Julius Erving’s place in the NBA’s rise, and the importance of the dunk, should not be forgotten
Erving’s move from the New York Nets to the 76ers in 1976 was a key moment in NBA history.

In this excerpt from his new book, “Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk,” Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski explores the effect of Julius Erving’s career, particularly his move from the ABA’s New York Nets to the 76ers. “Magic in the Air” will be available on Feb. 11 wherever books are sold.
There’s a narrative about the NBA, and if you’re at all familiar with the history of pro basketball, you’re familiar with the narrative.
The narrative goes like this: In the late 1970s, the league was in a bad way. Drug use and abuse, of cocaine in particular, was rampant. The lack of a dynastic team and a run of small-market franchises winning championships — Portland in 1977, Washington in 1978, Seattle in 1979 — caused fan interest to fall. TV ratings plummeted to the point that CBS, the league’s primary rights holder, had to tape-delay games in the NBA Finals. Then … along came Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the fall of ’79, bringing with them the 35 million people who had tuned in to their battle in that year’s NCAA championship game, joining the league’s marquee teams — Bird, the Celtics; Magic, the Lakers — and returning them to glory and breathing life back into one of sports’ best rivalries.
From a four-year deal with CBS for $74 million when Bird and Magic debuted, the NBA by 2002 had contracts with ABC, ESPN, and TNT, each of which was six years, the sum of which was worth more than $4.6 billion, and you trace that ascension by drawing a line from Bird and Magic — not Bird and Johnson, always Bird and Magic — to Michael to Shaq and Kobe. That’s the narrative, boiled down: Bird and Magic saved the NBA. It’s difficult to dispute it.
“I think,” Julius Erving told me one day over the phone, “that’s [bull].”
There are only so many occasions when an athlete of Erving’s stature and accomplishments reveals the full depth and dimension of his ego, of the indignation that even the slightest of slights causes him. Here was one of those occasions. Bird and Magic saved the NBA? Hell, no, Julius Erving said. Hell no.
“Obviously it was a great rivalry between the two individuals and the two franchises because they played for the NCAA championship, then moved on and it was pretty much Magic playing for the NBA championship, Bird eventually,” he told me. “It’s a good story. It was a good story. But truth be told, I think in terms of the popularity of the league, the league was never more popular than it was after the ABA joined the league. Eleven All-Stars in that first All-Star Game were from the ABA. That’s what saved the league.”
He was wrong, actually. There were 12 players in that 1977 NBA All-Star Game who had been in the ABA the season before. He was one of them, and he regarded the inconspicuousness of that fact as another piece of proof that he doesn’t get the credit he’s due for the sport’s success.
When those TV talking heads compiled their rankings of the best players of all time — Wilt or Russell? Michael or LeBron? Does Kobe or Oscar make your top 10? — how often do they leave The Doctor off their lists? Too frequently for his taste. Do they know that, if you combine his ABA and NBA careers, he scored 30,026 points — and that just seven players scored more? That he made 16 All-Star Games? That he won four Most Valuable Player awards — as many as LeBron and more than Bird or Magic or Steph Curry? That he won three championships, too? “When the naysayers take the ABA piece out,” he said, “it dilutes my career.”
It also strips away the context, timing, and effect of Erving’s entrance into the NBA. The Sixers acquired him just two days before their first game of the 1976-77 regular season, and his arrival coincided with what might have been Philadelphia’s high-water mark in 20th-century American social culture. The nation had celebrated its Bicentennial in the city that summer. Philadelphia International Records, led by the production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon A. Huff, had supplanted Motown as the source of the country’s best and most popular soul music. The O’Jays, Billy Paul, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass: These and other artists had been and would continue carrying the sweet and funk-filled sound of “Philly Soul” to the top of the R&B charts week after week. The Phillies — the city’s major-league baseball team, loaded with talented players, Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton among them — had just qualified for the playoffs for the first time in more than a quarter century. The Flyers — the infamous and innovative “Broad Street Bullies” — had won the Stanley Cup in 1974 and ‘75 and, in January ‘76, had defended the honor and superiority of North American hockey (literally) and Western civilization (metaphorically) by routing the Soviet Red Army team.
Now the Sixers, coming off their first winning season in five years, had added basketball’s greatest attraction. On Oct. 26, 1976, they beat the New Orleans Jazz, 111-101, for their first victory of Erving’s first season with them. Still getting acclimated to his new team and working himself into game shape, he came off the bench, missed seven of his 10 shots, and scored just 10 points. Still, the crowd at the Superdome, 27,383, was the largest ever to have seen a professional basketball game.
“The Doctor arrived in town just when the NBA needed a big image lift,” Philadelphia Magazine’s Robert Huber wrote in April 2008, “mid-’70s, a shining light in the coke-addled, pampered, arrogant, sex-crazed brotherhood of pro ball — the best brother, pure playground but responsible and winning, and better in this way, too: dignified, a family man, smart, a stand-up guy in his careful baritone, a dream for white suburbia. For God’s sake, he lived in white suburbia. Not all gated-up but comfortably, and he used to joke that he was white — off the court.”
» READ MORE: Mike Sielski: Julius Erving was the ideal Philly superstar — right up until he wasn’t.
On the court, he was melding those two worlds, making the playground palatable to wider, whiter audiences. “The 76ers are undoubtedly the dunk champions of the NBA,” The Inquirer’s Bill Livingston wrote in November ‘76. “It is that accolade that sets them apart, that has been partially responsible for a long line of sellouts on the road.”
