Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Especially because—as we'll get into—while they make astronomical sums in salary from playing more than any other sport in the world, the best of them make at least as much from all of their business outside of the court than they do on the court. All that is huge for the NBA, but still into the 1960s, it's still about 10X smaller than baseball, and ABC is only broadcasting the NBA once per week on Saturdays, I think. Let me come in here and say just to catch folks up on the teams at this point, we were eight teams. The ninth team then came in 1961. That's the Washington Wizards but at the time was the Chicago Packers, which seems like it has an overlapping name with a city that is pretty close to there and a decent rival. The history of that, that's got to be an interesting one. Then, of course, the Chicago Bulls come in. I think 1966–1968 is when they really went crazy and did like an expansion of five teams all at once. The Bulls, the SuperSonics, which are now the Oklahoma City Thunder. The San Diego Rockets who obviously became the Houston Rockets, the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Phoenix Suns. That's what the NBA is looking like at this point toward the end of the decade of the 1960s. Yeah, and they were expanding rapidly to compete with the upstart ABA, which we'll get to in one sec. But before the ABA—actually like super, super seminal—an important event happens in the NBA in 1964, which I think really set the stage for so much of what comes later and the modern business and game today. Like we said, ABC and Roone Arledge were starting to popularize the league, but the players were making nothing during those days, and baseball was still the national pastime. It was about 10X bigger than basketball at this point in terms of the reach to the professional leagues. In 1964 during the All-Star Game, the players led by Chamberlain and Russell were not super happy with how they're being treated. They really want a pension plan from the league for the players after they retire.…

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