Tragic news: we just found out about the death of a world-class player from 76xers.
On Thursday, George McGinnis passed away in Indianapolis. While he was an integral part of two championship teams in the American Basketball Association in the early 1970s, expectations for a championship pairing with Julius Erving on the National Basketball Association’s Philadelphia 76ers were not met. His age was 73 years old.
He played for and won his A.B.A. titles with the Indiana Pacers, who announced his death in the hospital on Friday. The cause of death was listed as complications from a cardiac arrest he experienced last week at home. According to the team, McGinnis has had trouble walking recently because of a hereditary problem that needed repeated back surgeries.
In basketball-crazed Indiana, where McGinnis played at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels, he shattered Oscar Robertson’s records for academic scoring while leading Washington High School to a 31-0 record and a championship in 1969.
Before playing for his native Indiana Pacers, he spent one season as a forward at Indiana University, where he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds. The Pacers quickly won back-to-back A.B.A. titles, but McGinnis was not the team’s undeniable star until his second season, when he averaged 27.6 points and 12.5 rebounds per game. McGinnis was accompanied by seasoned players Mel Daniels, Roger Brown, and Bob Netolicky.
With his sculpted 6 feet 8 inches and 235 pounds, McGinnis was a precursor to the basketball players who would later usher in an era of taller players who were not only physically strong but also deft in open space, with each passing decade showing increased agility away from the basket.
Before being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017, which many felt was long overdue 35 years after his retirement, he claimed in an interview that “big guys in my era couldn’t handle the ball.” “However, I could take guys outside and dribble with my left and right hands.”
He attributed those abilities to the guidance he received as a child in Indiana, where he claimed that “fundamentals are well taught.”
In a phone conversation, Len Elmore, who spent one season as McGinnis’s teammate with the Pacers before he joined the 76ers in 1975, recalled McGinnis when the slightly bigger 6-foot-9 and 250-pound LeBron James joined the Cleveland Cavaliers in the N.B.A. in 2003.