Fred Carter, a guard on the team, was more succinct about the phenomenon: “The dunk has come back. It’s more than just a basket.” Which made Erving, the shot’s primary purveyor, more than just another superstar. The Sixers won a league championship, reached the Finals four times, and won at least 50 games nine times during Erving’s 11 seasons with them. His favorite dunk of all time? Over Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld in the late 1970s at the Capital Centre, when Hayes and Unseld were with the Washington Bullets, when the Bullets and the Sixers were fighting for supremacy in the Eastern Conference.
“With Hayes and Unseld, when you went in there, you put your life on the line, mostly from Unseld,” Erving told me. “I don’t think Hayes was going to hurt you. So I turn the corner and go in and I’m airborne, and suddenly we end up chest to chest, and he’s got both arms up like it’s a field goal, like the goalpost in football, and I move the ball over to the middle and throw it down really hard.”
And the building, he remembered, got quiet … so quiet. “Really, for his teammates, it showed the power he had to control a game,” Bobby Jones, Erving’s teammate with the Sixers for eight years, told me. “It’s kind of a motivation for everybody else: ‘Look what this guy just did to them. What can I do?’” His career was a testament to the truth that, contrary to those who had dismissed the dunk as too showy and self-centered, individual excellence and panache didn’t have to come at the expense of team success.
“When you say ‘the best player,’ I didn’t think of myself that way, either,” Erving told me. “My whole approach to basketball was a team approach as opposed to an individual approach. So the idea of individual glory and honor, at the start of the game I wasn’t looking to do that. I was looking to win and enjoy my teammates and also treat the fans to my game. George Gervin and I talked about how we often played to please the crowd or tried to steal the other person’s crowd. It starts with the dunk line in warmups. Part of the preparation was, ‘All right, let’s go out here and steal this crowd so that, at the end of the game, they’ll be cheering for us, even against their home team.’”
That universal worship for Erving has lasted throughout his life. People are different around him, he told me. They become childlike, wide-eyed, even now that he is in his 70s and they might be in their 40s. “They’re like a son,” he said, despite the revelation that his image as a faithful family man was entirely and only that — an image. “I’ve had two children out of wedlock,” he told Huber, “but I can walk down the street holding my head up high. There are 10,000 children who I’ve been the catalyst for in all that I’ve done.”
Maintaining that measure of idolatry around Erving requires separating his personal flaws and foibles from his athletic exploits … and remembering not to separate him and his impact from his era. If the dunk is a symbol of basketball’s progress and Black athletes’ role in that progress — that they could own the game and take it to places it had never been before — then Erving’s importance can’t be overstated. He was a transformative figure, a conduit, maybe the conduit, for the sport’s acceptance and growth in the mainstream.
“He was — clearly,” Leon Saunders, one of Erving’s oldest and closest friends, told me. “There are a couple of players who changed the game, and Julius is clearly one of them. Wilt and Russell brought that game into the paint. Julius brought the ball above the rim from outside, from the wing. I referred to it as ‘an Afro-American aerial ballet.’ That’s how I saw how Julius was doing. That was the best description I could come up with. That’s what he created in professional basketball. You had to do more, and Julius was the single personage that made it clear this game had to change.”
At his springtime appearance in New Orleans during the 2022 Final Four, Erving noted how closely the ABA foreran the NBA’s evolution, particularly in its accent on its players’ individuality and creative freedom and the appeal that those qualities would have to fans. “Hopefully it won’t be forgotten because it was an important time in my life — probably the most fun that I had playing basketball,” he said. “I probably had more fun playing in the ABA than I did in college or even the NBA. The NBA was the most significant platform because that’s the one that exists today and that’s how most of you know me. But the ABA, the five years over there were extremely, extremely important.”
He should have been the greatest attraction in the sport, and with the Sixers, he would be. But when he entered the NBA, he was as much myth and mystery as he was man. “Everybody has seen LeBron James,” Erving’s former Nets teammate Bill Melchionni told me. “Three-quarters of the country probably never saw Doc. I’ve always made the statement: The Red Sox never should have traded Babe Ruth, and the Nets never should have sold Dr. J.”
The ABA retains a cultlike following today, a zealotry among hoops history buffs and that ever-shrinking club of people who have some connection, tangible or emotional, to the league. Even at the time, those lucky enough to have seen Erving play regarded it as an experience so vital to their devotion to the Nets that, once he left, they had no desire to continue following them at all.
In declaring that he was returning his season tickets, Mike Duarte wrote a letter to franchise vice president Barry Elson that read in part: “With Julius Erving being sold to another team, I have absolutely no interest in attending Nets games. … Erving is the only basketball player in the world who could provide incentive for me to travel out to Long Island to see a basketball game.” Another ticket-holder, Fred Schruers, asked, “Am I going to watch Roy Boe run up and down the court with three million dollars and slam dunk? Am I crazy? I’d rather hole up in my apartment with two frozen pizzas and try to pick up the Doctor on my short-wave.”
But they were the exceptions, the ones already in the know. The general public — the fans who come and go, who flipped through TV channels and stopped on a game because they had noticed someone doing something different and interesting, who learned of basketball superstars through chats at the office watercooler — knew little about Dr. J before he entered the NBA, before he penetrated the national consciousness to a depth and degree he hadn’t even while in New York, before he revealed the magic intrinsic not only in the game’s blazing future but in its shadowed present. And those kinds of fan, the most casual of fans, the fans who would be drawn to pro basketball by the millions throughout the subsequent two decades, could only take the word of the fortunate few who had ventured to Nassau Coliseum for a respite from Vietnam and Watergate and the trammels of that time … those who sought and found a night of entertainment that felt more like something sacred and supernatural … those who would swear, hands to their hearts, may God strike them dead, that Julius Erving could fly.