Fifty Years After Wilt Chamberlain’s Trade to Los Angeles

Fifty Years After Wilt Chamberlain’s Trade to Los Angeles.

LeBron wasn’t the first legendary player to plan a trade to the Lakers. Bob Ryan, Elgin Baylor, and Jerry West discuss how the trade of one of the greatest basketball players ever predicted the current era of celebrity culture.

Which is more unbelievable: LeBron James building his second career superteam or LeBron James signing a long-term contract elsewhere without the assurance of a superteam? Still in his prime at 33, he was a free agent with the ability to completely alter the destiny of any team he picked. When LeBron signed a four-year, $153.3 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, it didn’t completely tip the NBA’s competitive balance, but it was strange nonetheless because LeBron, a present powerhouse, aligned himself with a historic one.

When the Lakers relocated from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in 1960, they sent five championship banners with them. However, Los Angeles, a basketball city known for its history and stature, was unable to purchase a ring from the Boston Celtics.

Boston Celtics up until the arrival of Wilt Chamberlain. LeBron will be bound by the purple-and-gold L.A. prestige because of a transaction that took place nearly exactly 50 years before he signed a contract there. It was one of the most notoriously unfair trades in league history.

The Philadelphia 76ers traded Chamberlain to the Lakers on July 9, 1968, in return for three players: forward Jerry Chambers, center Darrall Imhoff (draft pick #2 overall), and Archie Clark, a gifted combo guard.

However, the action was really a façade of a typical NBA deal. Actually, twenty years before unrestricted free agency existed, Wilt, who was two years younger than LeBron at the time and equally influential, pulled off a shadow free-agency move. In the process, he also helped to create the first superteam in basketball history. Before LeBron, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh; before Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, and Ray Allen; and before Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and DeMarcus Cousins.

West sent an email saying, “We heard the superteam talk.” “You had three outstanding players with excellent stats.” According to Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe, it was “the great-grandfather of all these cheap ideas today.” That was the first significant one.

Occupational freedom of movement was severely restricted until 1976, when a lawsuit brought by Oscar Robertson forced the league into a sort of restricted free agency. When I spoke with Baylor on the phone in June, he told me, “You were with a certain team, and if you were with that team, you were their property.” Additionally, they may have chosen to keep you or get rid of you. At that time, athletes had no influence over whether to stay in the game because contracts included typical provisions known as “reserve clauses,” which granted owners the ability to keep their players after their contracts expired. There weren’t many agents, so even if a player had one, the front office wasn’t always needed .

When the American Basketball Association was established in 1967, players were the closest thing to having free agency. A player could no longer do anything but threaten to retire; thanks to the ABA, they could at least switch leagues. The NBA’s biggest names were recruited by the ABA, and some, like Rick Barry, jumped at the chance. Barry established the standard for how to legally leave a team: even in that case, the player would have to wait out a year for the reserve clause to expire. Barry was sued by the Warriors after joining the Oakland Oaks of the ABA. Though a thin one, it became a negotiating chip for improved contracts—the ABA was working with a restricted budget.

Rules are what they are. Unless, of course, you’re the neighboring 7-foot-tall black millionaire. Ryan, who began working for the Globe as an intern one month prior to the Lakers trade, claimed that “Wilt was different.” “With him, the rules were different. He lacked the formal power that you would have in the modern day. He possessed telepathic power.