Julius Erving
Julius Erving is the most culturally influential basketball player of the 1970s and, along with Michael Jordan, the player most responsible for turning the NBA from a regional American sports league into a global marketing property. He is a three-time ABA MVP (1974, 1975, 1976), a 1981 NBA MVP, a two-time ABA champion (1974, 1976 with the New York Nets), a 1983 NBA champion (with the Philadelphia 76ers), a 1983 NBA Finals appearance in which he averaged 27.9 points as the second option behind Moses Malone, an 11-time ABA or NBA All-Star, and a 1993 Hall of Famer. He was the signature athlete of the 1976 ABA-NBA merger; the Sixers paid $3 million for him as part of the merger settlement, the largest single-player transaction of the era. His foul-line dunk at the 1976 ABA Slam Dunk Contest, which was the first organized dunk contest in major American professional basketball, is the direct inspiration for Michael Jordan’s 1988 foul-line dunk and for every subsequent dunk-contest ceiling. His combined ABA-and-NBA career point total (30,026) is the fifth-highest in American major-league basketball history when the two leagues are combined.
Roosevelt, Long Island, and UMass (1950–1971)
He was born February 22, 1950 in Roosevelt, New York, a village on Long Island. His father Julius Winfield Erving Sr. abandoned the family when Julius Jr. was three. His mother Callie Mae raised him and his two siblings working as a domestic. His younger brother Marvin died of lupus at age 16, an event Erving has written about extensively in his 2013 memoir as the defining loss of his childhood. The nickname “Dr. J” came from a high-school friend who, during a pickup game, said Julius played basketball “like a professor at work.”
He attended Roosevelt High School and enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in 1968. He played three varsity seasons for coach Jack Leaman, averaging 26.3 points and 20.2 rebounds as a junior in 1970-71. Nothing about his UMass career suggested the player he would become in professional basketball, but the per-game production was elite. He left after his junior year to sign with the Virginia Squires of the American Basketball Association.
The ABA years (1971–1976)
He averaged 27.3, 31.9, and 27.4 points across his three Squires seasons before his May 1973 trade to the New York Nets. With the Nets he won the 1974 and 1976 ABA championships. He averaged 28.7 points in the 1976 Finals against the Denver Nuggets. He was ABA MVP in 1974, 1975, and 1976. The 1976 ABA All-Star Game, played on January 27, 1976 in Denver, included the first organized professional basketball slam dunk contest, which Erving won with, among other dunks, a take-off from the free-throw line. The dunk is the single most-cited and imitated dunk in basketball history.
The 1976 ABA-NBA merger absorbed four ABA franchises into the NBA (the Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and San Antonio Spurs). The New York Nets, saddled with the debt of the Knicks’ $4.8 million territorial-rights fee for joining New York, needed cash. They sold Erving’s contract to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million in September 1976. It was the largest player-transaction fee of the 1970s.
The Philadelphia 76ers years (1976–1987)
He played 11 seasons in Philadelphia. He averaged 21.9 points and 7.9 rebounds across his NBA career. He led the 76ers to the 1977 NBA Finals (lost to Portland in six games), the 1980 Finals (lost to Magic Johnson’s Lakers in six), the 1982 Finals (lost to the Lakers in six), and the 1983 Finals.
The 1982-83 Philadelphia 76ers are, by most retrospective rankings, one of the ten greatest single-season teams in NBA history. The acquisition of Moses Malone from Houston in September 1982 gave the Sixers the interior scoring and rebounding they had been missing in the previous three Finals appearances. The team went 65-17. Malone famously predicted before the playoffs that the postseason run would be “Fo, Fo, Fo” (four wins in each of the three rounds). The actual run went 4-0 over New York, 4-1 over Milwaukee, and 4-0 over the Lakers. Erving averaged 18.9 points in the Finals. Malone was the Finals MVP. It was Erving’s first and only NBA championship. More details on the series are on our Philadelphia 76ers franchise page.
The 1981 MVP
The 1980-81 76ers finished 62-20. Erving averaged 24.6 points, 8.0 rebounds, 4.4 assists, and 2.1 steals. He won the 1981 NBA MVP with 454 points, the highest total since the award went to panel voting. He beat out Larry Bird in one of the closer MVP votes of the early 1980s. He was, at the time, the first Black player since Bill Russell to win the award. The Sixers lost the 1981 Eastern Conference Finals to Boston in seven games.
Retirement and the Hall of Fame
He retired at the end of the 1986-87 season. He averaged 16.8 points that final year. His NBA career totals were 18,364 points (22.0 per game), 5,601 rebounds, 3,224 assists. His combined ABA-NBA career total of 30,026 points was the only time any American basketball player had reached 30,000 points in any organized major-league combination, until Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone and LeBron James broke that mark in subsequent years.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993. He was named to the NBA 50th Anniversary Team in 1996 and the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2021. The Philadelphia 76ers retired his #6 on February 12, 1987 at the start of his final season.
Legacy
Erving is the connective tissue between the pre-Jordan and Jordan eras of basketball. He was the first nationally recognized NBA player whose signature was above-the-rim play; the Jordan of the 1980s studied Erving’s game on tape at North Carolina and has said in multiple interviews that Erving’s 1977 Finals play was the reason he became a professional basketball player. The foul-line dunk is the most specific technical influence.
The cultural influence is broader. Erving was the first African-American basketball player to headline national television campaigns (Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, 1978; Coca-Cola, 1979; Spalding, 1981). His shoe and apparel endorsements, totaling approximately $30 million across his career, set the commercial template that Nike and Michael Jordan would explode in the mid-1980s. He appeared in the 1979 film The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh as himself. He co-founded the ABA Players Association with George McGinnis. Post-career, he was a minority owner of the Orlando Magic and served on the NBA’s Competition Committee.
He lives in 2026 in Atlanta. He is a grandfather. His daughter Alexandra was a college basketball player at USC. His son Cory died in 2000 of unintentional cocaine overdose, which Erving has written about as the hardest chapter of his life. His foundation, the Dr. J Foundation, has funded approximately $40 million in educational programs since 1983.
Gear
Shop official Julius Erving jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or read his autobiography Dr. J (HarperCollins, 2013).
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Sources
Basketball-Reference is the primary career statistical source. The Roosevelt, Long Island childhood and UMass recruitment details are from Erving’s 2013 autobiography Dr. J (co-authored with Karl Taro Greenfeld). The 1976 ABA Slam Dunk Contest is documented in the ABA broadcast archive maintained at remembertheABA.com. The 1981 MVP vote count is from the NBA’s 1980-81 official release. The 1983 championship Finals is from Jack McCallum’s June 1983 Sports Illustrated feature.
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