Rick Barry once coached in this league called the Global Basketball Association that existed for 1½ seasons and probably holds Rick Barry’s coaching stint as the highlight of its existence. Barry’s team, the Cedar Rapids Sharpshooters, finished with the best winning percentage in GBA history because the season and league got cut short after 16 games.
The GBA was the kind of low-professional basketball league that makes the 1970s’ ABA, where Barry starred in his Hall of Fame playing days, look like the modern NBA by comparison. The GBA was the kind of league where Barry had to send one of his assistants to the store for ankle tape in the middle of a game because the opposing trainer ran out.
Rick Barry promises that BIG3 is not the Global Basketball Association.
“Oh my God! Are you kidding me? There’s no comparison,” Barry told For The Win recently. “I can’t even compare it. It’s a bigger difference than night and day. This is going to be incredibly well-funded, incredibly well-marketed.”
BIG3 is the three-on-three league dominating headlines with each new retired NBA player who signs up. Ice Cube created it. Allen Iverson is the face of it. The roster is a veritable who’s who of NBA players who retired in the past decade but didn’t really want to: Chauncey Billups, Kenyon Martin, Jermaine O’Neal, Jason Williams, Rashard Lewis, et al.
Barry’s coaching. At age 72, he’s a bit old for this circuit. But 30 years ago — his last NBA season was 1979-80 — he totally would have been in.
“I still could have played when I was out,” Barry said. “To show you how things have changed, the league had dropped rosters from 12 to 11. Now they’re thinking of having 18. Had it not been for that, I still would have played for years. My knee hadn’t felt that good in a decade. So I would assume there are a lot of guys who feel like I did that, ‘Man, this game is great.’ It’s difficult for anyone to give up a passion. It’s had a great part in your life. So this will keep that alive for a few more years.”
Maybe that’s why he’s so excited. Barry was in the 18th minute of a 15-minute interview with For The Win when a publicist interjected to remind us of the time. Barry stopped her immediately — and the interview went on for another 14 minutes. He believes The Big 3, with its halfcourt format that mimics how the sport is predominantly played around the world, has the chance to be a rare kind of success.
He’s seen the Global Basketball Assocation, the Contentinal Basketball Association, the United States Basketball League. This ain’t that.
The talent level is higher: Ex-NBA players may not be ideal for full court, but they can shine here. The fan outreach is better: The league was created by fans (Ice Cube and his partner, Jeff Kwatinetz). The format is better: Instead of home markets, the league travels around the country with eight teams of five players and one coach each. And the marketing is better: Consider that you’re reading this article.
But Barry, once a fiery champion small forward who was the only player to lead the NCAA, NBA and ABA in scoring, is excited about the fumes of competition. These aren’t a bunch of guys out to cash a check, avoid getting hurt and hope someone in a better league notices them. (OK, there will be some of that, but still.)
“Everybody knows who each other is, and there will be camaraderie, but the competitive is not going to go away,” Barry said. “They’ll joke around beforehand, they’ll joke around afterward. But from the time that game starts until the time it finishes, all of a sudden, friendships are no longer an important factor. Who’s going to win is the factor.”
Barry’s in a unique position in that sense. Each team’s five-man roster and coach is picked by the team captain or captains. Barry is one of five Hall of Famers (joining Iverson, Gary Payton, Clyde Drexler and George Gervin) plus Rick Mahorn who have signed up to be coaches, but other than player-captain-coach Iverson, those legends will be at the mercy of the players in determining both their rosters and their team assignments.
He’s hoping the captains set their teams up well — “I’m hoping that the players are smart enough to realize that you’ve got to have somebody with some size,” he said — and he was definitely intrigued by the idea of getting a few of his five basketball-playing sons out there. Jon, Brent and Drew Barry all played in the NBA, with Jon the oldest at 47, and a Barry-Barry-Barry lineup coached by Barry would be the exact kind of fun, unique opportunity BIG3 seems geared to accommodate.
Still, with all due respect to his sons, Rick Barry knows who he’d take if he could get his ideal three-man lineup: “I’m taking Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain,” he said. “But if it were after their careers, with the new rule, with the four-point shot, I think I’d want Steph Curry.”
Curry has another decade or so before he has to think about post-NBA options. But if you believe Barry, BIG3 might still be around when the Warriors star is ready to join.
“This is a great opportunity to market,” Barry said. “Take the NBA, it was always a great product but was never marketed properly until David Stern got there along with Rick Welts. It’s the same with BIG3. If marketed properly, it could be a huge success.”
