Virginia had a pro basketball team once before. It didnt go well.

The last time Virginia had a professional basketball team, it had no problem attracting stars. The team known as the Virginia Squires just had trouble keeping them — and keeping its business going — in a bumpy six-year run that ended in 1976, shortly before the American Basketball Association merged with the rival National Basketball Association.

Julius Erving, widely considered the most transcendent basketball player of the 1970s, sued the Squires over his contract and tried to force his way to the NBA in 1972 before reluctantly returning to the team for one more season. Two years later, the Squires were forced to sell the contract for George Gervin, the future NBA star known as “The Iceman,” to the San Antonio Spurs because the team couldn’t meet payroll.

Rick Barry, who went on to become one of the NBA’s greatest scorers, was so upset by his contract with the Squires that he publicly mocked the state of Virginia in hopes of forcing a trade.

“I don’t want [my son] to go down there to school and learn to speak with a Southern accent,” Barry told Sports Illustrated in 1970, after the ABA team formerly known as the Washington Caps decided to cross the Potomac. Barry was traded the following week.

More than 50 years later, the Washington Wizards are hoping to become the second pro basketball team — and the first from the NBA — to call Virginia home. Executives from Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the team’s parent company, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Wednesday unveiled a plan to relocate the Wizards and the NHL’s Washington Capitals from downtown Washington to Alexandria, Va., a proposal that still needs to navigate multiple state and local hurdles.

If the move happens, Virginians would be getting a far different basketball product from the state’s foray into the ABA, the flashy and short-lived rival to the NBA that experimented with a multicolored ball, instituted the three-point shot and made other attempts to stand out, even as it dealt with small crowds, uneven competition and constant money woes. The Squires also operated as a regional franchise that ended up playing home games in seven arenas in four cities across Virginia — a freewheeling “sort of a floating crap game,” Barry would dismissively write in his memoir.

In contrast, today’s NBA is a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with a global television audience. Rather than flit across Virginia, Monumental executives are eager to build a large complex to house its teams in the Potomac Yard neighborhood.

How pro hoops came to Virginia

If the Wizards do leave the District, it would also be the second time the NBA franchise has followed its defunct ABA rival south and eventually across state lines.

The first time, the two franchises squared off over playing in Washington, D.C. The ABA got to the city first: Lawyer Earl Foreman bought the California-based Oakland Oaks in 1969, rebranded the franchise as the Caps and installed them in an arena in Northeast Washington that today houses an REI store.

The Caps’ presence infuriated Abe Pollin, who owned the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets — and chafed that Foreman, who had been one of his former partners, was now operating another basketball team 40 miles away.

“They’re in my territory, and they have to get out — period,” Pollin told the Baltimore Sun in September 1969, before the Caps had played a single game. The dispute threatened to hold up a long-discussed merger between the two leagues, and fellow owners pressured Foreman to move his ABA franchise to Virginia.

Foreman claimed he didn’t want to leave Washington — “it’s grossly unfair to say where you can and can’t play,” he told the Sun in March 1970 — but he had lost $500,000 running the Caps for one year and saw a path to getting his money back. In exchange for the move to Virginia, the other ABA owners eventually agreed to reimburse Foreman for his $500,000 operating loss and waived the $1.25 million fee his franchise would have to pay if a proposed merger with the NBA was successful.

“His ‘giving in’ netted him $1,750,000 and promises to net him even more,” Washington Post sports reporter Mark Asher wrote in November 1970, predicting that NBA players like Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West would soon be playing in Virginia cities, once the leagues’ merger was complete. “How much Earl Foreman will eventually profit from this is anybody’s guess.”

With the Caps finally gone from the Washington metro region, Pollin relocated his team to Landover, Md., in 1973 and rebranded it as the Capital Bullets for one season and the Washington Bullets after that. The team rebranded again as the Wizards in 1997 and moved into its current downtown arena that same year.

Meanwhile, pro basketball in Virginia seemed to pay off — at first.

