ABA's Demise and Later San Diego Basketball
The collapse of the San Diego team, combined with the failures of the Baltimore and Utah franchises, reduced the ABA to seven franchises, and signaled the league's end. Despite this, the NBA absorbed four of the surviving teams in the summer of 1976.
From 1967-1971, San Diego was the home of the NBA's expansion San Diego Rockets, who also played at the then-new Sports Arena. Although they were to draft University of Houston prodigy Elvin Hayes, who would later become a star for the Washington Bullets, the Rockets failed to garner wins or significant support in San Diego. Real estate broker Wayne Duddleston and banker Billy Goldberg bought the franchise for $5.6 million, and brought the team to Houston, bringing Hayes home to his adoring UH fans. In 1978, the NBA's Buffalo Braves arrived in San Diego and became the San Diego Clippers; in 1984, they moved to Los Angeles to attempt to compete with the already-established Lakers. San Diego has not had another professional basketball team since.
Read more about this topic: San Diego Sails, History
Famous quotes containing the words san and/or basketball:
“There they are at last, Miss Rutledge. The will-o-the-wisps with plagues of fortune. San Francisco, the latest newborn of a great republic.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
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