It is NBA gospel to believe that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, shining stars as they were in the East (and West), enabled the league to rise into the firmament, to become the Goliath it has since become.
Upon their arrival in 1979, they polished pro basketball’s profile, burying its sordid, drug-addled past and paving the way for the Michael Jordans and the Kobe Bryants and the LeBron Jameses.
And verily, David Stern and Adam Silver have said, it is good.
Julius Erving, forever the epitome of decorum and decency, is an unlikely blasphemer. And yet, Dr. J said this entire idea is “bullshit” in the 2025 book “Magic in the Air,” by Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski.
Erving believes that the NBA’s ascension can be traced not to the Bird-Magic bump but rather the league’s merger with the ABA in 1976 – that the resulting infusion of talent and flair led to a quantum leap.
The Good Doctor acknowledged in Sielski’s book that Magic and Bird brought “a great rivalry” from college to Los Angeles and Boston, respectively, where it became white hot. It was, Erving said, “a good story.”
“But truth be told,” he told the author, “I think in terms of the popularity of the league, the league was never more popular than it was after the ABA joined the league. Eleven All-Stars in that first All-Star game were from the ABA. That’s what saved the league.”
Both things can be true, of course. Erving and the ABAers brought talent, style and panache to a league sorely in need of all three. But in migrating to the two most storied franchises, Bird and Magic gave the NBA sizzle beyond measure. And that obscured all else … at least until MJ came along in 1984.
Recent media offerings have brought the ABA’s role in the NBA’s resurrection to the fore, none better than Luke Epplin’s new book “Moses and the Doctor: Two Men, One Championship and the Birth of Modern Basketball.” With a painstaking eye for detail and a novelist’s knack for narrative, Epplin – who in fact once dreamed of becoming a novelist – underscores the impact not only of Dr. J but another ABA alum of note, Moses Malone. And it is artfully framed around the Sixers’ 1982-83 championship run.
“My biggest thing is character,” Epplin, 47, said before a book signing last Tuesday, the day “Moses and the Doctor” was released.
That’s befitting of a man who had trained to be a novelist at Washington University in St. Louis, and who continued to write fiction into his 30s. Then he came to a realization.
“I sucked,” he told those who gathered at the signing, at a bookstore near Rittenhouse Square.
But, he added, “I use the techniques I developed as a failed novelist to write these kinds of stories.”
He did that in his 2021 book “Our Team,” about the Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s, and he does it here. In the process he echoes, at least to a degree, not only Sielski’s book, but also one authored in 2025 by Paul Knepper entitled “Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet,” as well as an Amazon Prime documentary released last week called “Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association.“
And really, what better characters are there than Doc and Moses? What better story is there than theirs? Erving was soaring and elegant, Moses down and dirty. They were perfect complements to one another, a veritable yin and yang.
While apart, their successes were considerable. Dr. J won two championships as a New York Net while keeping the ABA afloat, and Moses established himself as one of the greatest rebounders in history after becoming the first player to make the prep-to-pro jump. Epplin nonetheless argues that their tales were pockmarked with failure.
Malone broke in with the Utah Stars as a 19-year-old in October 1974, then bounced from team to team. Indeed, one of pro basketball’s great what-ifs is how things might have turned out if the Portland Trail Blazers, his first NBA landing spot, had held onto him, given the subsequent injuries suffered by Bill Walton. As it was, Malone never appeared in a regular-season game for the Blazers, who traded him to Buffalo, leading to another what-if: The Braves (now the Los Angeles Clippers) had Bob McAdoo! And Ernie DiGregorio! And Adrian Dantley! And the eternally underrated Randy Smith!
Moses played exactly two games in Buffalo before he was shipped out to Houston, where he blossomed. Even led the undermanned Rockets to the 1981 Finals, at which point he argued that he and four guys from his native Petersburg, Va., could take down Bird and the mighty Celtics. We’ll never know, but certainly the Rockets couldn’t; they lost in six games.
Meantime Erving, acquired by the Sixers from the cash-strapped Nets in the fall of ‘76, was experiencing his own frustrations. As part of a talented but dysfunctional ‘76-77 Philadelphia club, he lost in the Finals to Walton’s Blazers. Then Doc fell short against Magic’s Lakers in the ‘80 and ‘82 Finals as well.
By that point Dr. J was a beloved figure – the sport’s foremost ambassador, a high-profile pitchman and the perfect teammate. Bobby Jones, with whom Epplin spoke for his book, once told me for one of mine that unlike other superstars, Erving was “an encourager.”
“He wasn’t arrogant,” Bobby said. “He didn’t consider himself better than anybody. He worked as hard as anybody, if not harder. Didn’t put anybody down for the mistakes that they made. That’s easy to do at that level, when the game’s on the line or something’s on the line. He knows he can do it, but you’re in a position where you have to do it, and you don’t, it takes strength of character to say, ‘We’re in this together. We win together, we lose together.’ I think that was probably, to me, his greatest quality.”
That is as great a testimonial as any teammate could offer another, but that’s Bobby. And that was Julius. Which is why everyone – and I mean everyone – wanted to see him win an NBA championship.
It’s also why he was beginning to wonder if he ever would. He cried in the Los Angeles Forum’s visiting locker room after the Sixers were eliminated by the Lakers in six games in the ‘82 Finals.
To revisit the Biblical theme: Julius wept.
When Epplin learned of this, it immediately struck a chord.
“I thought, there’s the break right there: Why is Julius Erving crying?” he told last week’s gathering.
The answer is simple: Dr. J would not be fulfilled without a title. His tale would be incomplete.
Then Moses came to Philly via trade, bringing with him the means of completion and redemption. No longer would the Sixers be bullied inside. No longer would they have to live with inconsistency at center, as had been the case with the eternally entertaining and eternally frustrating Darryl Dawkins. (Caldwell Jones had been around, too. But he was more a complementary piece than the dominating force Moses was, and was ultimately jettisoned in the Malone trade.)
The following spring, back in the Forum, the Sixers finished off a sweep of a Lakers team that by the end was without McAdoo, James Worthy and Norm Nixon due to injury – i.e., two Hall of Famers and a terrific guard.
No matter, though – the Sixers were the best team all year, storming to 65 victories and then nearly fulfilling Moses’ fo’, fo’, fo’ playoff prophecy. (And consider how Moses, famously averse to media interactions, uttered two of the greatest quotes in NBA history – this one, and the one about the dudes from Petersburg.)
It is a testimony to Malone (who died in 2015) and Erving that they were able to meld their talents, that they knew they needed each other at that point in their careers. And it is testimony to Epplin that he was able to deftly navigate this most fascinating period in the history of the Sixers, and the league. That he was able to retell a tale that needs to be retold, for the sake of context. It is inarguable that Bird and Magic brought a great deal to the table, but Moses and Dr. J are among those deserving of a seat, too. In this book, each is given one.