George McGinnis dies at 73; Made his way to basketball stardom

George McGinnis, whose rare combination of size and agility made him a mainstay of two early 1970s championship teams of the fledgling American Basketball Association, but whose heralded partnership with Julius Erving in the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers fell short of the expectations of a title, died Thursday. in Indianapolis. He was 73.

The Indiana Pacers, the team with which he won his ABA titles, said his death, in a hospital, was the result of complications from cardiac arrest, which he suffered last week at his home in Indianapolis. McGinnis had difficulty walking in recent years after undergoing multiple back surgeries for a hereditary condition, the team said.

McGinnis played at the high school, college and professional levels in basketball-obsessed Indiana, where he broke Oscar Robertson’s scholastic scoring records while leading Washington High School in Indianapolis to a 31-0 record and a championship in 1969.

As a forward, he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds in his lone season at Indiana University before joining his hometown Indiana Pacers. The Pacers immediately won back-to-back ABA championships, although McGinnis, surrounded by veterans Mel Daniels, Roger Brown and Bob Netolickywasn’t the team’s undisputed star until his second season, when he averaged 27.6 points and 12.5 rebounds per game.

At 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds, McGinnis heralded basketball’s athletic revolution, featuring taller players who could be muscular around the basket but more agile with each passing decade, and skillfully navigate the open could navigate space.

“Big guys in my day couldn’t handle the ball,” he said in an interview with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame before he was inducted initiated in 2017, an honor that many felt was seriously overdue 35 years after his retirement. “But I could dribble with my left hand, my right hand and bring guys out.”

He credited these skills to the coaching he received growing up in Indiana, where “the fundamentals are taught well,” he said.

Pacers teammate Len Elmore — McGinnis’ last in Indiana before joining the 76ers in 1975 — said in a telephone interview that he reverted to McGinnis when LeBron James, slightly taller at 6-foot-1 and 250 pounds, left the league entered. NBA in 2003 with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

“Similar size, strength and mobility,” Elmore said, “I remember saying it right away: George was LeBron before LeBron. You couldn’t believe he could be so agile with his body.”

A distinctive part of McGinnis’ game was his midrange jumper, a right-handed shot put-style release that made purists cringe. “It was different, but he made it work for him,” Elmore said.

After leading the ABA in scoring, with an average of 29.8 points, and sharing the 1974–75 Most Valuable Player Award with Erving, his future 76ers teammate, McGinnis left the cash-strapped Pacers, calling his departure ‘ a matter of dollars and cents’.

In a challenge to the NBA’s constitution, he attempted to bypass Philadelphia’s draft rights by signing with the New York Knicks. But when the league voided the deal, McGinnis joined the 76ers and accepted a six-year contract for $3.2 million (the equivalent of about $18.3 million today). It took one season for the team to acquire Erving from the New York Nets as it entered the NBA with three other ABA teams, including the Pacers.

“George was the turning point of pro basketball in this city,” Pat Williams, the team’s general manager, told Sports Illustrated in 1982. “Julius put up the walls and a roof, but it was George who laid the foundation.”

The 76ers’ slogan for McGinnis’ first season in Philadelphia was “Let George Do It.” Led by McGinnis, who was chosen to play in the first of his three NBA All-Star games, the 76ers increased their win total to 46 from the previous season’s 34, but lost in the first round of the playoffs.

Erving’s arrival accelerated the sport, although there were many questions about whether the two prolific forwards could co-exist. “It was inevitable that people would say we hated each other, but Julius and I knew it wasn’t true, and we rose above it,” McGinnis said in the Sports Illustrated article.

The 76ers came within two wins of fulfilling their supposed destiny, winning the first two games against the Portland Trail Blazers in the finals of the 1976-77 league. But the Bill Walton-led Blazers won the next four. McGinnis struggled with his shot until the last game in Portland, when he scored 28 points.

Trailing by two with one final possession in Game 6, 76ers head coach Gene Shue called a play for McGinnis. Erving, who had already scored 40, was stunned as Shue bypassed him and Doug Collins, the team’s best pure shooter.

After another disheartening playoff finish the following season, the 76ers dealt McGinnis to the Denver Nuggets, landing Bobby Jones, whose stalwart defense better complemented Erving and helped the 76ers win the title in 1983.

McGinnis did not have a long career, especially compared to James’ 21st century standard. His performance declined in Denver, partly due to an Achilles tendon injury. He returned to the Pacers during the 1979-80 season and finished his eleventh and final professional season, 1981-82, with an average of 4.7 points over 76 games.

George F. McGinnis was born on August 12, 1950 in Harpersville, Ala., about 30 miles southeast of Birmingham, to Burnie and Willie (Keith) McGinnis. His father was a carpenter. With a daughter, Bonnie, the family settled on the west side of Indianapolis.

During McGinnis’ senior year of high school, his father died after falling from scaffolding at a construction site — days after watching George score 53 points and grab 30 rebounds in an All-Star game. McGinnis, who was also an all-state football player, said he left Indiana University early to help support his mother.

He expressed regret about not playing for Indiana coach Bobby Knight for a season, speculating, “I think it would have given me different values.” (Knight died in November.)

McGinnis was married for 43 years to Lynda (Dotson) McGinnis, who had been a high school friend. She died of cancer in 2019, not long after, he underwent surgery to address a back problem, spinal stenosis, which required him to walk hunched over with a cane or walker. His survivors include his sister, Bonnie McGinnis.

After his playing years, McGinnis worked as a broadcaster in Indianapolis, where in 1991 he and his wife founded GM Supply Company, a supplier of specialty tools and abrasives to manufacturers.

McGinnis remained a popular presence in the state’s basketball community and was inducted into the Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame in September.

Twenty years earlier, he told The New York Times, “One of the great things about being a basketball player in Indiana is that they never forget you.”

Alex Traub reporting contributed.