Pete Maravich

Pelicans.com

Highlights from New Orleans Jazz/LSU great Pete Maravich's 68 point game against the New York Knicks on February 25, 1977.

highlights-from-pete-maravichs-68-point-game

Highlights from Pete Maravich's 68 point game

Wednesday night at 7 p.m. basketball fans in New Orleans will get to watch one of the great scoring performances in NBA history, Pete Maravich’s 68-point game against the New York Knicks.

The game, a 124-107 victory for the New Orleans Jazz, will be broadcast on Fox Sports New Orleans. If you miss the initial showing, or just want to watch Pistol Pete do his thing again, it will be re-aired at 10 p.m.

Maravich’s 68-point game on Feb. 25, 1977 in the Superdome was the highest outing by a guard in NBA history at the time – only big men Wilt Chamberlain (100) and Elgin Baylor (71) had scored more - and Maravich did it without the benefit of a 3-point line.

“I honestly did not know I had that many,” Maravich said after the game. “ You never really know, you never think about how many points you have.”

“If there were a 3-point line over 75 easy,” said Kriegel, a ring-side boxing analyst for ESPN. “Could Pete have gone for 81 or 82? I like to think so.”

Another factor that kept the 68 points from being even more, Maravich fouled out with one minute and 18 seconds to play.

“They fouled him out of the game on two offensive fouls against Tom McMillen,” Kriegel said. “Michael Jordan could not relate to that.”

In The Times-Picayune’s postgame recap, Maravich said that the fouls were judgment calls by the referees, especially the final one.

“Another ref and it could have been a 3-point play,” Maravich said of the charging call that sent him to the bench.

No matter, it was an historic night in NBA and New Orleans basketball history and we all can re-live it Wednesday at 7 p.m. on Fox Sports. It’s been 50 years since the Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer was forced to retire in 1980 because of knee problems, ending his spectacular NBA career at just 10 seasons. Maravich would die eight years later of a heart ailment while playing a pickup basketball game in California. He was 40 years old.

Fifty years of not seeing the ultimate basketball showman, a 6-foot-5 guard with an accurate jump shot, otherworldly passing and ultimate ball control. “His size and skill announced the modern ballplayer,” Kriegel said.

Wednesday night is a chance for New Orleans basketball fans to re-live one of the great performances in NBA history. “It’s more than just the magic,” Kriegel said of watching Maravich play. “It’s the tempo, the look on his face, those moments of ecstasy. You can feel he’s touching the crowd.”

For one night, New Orleans can experience the Maravich magic again.

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Watching re-broadcast of Pete Maravich's 68-point game a chance for New Orleans to witness his magic again

Jim Eichenhofer

Some of the stories from the initial few seasons of New Orleans in the NBA sound more like the stone ages of professional basketball, as opposed to something that took place a couple generations ago. For example, when the inaugural ’74-75 Jazz played home games at Loyola Fieldhouse – which used an elevated three-foot stage for its basketball court – the team put up nets all the way around the hardwood, for safety purposes. As Sports Illustrated explained of the reasoning behind the protective nets, “The NBA Players Association, conjuring visions of their dues-paying members hurtling off the edges, made the Jazz (pay) $5,000 for restraining nets.”

“Because of the elevated court, the nets were there to keep you from falling over the side of the floor,” New Orleans Jazz forward Aaron James said, laughing at the memory.

That bizarre setup is only the tip of the iceberg, however. In virtually every notable category, the 1970s NBA is almost completely unrecognizable when compared to today’s league. Here is a partial but lengthy list of many of the largest differences, based on interviews this month with former members of the New Orleans Jazz:

Reliable information on player salaries is spotty at best prior to the NBA instituting a salary cap in 1984-85, but consider this: When the league implemented that rule five years after the Jazz left the Big Easy, the entire salary cap per team was just $3.6 million. According to Basketball Reference, 10 of New Orleans’ 15 roster players in 2019-20 earned more than that individually. Even after you factor in rises in inflation and cost of living, today’s players make an infinitely better living than 1970s Jazz players did.

