Deja Vu

This playoff series is not the first for the Indiana Pacers against Los Angeles for a pro basketball title.

The Pacers beat L.A., four games to two, in 1970.

But then, it was the Los Angeles Stars and the league was the American Basketball Assn.

Three of the six games in the finals were in Southern California--two at the Anaheim Convention Center because the Sports Arena, the Stars’ regular home, was not available.

The Stars’ coach was Bill Sharman, the Boston Celtic legend who two years later would coach the Los Angeles Lakers to their first NBA title. The Stars’ owner was Bill Daniels, the cable television czar and Prime Ticket originator who died in March.

Daniels bought the Stars in midseason from Jim Kirst and brought in Vince Boryla to replace Jim Hardy as general manager.

The Pacers’ coach was Bob “Slick” Leonard, now the team’s television commentator. The general manager was Mike Storen, who was also one of the founders of the team. Storen, who was the ABA commissioner for the league’s final two seasons and later the president of the Atlanta Hawks, is now the commissioner of the new Indoor Professional Football League, based in Atlanta.

Storen is also the father of NBC’s Hannah Storm, who changed her name shortly after graduating from Notre Dame--also her father’s alma mater--and getting a job as a disc jockey at a rock ‘n’ roll radio station in Corpus Christi, Texas. The station, which called itself “101 by the sea,” announced, “The Storm is coming to 101 by the sea,” and the name Hannah Storm stuck.

So have her father’s memories of the Pacers.

“I named the team, picked its colors, did the draft and hired all the players,” he said.

Storen and his six partners paid a $25,000 franchise fee to become one of the ABA’s original 11 teams. The Anaheim Amigos were another. So were the Oakland Oaks, owned by singer Pat Boone.

Storen says he lost money, “but not as much as some people did.”

Boone, in a recent HBO documentary on the ABA, said he lost $2 1/2 million in two years. The Oaks won the ABA title in 1969, and Boone said, “I attended 10 games, so this ring cost me about a quarter of a million per game.”

In 1970, the Stars, after Daniels had bought the team and cleaned house, won 17 of their last 21 games to make the playoffs. They were big underdogs after getting through the first two rounds to the finals.

The Pacers had one of the two best players in the league, Roger Brown. The other was Spencer Haywood, who had dropped out of the University of Detroit, signed with the Denver Rockets and become the league’s most valuable player and rookie of the year. Before the next season, Haywood became the NBA’s first hardship player, signing with Sam Schulman’s Seattle SuperSonics and causing a bitter and fierce court battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Brown was in the ABA because he had been banned from the NBA for life because of his alleged involvement in a point-shaving scandal. As a freshman at Dayton in 1959, he was called before a New York grand jury. He was never charged with anything but because he admitted knowing a noted Brooklyn gambler, he was asked to leave school. Iowa’s Connie Hawkins was involved in the same scandal but after six years in the ABA, Hawkins at least got to play two seasons in the NBA, mostly with the Lakers, who acquired him for Keith Erickson in a 1973 trade with Phoenix.

Brown was 25 and working in a car factory in Dayton when Storen signed him to play for the Pacers for $17,000, plus a $2,000 signing bonus. Brown died of liver cancer in 1997 at 54, and some writers acclaimed him as the best player to have never played in the NBA.

Sharman and the Stars got a first-hand look at him during the 1970 ABA finals.

The Pacers won the first two games in Indianapolis, but the Stars came from 21 points down to win Game 3 in Anaheim, 109-106, before 5,780 fans.

Tickets were only $6--up from $5 during the regular season--but this reporter, who was then a young sportswriter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, remembers attending that game and noting the comp ticket line was five times as long as the one for buying tickets.

There was no television coverage, and The Times ran one story, with a one-column headline, on each of the three home games. The Times did not send a reporter to the games in Indianapolis.

Of the Stars’ comeback in Game 3, the late Dan Hafner wrote, “Bill Sharman, proving once again that he as good a coach as there is, came up with a solution.”

Hafner credited Sharman’s defensive alignments, specifically putting 6-foot-7 forward Tom Washington on Pacer center Mel Daniels, who might have been the ABA’s third-best player that season. Forward Bob Netolicky and guards Freddie Lewis and Billy Keller rounded out a strong Pacer starting five.

In their victory in Game 3, the Stars were led by George Stone, who scored 34 points. Brown was held to 17.

But Brown scored 53 points the next night, before 7,027 in Anaheim, making 15 of 21 shots, and the Pacers won, 142-120, to take a 3-1 lead in the series.

Brown had 39 in a Pacer loss in Game 5, then 45 when the Pacers wrapped up the title with a 111-107 victory before 8,233 in Game 6 at the Sports Arena.

Said Sharman of Brown after the final game, “Over the last three games, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better individual performance, especially by a forward, in my 20 years.”

That included his 11 years with the Celtics, when his teammates included Bill Russell and Bob Cousy.

“I never intended to say Brown was better than any of my Celtic teammates,” Sharman says today. “But for three games in a playoff series, I still think it was one of the best individual performances I’d ever seen at that time.”

Daniels moved the Stars to Salt Lake City the next season, and they beat the Kentucky Colonels for the 1971 ABA title. To get to the finals that year, the Stars beat the Pacers in a Game 7 at Indianapolis.

After that season, Sharman, over Daniels’ protests, left the Stars and the ABA for the Lakers. Daniels maintained he had Sharman under contract but Sharman’s attorney, Ed Hookstratten, and the Lakers’ attorneys told Sharman that was not the case.

Problems with his vocal cords forced Sharman to retire from coaching in 1976. He was the Laker general manager until 1982, then president of the team until 1988, when he retired, although he remains a paid consultant.

After the 1971 season, Storen became president and general manager of the Colonels.

The Pacers went on to win two more ABA titles, in 1972 and ’73. They are still trying to win their first NBA title.