For the Wizards and their fans, the start of a ‘bittersweet’ goodbye

“The Virginia Squires weren’t playing to packed stadiums, but the arenas weren’t empty, either,” Brett L. Abrams and Raphael Mazzone wrote in their 2013 book, “The Bullets, the Wizards, and Washington, DC Basketball.” The newly branded team made its debut on Oct. 17, 1970, in Roanoke, and more games would follow in Hampton, Richmond and Salem. By the end of the season, attendance in Virginia was roughly double what the team had been drawing in Washington.

The team’s strength was its on-court talent. Led by players like Erving and Charlie Scott — another player who would one day make basketball’s Hall of Fame — the Squires contended for the ABA title in their first two seasons in Virginia.

But by the Squires’ third season, 1972-1973, the chaos afflicting much of the ABA had begun to consume them, too. Scott had abruptly left the team, frustrated with the second-tier league and seeking NBA stardom. The Squires struggled to pay rent and players, and slid to a .500 record.

Erving’s departure followed the next season, effectively dooming the Squires to irrelevance for their remaining existence. Across the next three years, the franchise would compile a combined 58-193 record — a .230 winning percentage — and set the mark for the two worst individual seasons in the league’s short history. In the 1975-76 season, the Squires rotated through five coaches in 81 days: Al Bianchi (who compiled a 1-6 record), Bill Musselman (0-6), Mack Calvin (4-22), Jack Ankerson (1-1) and Zelmo Beaty (9-33).

The team also suffered off-court travails. The team’s starting center, David Vaughn, was chased by police in July 1975 as he drove away from a gas station; Vaughn had filled up his tank with $14 worth of gas but didn’t stop to pay.

“What a sight it must have been if [the 6-foot-11-inch Vaughn], as they allege, kept standing up frequently, protruding his upper body through a sun roof and throwing things,” Byron Rosen wrote in The Washington Post. The chase ended after multiple police cars boxed in Vaughn’s vehicle and a policewoman shot him in the abdomen — accidentally, the officer said.

The ‘father of Black basketball’ transformed a White-dominated sport

The long-awaited merger between the NBA and ABA finally arrived in June 1976 — but the Squires were not among the four teams invited to join the more established league. That’s because the Squires did not exist anymore; the ABA had canceled its Virginia franchise one month earlier, after a series of missed payments.

Foreman’s bet that relocating his team to Virginia would pay off with NBA riches had failed, but he was long gone too, having sold the Squires for about $1 million in 1974. A wire service reported that Foreman was “relieved” to have rid himself of the team.

‘It wasn’t what I wanted’

For some Virginia natives such as Michael Britt — who went on to star at the University of the District of Columbia and later enjoyed a career in the NBA — having a local pro basketball team was inspiring, thanks to athletes such as the gravity-defying Erving and the silky-smooth Gervin.

“Although Britt was only in elementary school, their grace and artistry captured him totally,” Thomas Boswell wrote in The Post in 1983. “That’s what Britt wanted to be.”

But today, the Squires are usually discussed by pundits who marvel that the team’s greatest players repeatedly wanted out. Bill Simmons, the prominent sports podcaster, has suggested that Barry’s strategy to force a trade by publicly antagonizing Virginians could inspire modern-day NBA players to adopt similar tactics.

“Virginia was like, f--- this guy. And then it worked and they traded him,” Simmons said on a podcast in October, noting that current NBA player James Harden was similarly desperate for a trade from his then-employer, the Philadelphia 76ers. “I wonder if Harden, maybe that’s the next step," Simmons mused, suggesting that the disgruntled Philadelphia player could copy Barry and start insulting regional favorites like cheesesteaks and the “Creed" films that are a spinoff of the beloved local “Rocky” film franchise. (Harden got traded several weeks later without resorting to the Barry strategy.)

Barry ended up with a connection to Virginia after all: He married Lynn Norenberg, the most famous women’s basketball player in the history of the Williamsburg, Va.-based College of William & Mary. And he admitted that he only trashed the state to force a trade.

“I want to apologize to the people of Virginia,” Barry wrote in his 1972 memoir, “Confessions of a Basketball Gypsy,” a book published two years after he had insulted the state in his Sports Illustrated cover story. “I hardly know the place, and for all I know it is a beautiful place and a lovely place to live and raise a family. But it wasn’t what I wanted."

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