In the dying days of the ABA, teams scrambled for survival, and the Pacers needed a miracle to avoid vanishing forever.

NBA

How a girl’s $5 donation and the Chicago Bulls helped save the Indiana Pacers

Update: Jun 22nd, 2025 02:58 EDT

In 1975, the ABA – that glorious, chaotic mess of glitter and grit known as the American Basketball Association – had run out of rabbits to pull from its hat. The tricks were done, the cash was drying up, and the league staggered forward on life support, desperate to seal a merger with the NBA – or more accurately, an absorption, since the NBA would keep its name and identity intact.

From the outset, the ABA’s founders (visionaries, or just plain lunatics) had sold the venture as a fast-track to owning an NBA franchise at half the price of expansion. They pointed to the precedent in football – the AFL and NFL had pulled it off.

The ABA and the story behind the Pacers

What followed was the stuff of sports mythology: red, white and blue basketballs (a branding triumph never patented and born of commissioner George Mikan’s poor eyesight); the three-point line; the first dunk contest; a looser, faster game that prioritized flair over rigidity. Modern basketball, if we’re honest, owes more to the ABA than the early ’70s NBA ever did.

And the stars? The ABA was teeming with them. Julius Erving, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Artis Gilmore, Moses Malone, David Thompson… The league routinely beat NBA teams in preseason exhibitions. Even though the NBA narrowly won the two high-profile “supergames” (1971 and 1972), the ABA walked away with bragging rights – the Kentucky Colonels beat the Bullets in a showdown of reigning champions. By the time of the 1977 NBA Finals, five of the ten starters had come from the ABA. The first post-merger All-Star game? Ten of the 24 were ABA vets.

But by 1975, things were unraveling fast. Antitrust laws were a huge barrier to merger talks, and the NBA Players Association, led by the legendary Oscar Robertson, filed a lawsuit to stop it. At the time, players had almost no freedom – drafted players were essentially bound to their teams for life unless traded. Two rival leagues at least meant bidding wars and rising salaries. That lawsuit delayed a merger deal that had first been approved in principle back in 1970.

The last survivors

By the start of the 1975–76 season, the ABA was crumbling. Denver and New York tried jumping ship solo to the NBA. Memphis, San Diego, and Utah folded or failed to start the season. Virginia Squires did start it – but folded before the final game of the year, unable to pay a $75,000 league fee. That check, had it cleared, might have kept pro basketball alive in Virginia.

When the dust settled, six teams remained: the Kentucky Colonels, The Spirits of St Louis, and four that would join the NBA when the deal finally closed on June 17, 1976 – Denver Nuggets, New York Nets, San Antonio Spurs, and Indiana Pacers.

The Pacers’ survival, and their place in the NBA, was down to pure chance. Though they had dominated the ABA in the early ’70s – three titles in five years under coach Bob “Slick” Leonard – their finances in 1976 were shaky at best. The Colonels, with whom they had a fierce rivalry, seemed the likelier candidate for an NBA spot. But the NBA had room for only four teams. Three were set: the Nets, Nuggets, and the red-hot Spurs.

Enter the Chicago Bulls. The NBA’s Windy City team didn’t want a new franchise nearby siphoning off fans and TV viewers. But Indiana was the lesser evil – losing the Pacers would have enraged an entire basketball-mad state. Plus, the Bulls had their eye on Artis Gilmore, the Colonels’ star big man, and hoped that if Kentucky folded, they could snap him up.

That’s exactly what happened. On merger day, the Colonels accepted a buyout of $3 million. The Pacers got in – barely – but at a huge cost. To “join” the NBA, each incoming team had to pay $3.2 million in three months, forfeit all ABA records, give up their share of TV revenues until 1979, and miss out on both the regular and dispersal drafts of 1976. It was a brutal welcome.

A miracle on local TV

The merger didn’t end the Pacers’ problems. After one losing season in the NBA, with bills piling up and no TV money flowing in, the franchise faced extinction. Coach Slick Leonard – still GM too – sat down with his wife Nancy to think the unthinkable: how to raise enough money to keep the team alive.

Their solution: a 16-hour TV telethon, broadcast July 3–4, 1977, called “Save the Pacers.” The goal was 8,000 season ticket sales. They got 8,028.

It was homemade, barely scripted, and slapped together in 72 hours. Local celebrities answered phones, former players made on-air appeals, and children broke open piggy banks. One nine-year-old girl donated $5 because the Pacers were “a good team.” In the final minutes, with the goal still in doubt, Nancy Leonard took the mic in tears and announced the team had been saved. Donations from local businesses helped fund their second NBA season, and construction of a new $23 million arena was secured.

Later, city leaders like then–deputy mayor David Frick credited that night with shaping the future of Indianapolis: “If we’d lost the Pacers, we wouldn’t have the Colts, the stadium, or the downtown we have today.”

The greatest deal in NBA history?

One team that didn’t make the cut also made history – just in a different way. The Spirits of St Louis were owned by Ozzie and Daniel Silna, two polyester magnates who had failed to buy the Detroit Pistons. With their NBA dream dead, they cut an unbelievable deal: $2.2 million upfront and a perpetual cut – one-seventh of TV revenue from each of the four surviving ABA teams. That deal, with no expiry date, ended up netting the Silnas hundreds of millions of dollars as the NBA exploded in popularity through the ’80s and beyond.

The Knicks’ unforgivable mistake

Then there’s the cautionary tale of Julius Erving. After the merger, the Nets owed the Knicks $4.8 million for encroaching on their market. To settle it, they offered Dr J – arguably the most electrifying player alive. The Knicks declined. The Sixers swooped in, paid the Nets $3 million in compensation and $3 million more for Erving’s contract.

He went on to win the NBA title in 1983, just as he had twice in the ABA. He was the only player to win MVP in both leagues, an 11-time NBA All-Star (16 overall), and retired with career averages of 24.2 points, 8.5 rebounds, and 4.5 assists. The Knicks’ refusal to take him? Still widely seen as the worst mistake in the franchise’s long history of them.

And so, what they called a “merger” was, as Slick Leonard later put it, “really a massacre.” But it also birthed the modern NBA – with a little help from a polyester fortune, a late-night telethon, and a little girl with $5 to spare.