George McGinnis, whose rare combination of size and agility made him a mainstay on two championship teams in the early 1970s in the fledgling NBA, but his heralded pairing with Julius Erving on the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers fell short of title expectations , died Thursday. in Indianapolis. It was 73.
The Indiana Pacers, the team he won ABA titles with, said his death, at a hospital, was from complications of a cardiac arrest he suffered last week at his home in Indianapolis. McGinnis had struggled to walk in recent years after multiple back surgeries due to an inherited condition, the team said.
McGinnis played in high school, college and professionally in basketball-obsessed Indiana, where he broke Oscar Robertson’s varsity scoring records while leading Indianapolis Washington High School to a 31-0 record and a championship in 1969.
As a forward, he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds in his one season at Indiana University before joining his hometown Indiana Pacers. The Pacers immediately won back-to-back ABA championships, although McGinnis, flanked by veterans Mel Daniels, Roger Brown and Bob Netolicky, was not the team’s undisputed star until his sophomore season, when he averaged 27.6 points and 12, 5 rebounds per game.
At a chiseled 6 feet 8 inches, 235 pounds, McGinnis was the harbinger of basketball’s athletic revolution, with taller players who could be brooding around the basket but more agile away from it with each passing decade, deftly navigating the open space.
“The big guys of my era couldn’t handle the ball,” he said in an interview at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame before he was inducted in 2017, an honor many thought was grossly overdue 35 years after he retired. “But I could dribble with my left hand, my right hand and get guys out.”
He credited those skills to the coaching he got growing up in Indiana, where “the fundamentals are taught well,” he said.
Len Elmore, a Pacers teammate for one season — McGuinness’ last in Indiana before joining the 76ers in 1975 — said in a telephone interview that he returned to McGuinness when the slightly taller 6-foot, 250-pound LeBron James entered the NBA in 2003 with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“Similar size, strength, mobility,” Elmore said, “I remember saying it right away — George was LeBron before LeBron. You couldn’t believe that with his body he could be so agile.”
A signature part of McGuinness’ game was his mid-range jumper, a shot-like right hand that made purists cringe. “It was different, but he made it work for him,” Elmore said.
After leading the ABA in scoring, averaging 29.8 points, and sharing the 1974-75 MVP award with Erving, his future 76ers teammate, McGuinness left the Pacers, calling his departure “a matter of dollars and cents’.
In a challenge to NBA bylaws, 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, accepting a six-year contract for $3.2 million (equivalent to about $18.3 million today). It was a season before the team acquired Erving from the New York Nets as he entered the NBA with three other ABA teams, including the Pacers.
“George was the game changer of professional basketball in this town,” Pat Williams, the team’s general manager, told Sports Illustrated in 1982. “Julius put up the walls and a roof, but George was the one who built the foundations”.
The 76ers’ motto for McGinnis’ first season in Philadelphia was “Let George Do It.” Led by McGinnis, who was voted to play in the first of three NBA All-Star games, the 76ers increased their win total to 46 from 34 the previous season, but lost in the first round of the playoffs.
Erving’s arrival electrified the sport, though questions abounded about whether the two prolific power forwards could co-exist. “It was inevitable that people would say we hated each other, but Julius and I knew that wasn’t true and we were over it,” McGuinness said in the Sports Illustrated article.
The 76ers were two wins away from fulfilling their supposed destiny, taking the first two games against the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1976-77 championship finals. But the Bill Walton-led Blazers won the next four. McGuinness struggled with his shooting until the final game in Portland, when he scored 28 points.
Trailing by two with one final possession in Game 6, 76ers coach Gene Shue called a game for McGinnis. Erving, who had already scored 40, was stunned by Sue and Doug Collins, the team’s best pure shooter.
After another heartbreaking playoff exit the following season, the 76ers dealt McGinnis to the Denver Nuggets, landing Bobby Jones, whose solid defense complemented Erving better and helped the 76ers win the 1983 title.
McGuinness didn’t have a long career, especially by James’ 21st century standards. His performance dipped in Denver, in part due to an Achilles tendon injury. He returned to the Pacers in 1979-80, finishing his 11th and final professional season, 1981-82, averaging 4.7 points in 76 games.
George F. McGinnis was born Aug. 12, 1950, in Harpersville, Ala., about 30 miles southeast of Birmingham, the son of Burnie and Willie (Keith) McGinnis. His father was a carpenter. With one daughter, Bonnie, the family settled on the west side of Indianapolis.
During McGinnis’ high school years, 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 lamented missing out on playing for Indiana coach Bobby Knight for one season, speculating, “I think he would have given me different values.” (Knight died in November.)
McGinnis was married for 43 years to Lynda (Dotson) McGinnis, who was a high school friend. He died of cancer in 2019, not long after undergoing surgery to treat a back problem, spinal stenosis, that forced him to walk stooped with a cane or walker. His survivors include his sister, Bonnie McGuinness;
After his playing years, McGinnis worked as a broadcaster in Indianapolis, where he and his wife founded GM Supply Company, a supplier of specialty tools and abrasives to manufacturers, in 1991.
McGinnis remained a popular player in the state’s basketball community and was inducted into the Indiana University 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 contributed to the report.
