AND so it came to pass that the San Antonio Spurs have dethroned the back-to-back titlist Miami Heat for their first NBA crown since 2007.
Yet there are some hoops fans from the young generation that still don’t know why the hardware that goes to the NBA champion is named the Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien trophy.
This hardware is so named in honor of the NBA’s third commissioner after Maurice Podoloff and J. Walter Kennedy following his retirement in 1984. O’Brien’s successor David J. Stern himself gave up the post to the current commish Adam Silver on February 1, 2014.
Before his NBA stint, O’Brien had been involved in U.S. politics. He gained instant world recognition during the early 1970s because of the infamous Watergate scandal that resulted in the stunning downfall of an American president.
At the time, O’Brien was the U.S. Democratic Party chair. It was his Watergate headquarters that was burglarized in 1972 at the height of the American president elections.
Richard Milhous Nixon (Republican Party) was re-elected U.S. president on November 7, 1972, gathering over 60 percent of the popular vote in one of the largest landslide election victories in American history with his defeat of then-South Dakota Senator and Democratic Party challenge George McGovern.
However, Nixon was forced to resign on August 9, 1974 in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office for his role in the subsequent Watergate cover-up. Nixon was the only president to resign the office.
After quitting politics, O’Brien joined the NBA in June 1975 as its commissioner upon the retirement of Kennedy. He served as the league’s top official until February 1984.
When O’Brien announced his retirement, the NBA Board of Governors voted to name the championship trophy in his honor.
The handcrafted trophy was initially called the World Championship Trophy and was launched in time for the NBA Finals between the Portland Trail Blazers and Philadelphia 76ers in 1977.
The NBA decided to create the two-foot, 20-pound trophy, which is finished with 22-carat gold over sterling silver and depicts a basketball in motion over a stylized segment of a hoop and a basket, following the absorption of the four franchises from the rival league American Basketball Association (ABA) – the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs and New York (later New Jersey and now Brooklyn) Nets – into the NBA in 1976-77.
The O’Brien hardware, which is kept by the title-winning squad on a permanent basis, is actually the second symbol of NBA supremacy. The first was a huge punch bowl named after Walter Brown, the former owner of the Boston Celtics and one of the NBA’s founders.
It was awarded from 1964 through 1976, with each champion getting custody of the hardware for just one year. The Walter Brown trophy is now on display at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the name of each NBA titlist is inscribed annually.