MCT wrote:If this team could have access to any player from the 1961-62 ABL,
This is of course, a big "if". I realize that Jerry's original post is asking us to assume that this happens, not give reasons why it couldn't, but a few things would need to be worked out:
1) What would happen to the NBA rights to these players?
When the NBA and ABA merged in 1976, with a few minor exceptions (mostly related to free agency), these rights simply went away. Merging teams kept the players they had, and players from the two other teams that survived all the way to the merger were entered into a dispersal draft. It is my understanding that teams who lost the NBA rights to players could submit a claim to a compensation pool established for this purpose, but the money they received was probably pennies on the dollar. One might simply say, "the NBA would have done the same thing with the ABL", but I'm not so sure.
--The ABA had been around for nine years. The ABL had been around for one. NBA owners may have been less willing to let teams from an upstart league keep players if that league had only been around for a single season.
--At the time of the merger, most of the ABA players whose NBA rights were held by someone were draft picks who had never actually played in the NBA; there were few players in the ABA who had jumped leagues after playing out their option. Many of the players involved had been drafted years before, and the NBA teams that held their rights had moved on without them. Some had been drafted purely for speculative value, or had not been high draft picks in the first place. Not every player was like this (Exhibit A: David Thompson), but losing the rights to those who were may have been easier for NBA teams to swallow. By contrast, the ABL had a number of players who had jumped leagues, and all of the players who were draft picks were from the past year or two. NBA owners may have been less willing to let these players go.
--In 1976, the NBA had been through years of battles with both a rival league and the labor movement. The idea that teams could use the reserve clause to keep players under their thumbs forever had crumbled. That was not so in 1962. I think many NBA owners in 1962 would have taken the attitude that "These players belong to us, period, end of discussion."
The history of the ABL at the APBR web site states that if the Pipers had jumped to the NBA, they would have had to pay an indemnity to the Royals for Jerry Lucas' rights. The Pipers had several other players whose NBA rights probably belonged to someone (Barnett, Warley, Siegfried, Dierking, Barnhill, Cox), but it's not clear to me how they would have been handled.
2) The ABL had a handful of prominent players who had been blacklisted from the NBA due to peripheral involvement in point shaving scandals (e.g., Connie Hawkins, Bill Spivey, Tony Jackson). Would these players have been allowed to move to the NBA, or would any ABL teams that joined the NBA (either as individual teams, or as a single "super-team") been forced to leave them behind?