However, as James points out, there’s little reason for retired players like him to waste time dwelling on that fact. During parts of three seasons, Elgin Baylor was New Orleans Jazz head coach. One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players of all time, Baylor had been a star forward for the Lakers in the 1960s.

“But a lot of us (1970s players) made more money than Elgin ever did when he was a player,” said James, a career 10.8 ppg scorer. “Times just change.”

In newspaper accounts of Pete Maravich’s 68-point game vs. New York in February 1977, Jazz rookie Paul Griffin is quoted as saying in jest to Maravich, “It’s about time you earned your salary!”

Maravich was under contract that season for $600,000.

New Orleans Jazz official scorer Bob Remy – who later served for a decade-plus on the stat crew for the Hornets and Pelicans – still has ticket stubs from Jazz games. The most expensive ducats in the vast majority of the Superdome cost only $5 or $7. In fact, during some of the most well-attended games in the venue, thousands of fans gained admission for only $1.50. The Jazz hosted the Philadelphia 76ers and Julius Erving (“Dr. J”) in the Dome in ’77 and drew 35,077 fans, then an NBA record. A ’75 game vs. the Lakers featured 26,511 spectators.

The process of selling tickets to games was much less complicated 45 years ago, which was definitely a good thing, because in those days, NBA franchises only had a minuscule number of full-time employees. Remy recalls the Jazz having a staff of fewer than 20 people (everyone now has 100-plus). There were also far fewer assistants on coaching staffs; the team trainer doubled as equipment manager and travel secretary, among other responsibilities. Team security? It did not exist. Star players such as Maravich had to fend for themselves in situations where large gatherings of fans wanted an autograph.

Speaking of throngs of fans, Remy remembers a preseason road trip in which the Jazz were on a commercial flight, landing in another city – and apparently word got out that Maravich would be strolling through the airport. When the Jazz got off the plane, a hundred-plus fans were at the gate waiting for “Pistol Pete.” Yes, in those days, no teams took charter flights, so Americans wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see entire NBA rosters sitting by their gate, waiting to get on a flight along with everyone else.

“If you were playing a back-to-back in two different cities, you had to get on the first available flight the next morning,” Jazz forward Paul Griffin explained. “So we had a lot of 6 a.m. wakeup calls, where we’d have a flight at 8 (then arrive in the second city the same day of the game).”

Due to NBA teams now relying exclusively on private flights, same-day travel never happens in 2020, barring a weather delay or some other unusual circumstance.

Not only did 1970s NBA teams travel by commercial flight, but the league’s schedule was also far less hospitable than it is today. Modern players sometimes talk about how fatigue can set in and affect them during the “dog days” of the season – right before the All-Star break – but many might be shocked to learn some of the details about the old schedule. When Maravich rang up 68 points vs. New York in a late February game, the Jazz had already previously played four back-to-back-to-backs that season. One of those three games-in-three-days sets featured October contests in the cities of New Orleans, New York and Cleveland over barely more than a 48-hour span.

During an infamous period of the 1970s and early 1980s, NBA Finals games were often shown on TV via tape delay, preempted by more popular network programming. As Griffin noted, when he signed with San Antonio for the 1979-80 season, the Spurs only broadcast 14 games all season on local television, all road games (many teams kept home games off local TV, theoretically increasing the incentive for fans to buy tickets). In the case of Maravich’s 68-point game, in hindsight, it is fortunate that the Knicks happened to be televising that night, because otherwise there may not be any footage of the historic scoring performance. There’s no video available from many historic NBA games, including Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point night in 1962.

Remy remembers seeing plenty of fisticuffs during games in the 1970s, with dustups happening so frequently that in general, no one made much of a big deal about them (perhaps partly related to the lack of media and TV coverage). At times, no foul was whistled even after a punch was landed; with no replay reviews available, if the referees didn’t see an incident in real time, they had no recourse but to just let the game continue. There were so many scuffles, Remy noted that a tongue-in-cheek joke among some media and fans about the NBA back then was, “I went to a boxing match and a basketball game broke out!”  There was no such thing as a flagrant foul, either - the NBA did not enact penalties for hard fouls until ’90.

