The Courier-Express front page on April 13, 1974.
Wide Right. No Goal. Thirteen Seconds.
We’re all too familiar with those references. But there’s another two-word shorthand for heartbreak in Buffalo sports history that we sometimes forget to include.
One Second.
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Today marks 50 years since the Buffalo Braves began their first playoff series in their fourth season. Game 6 of said series would end controversially. The bare facts are these:
Braves vs. Boston Celtics. First round, 1974 NBA playoffs. Game 6, at the Aud. Score tied, 104-104.
Seven seconds remain. The Celtics inbound to John Havlicek. He takes four dribbles and shoots. Bob McAdoo blocks it. The ball ricochets right into the hands of Jo Jo White. He lets fly a quick shot. McAdoo blocks this one, too, but crashes into White. Referee Darell Garretson calls it a foul. With the clock at 0:00, White steps to the line, alone, and sinks the two free throws.
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Game over, 106-104. Series over, too.
Buffalo sports fans of a certain age may remember that foul call as a bad one. Garretson got booed at the Aud ever after. But White did get knocked to the ground in the collision. The real error wasn’t so much the call of a foul as it was deciding that no time remained when the foul was called – because at least one second did.
Courier-Express photographer Bob Bukaty got the shot that proved it. His photograph ran on the Courier’s front page the next morning. The ball is in the air. White is falling to the ground. McAdoo is airborne, left hand raised, head turned to watch the ball. The overall effect is of basketball ballet. And the overhead scoreboard, visible through the clear backboard, shows “0:01.”
Braves coach Jack Ramsay stomped along the sidelines, like Rumpelstiltskin, pleading in his plaid pants for that one second to be restored. In today’s NBA, a video review probably would have put back additional tenths on top of that single second. Back then, though, referee Mendy Rudolph and alternate ref Manny Sokol simply ruled no time was left, and that was that.
The Braves would have had the ball at midcourt following a timeout. One second was enough time for McAdoo to come off a screen and hit a long jumper to force overtime. Who better? He was the NBA’s scoring leader that season, with 30.6 points per game, and he already had 40 in this game.
“That’s what I wanted, just one chance, with the way Mac was shooting the ball,” Ramsay told Tim Wendel years later for the 2009 book “Buffalo, Home of the Braves.”
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The largest home crowd in Braves history to that point – 18,257 – jeered as the referees left the court. Braves owner Paul Snyder raged outside the refs’ locker room. “You can’t do this to me!” he screamed. “Mendy, the clock!” He pounded the door with both fists. “That’s a hell of a way to operate the league. You can’t throw me out of here. I own the place!”
The Braves filed a protest with the NBA the next day, with Bukaty’s photograph as Exhibit A. The effort never stood a chance. It depended on proving a misapplication of the rules, but this was an error of judgment, and therefore unfixable. The game was over. No going back.
The controversy did not hurt the reputations of Garretson and Rudolph, both of whom are enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. So, too, is McAdoo. Years later he told Wendel that Garretson had been wrong to call a foul in such a circumstance, with time winding down on what amounted to a lucky bounce on a last-second scramble play.
“I thought it was a bogus call,” McAdoo said. “I still do. You cannot call a foul like that so late in the game. You can’t have the whole thing decided by something that iffy. You have to let the players decide it on the floor.”
Jo Jo White, speaking after the game, insisted that the foul call was correct. “Mac jumped into me,” he said, “and knocked me down.”
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Even so, White agreed with the Braves on one thing – time did remain. He told the Courier-Express he'd rolled over after hitting the floor, looked up to see that last crucial second still on the clock, and watched as it ticked down to 0:00.
“The timekeeper just ran out the clock,” White said. “I guess he figured there would be no call. But there was one second left.”
The Celtics would go on to beat the New York Knicks in the conference finals and then the Milwaukee Bucks, in seven games, in the finals. Buffalo had taken the champs to the brink. The Braves were young and good, and they thought time was on their side.
Instead, time ran out on them forever ago. All except for that one ghost of a second.
And it will never run out.