1974–75 Kentucky Colonels season
NBA professional basketball team season
The 1974–75 Kentucky Colonels season was the eighth and penultimate season in franchise history. After repeated failures with the team trying to win the ABA Finals championship throughout the last seven seasons, the Colonels under John Y. Brown Jr.'s ownership looked to replace last season's head coach, Babe McCarthy, with Milwaukee Bucks assistant coach Hubie Brown believing he was ready to coach a professional basketball team like the Colonels in the ABA. Under Hubie Brown's leadership as a head coach combined with the homegrown team chemistry that was led by previous draft picks of theirs in Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore, and Louie Dampier, the Colonels would finish the season winning 22 of their last 25 games of the regular season, including the final 10 games of the season, the last of which became a key match-up against the New York Nets, which saw them improbably tie the Eastern Division up with the Nets to end the regular season. They would later play in a one-game playoff to determine who would win the #1 seed despite Kentucky already winning more games against the Nets this season (beating them 6 games to 5), which Kentucky won easily due to Artis Gilmore's rebounding ability being so strong that night that he alone overpowered the entire Nets team that game with a double-double of 28 points and 33 rebounds (having three more rebounds than the entire Nets team that game) for a 108–99 win to secure the #1 seed. Once that was done with, the Colonels would make easy work with both the Memphis Sounds and Spirits of St. Louis (both teams being playoff contenders this season despite them having losing records due to the talent dispersity in the Eastern Division) before resting up real well for the 1975 ABA Championship series against their nearby stateside rivals, the Indiana Pacers. Once they began playing for the championship, the Colonels finally managed to get the upper hand over their longtime rivals, winning the championship series 4–1 to finally proclaim themselves as ABA champions after eight years of waiting. Notably, the Colonels attempted to get a "World Series" championship game of sorts to occur with the champions of the 1975 NBA Finals, the Golden State Warriors, with the winning team receiving $1,000,000 and the game being projected to have been aired on CBS after the season ended, but the Warriors and NBA declined them that opportunity.
Offseason
ABA Draft
This draft table does not include the "ABA Draft of NBA Players" that was done immediately afterward.
ABA Draft of NBA Players
The "ABA Draft of NBA Players" that was done on April 17, 1974, happened immediately after the actual ABA Draft done for this season was concluded on that day. None of the five players drafted by the Colonels would report to the team this season, though Jim Price would later play for the Denver Nuggets following the ABA-NBA merger that would later occur in 1976.
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