In ’74, when the New Orleans Jazz were a brand-new expansion team, not a single TV viewer tuned in to hear the final selection announced. Not only because the draft went a staggering 10 rounds, but also because it wasn’t even televised. The NBA draft has been a two-round process since ’89.

Despite being a fifth-round pick, Griffin played seven seasons in the NBA, appearing in 480 games. These days, he may not have even had the opportunity to try to make the team.

“They think you’re a long shot,” Griffin said of the perception of his roster chances when he was picked in Round 5. “The Jazz basically set me a contract (in the mail) and said, ‘Sign it.’ There was no negotiating, and I knew that.”

In perhaps the best tale that illustrates the difference between the NBA’s old school and now, when the Jazz opened their first season in ’74-75, the brand-new, inexperienced team started 0-11 and 1-16, with the only victory coming by a point over Portland. A higher-up at the Elias Sports Bureau in New York City started to notice that when the Jazz submitted stats by phone after home games, New Orleans players invariably were being given credit for more assists than the visiting team, despite losing by big margins (and therefore scoring fewer baskets). While calling in stats after one game, Remy remembers getting an earful from Elias, because the stat-keeping organization was upset about what they believed was a clear fudging of the numbers. Fitting for ’74, though, there were no game tapes available for anyone to review. There was no way to correct or adjust misinterpretations of statistics – a process that happens on a nightly basis in the NBA of 2020. Back then, the only “recourse” Elias had to try to fix the problem was to yell into the phone at Remy and exclaim, “Hey Remy from New Orleans! What the heck are you doing down there!?”

in-many-ways-the-1970s-nba-of-the-new-orleans-jazz-bears-no-resemblance-to-todays-league

In many ways, the 1970s NBA of the New Orleans Jazz bears no resemblance to today’s league

NEW ORLEANS – The New Orleans Pelicans and FOX Sports New Orleans today announced the re-broadcast of the February 25, 1977 matchup between the New Orleans Jazz and the New York Knicks, airing tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. as part of FOX Sports New Orleans’ encore programming.

In front of a sold-out crowd at the Louisiana Superdome, ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich scored a career-best 68 points against a Knicks team that featured five Hall of Famers including Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Bob McAdoo, Earl Monroe, and Phil Jackson.

Maravich appeared in 330 career regular-season games for the Jazz from 1974-79. A five-time NBA All-Star and four-time All-NBA selection, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1987. Prior his professional career, Maravich starred at LSU where he was a unanimous three-time All-American and the 1970 College Player of the Year, and holds the NCAA record for career points (3,667) and points per game (44.2).

Additionally, FOX Sports New Orleans will air a New Orleans Jazz Classic TV pregame show at 6:30 p.m., during which Pelicans play-by-play man Joel Meyers will preview the contest and interview a number of the game’s participants including McAdoo, Maravich’s Jazz teammate Jim McElroy, and Jazz official scorer and New Orleans basketball historian Bob Remy.

FOX Sports New Orleans encore programming is available statewide on cable and satellite providers Cox, DirecTV, AT&T U-Verse, and Charter:

fox-sports-new-orleans-to-re-air-new-orleans-jazz-legend-pete-maravichs-68-point-performance-against-the-new-york-knicks

Fox Sports New Orleans to re-air New Orleans Jazz legend Pete Maravich's 68-point performance against the New York Knicks

They’d already watched him rack up 51 and 50 points in games earlier that season, so a high-scoring performance by New Orleans teammate Pete Maravich came as no surprise. But this was different. On Feb. 25, 1977, future Hall of Famer “Pistol Pete” fired in 31 points by halftime, connecting on shots from all over the Superdome hardwood. Without saying a word to each other, Jazz players understood the strategy: Make sure Pete touches the rock as much as possible.

