the Colorado Avalanche dumped salt in Quebec City’s fresh wound as Stanley Cup winners a season after moving as the Nordiques; neither the Hurricanes nor the Avalanche are truly WHA products.

That may be the most impressive part of the ABA’s legacy in basketball with the 50th anniversary of the league’s final season coming next fall. All four ABA franchises to merge with the NBA remained in their original incarnations.

Going into the Golden Anniversary with Indiana carrying that ABA banner would be especially significant, though. The Pacers set a standard that if all league franchises had met, the ABA may well have overtaken the NBA.

Indiana won three ABA championships, the last coinciding with George McGinnis’ 1975 ABA Most Valuable Player season. McGinnis’ role in the ABA reflects the most important part both the basketball league and the WHA played in shaping the NBA and NHL. Each alternative federation forced their counterparts to rethink their economics dramatically to the benefit of the athletes, including in basketball’s case. The ABA shook up the marketplace dramatically by allowing underclassmen to jump to the pros.

McGinnis was one such talent who joined the ABA early from college, along with Dr. J and Moses Malone, who spurned college ball altogether. And while departing the University of Indiana after one season kept McGinnis from becoming a Hoosiers legend — albeit that was one spectacular college season — McGinnis is a state of Indiana basketball legend all the same.

Tyrese Haliburton is a worthy successor on the cusp of leaving his own legacy on the Hoosier State. There’s significantly less pressure on the Pacers point guard than there is McDavid in Edmonton’s Stanley Cup Finals rematch with the Florida Panthers, but that doesn’t mean the hardwood stakes on any less significant.

In both series, decades of history and transformational legacies ride on the results.

1. This is not Press Break’s first direct reference to Brodie’s introductory scene from the Kevin Smith film, Mallrats — nor will it be the last. Stay tuned for a special edition of Sports Movie Monday, coming very soon.

2. Speaking of hack, I have made Sopranos references in consecutive newsletters. Next time…there won’t be a next time.