Had there been a seventh game of the 1975-76 season's championship playoff series it would've been televised by NBC,[14][15] because that network signed contract to a potential seventh game on Sunday, May 16, 1976. Since the ABA Finals ultimately ended in six games, with the New York Nets triumphing over the Denver Nuggets in what would become the ABA's final game of its nine year existence, NBC's contract was void.
Van Vance appeared on WHAS radio as the announcer for the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association, often with Cawood Ledford. After the Colonels folded as part of the ABA-NBA merger in June 1976, Vance was best known for broadcasting University of Louisvillebasketball games (including the 1986 NCAA National Championship Team) on the same station. Vance worked on the air for WHAS from 1957 through 1999.
Marty Glickman joined the radio station WHN in 1939 and was its sports director by 1943. Glickman was also the first announcer for the New York Nets before the ABA-NBA merger, when they played in their first home, the Island Garden in Nassau County. Many feel he became the voice of the New York Nets as a favor to Lou Carnesecca, who left a successful stint as the basketball coach of St. John's University to be the first coach of the New York Nets.
WTTV served as the television flagship for the Indiana Pacers from the team's days in the original American Basketball Association (except in 1984–85, when those rights were held by present-day sister station WXIN due to Pacers owner Melvin Simon's part-ownership of the station) to 2006. WTTV lost the rights to the Pacers telecasts after the 2005–06 season,[59] when the NBA team moved their local game telecasts to Fox Sports Indiana.
In 1976, CBS sought to establish a postseason playoff between the ABA and NBA, and to win the rights to broadcast those games.[73]
Following the ABA–NBA merger
In June 1976, the remaining ABA owners agreed to a merger with the National Basketball Association, in return for the Spirits of St. Louis folding, to pay the St. Louis owners $2.2 million in cash up front in addition to a 1/7 share of the four remaining teams' television revenues in perpetuity. As the NBA's popularity exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, the league's television rights were sold to CBS and then NBC, and additional deals were struck with the TNT and TBS cable networks; league television revenue soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Ozzie and Daniel Silna continued to receive millions of dollars in television revenue from the NBA until reaching a revised agreement in April 2014, which included a $500 million payment to the Silnas from the four former ABA teams.[74][75]
The NBA imposed one of the following terms on the four ABA refugees—the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, New York Nets and San Antonio Spurs:
The four ABA teams would receive no television money at all during their first three seasons in the NBA (1976–1979), and were to pay one seventh of their annual television revenues after that to the owners of the defunct Spirits of St. Louis in perpetuity.
During the 1976–77 season, the NBA's first after the ABA–NBA merger brought the American Basketball Association into the league, CBS held a slam dunk contest that ran during halftime of the Game of the Week telecasts. Don Criqui was the host of this particular competition. The final, which pitted Larry McNeill of the Golden State Warriors against eventual winner Darnell "Dr. Dunk" Hillman of the Indiana Pacers, took place during Game 6 of the 1977 NBA Finals. At the time of the final, Hillman's rights had been traded to the New York Nets, but he had not yet signed a contract. Since he was not officially a member of any NBA team, instead of wearing a jersey, he competed in a plain white tank top. Then for the post-competition interview, Hillman donned a shirt with the words "Bottle Shoppe" – the name of an Indianapolis liquor store, which is still in existence, and was the sponsor of a city parks softball league team for which Hillman played left field (and the only team he was a member of at the time).[76] Other players to compete in the slam dunk tournament included Julius Erving, George Gervin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Moses Malone. CBS, anxious for star power, also gave David Thompson the opportunity to be eliminated three times.[77][78]