“When he got on a roll like that, we were happy to get him the ball,” remembered then-Jazz rookie forward Paul Griffin 43 years later of Maravich, who went on to tally 68 points in a 124-107 win over the New York Knicks. At the time, it was the highest-scoring game by a guard in NBA history.

“It was just amazing,” said then-Jazz forward Aaron James last week, from his home in Ruston, La. “We were just watching Pete. He could score in just about any way possible. He could shoot right-handed, left-handed, off the wrong foot. He could shoot hooks.”

Indeed, if you watch the somewhat-grainy YouTube footage from New York’s TV broadcast feed, you’ll see Maravich crack the scoresheet on a crafty lefty baseline layup for an and-one; on one second-quarter field goal, he takes a pass while stationed at the right block and – all in one motion – improvises a sweeping hook shot. You probably could watch the entire ’19-20 NBA season and never see the latter move executed by a guard.

Maravich’s career-high scoring eruption is now the 13th-best offensive game in 70-plus years of the NBA. Only seven other players have ever tallied more (Wilt Chamberlain six times, Kobe Bryant, David Thompson, David Robinson, Elgin Baylor, Devin Booker, Michael Jordan). Maravich – who died at age 40 in 1988 due to heart failure, while playing a pickup basketball game – never got to see fellow prolific guard Bryant’s 81-point game in ’06 or the 70 points Booker put up in Boston in ’17. Coincidentally, Maravich’s shooting line from the field on Feb. 25, 1977, is very similar to that of Bryant’s 81-point game, with Maravich going 26/43 and Bryant at 28/46. At the foul line, Maravich was 16/19, while “Mamba” went 18/20. The separation in total points partly comes from Bryant shooting 7/13 from a three-point line that did not exist in the NBA until ’79-80. Maravich was a renowned deep shooter, but only got credit for two points on his long-range bombs.

“It was pretty fun to watch,” Griffin said of Maravich’s 68-point display. “He had so much scoring prowess that it was not unheard of for him to do something like that, but it was still quite a feat, especially without a three-point stripe. He won the scoring championship that year and averaged (31.1) points a game, so we were used to it. But that night, he was just feeling it.”

Maravich also could’ve benefited from a three-point arc while he was dominating college basketball at LSU (career average of 44.2 ppg, still the best of all time), but the NCAA did not adopt a line until the mid-80s.

“He did the same thing in college – once he got going, he was going to shoot it,” said Griffin, himself a Western Michigan standout. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if there were a three-point shot when he was in college.”

As Maravich shot 26/43 in his 68-point game, his teammates combined on 48 percent shooting, splitting up 24/50 accuracy (reserve guard Mo Howard was the Jazz’s No. 2 scorer with 12 points). More than four decades later, when former New Orleans Jazz players are asked to list the most memorable moments from their NBA careers, some use a joke that always draws laughter after the punch line is revealed.

Griffin: “Sometimes I will say to people, ‘Hey, did you know Pistol Pete and I once combined to score 70 points in a game?’ ”

After a pause, Griffin – who shot just 1/2 from the floor that night, but had eight rebounds and five assists – adds, “Yes, Pete had 68 points. I had two.”

James tells another story that sums up how unique Maravich’s scoring achievement was, particularly as Maravich faced a star-laden New York team that had won a pair of NBA championships that decade. James has attended reunions featuring former NBA players and recalled how ex-pros at one gathering were ribbing New York guard Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, for allowing Maravich to score 68 points against him. Monroe had a response at the ready.

James: “The guys were all saying to him, ‘Hey Earl, do you remember that night when Pete got 68 points on you?’ ”

Monroe jokingly countered that even to this day, he accepts little responsibility for New York’s rough night defensively, pointing a finger at fellow backcourt star Walt “Clyde” Frazier. Like Maravich, both Monroe and Frazier were named to the NBA’s 50 greatest players of all time list at the ’96 NBA All-Star Game.

“No,” Monroe responded with a sly grin to his former NBA colleagues. “Pete got four points on me… and 64 on Clyde!”

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Forty-three years later, New Orleans Jazz teammates share fond memories of Pete Maravich’s 68-point game

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