Pete Maravich And The Art Of The Pass

It’s our contention that the pass is the most magical and exciting part of the game or at least it can be - in the right hands.

When you see what Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Jason Williams (the one who played for Billy Donovan at Marshall and Florida, not Duke’s Jason Williams) could do with a pass, and how they could bring a crowd to its feet when they saw something no one else knew was possible, well...it’s just far more satisfying than a dunk (although a lot of those passes ended up in dunks).

Here’s a brief clip of some of Maravich’s more amazing passes. We linked to a video a while back similar to this but some of these are just incomprehensible. It’s not just that he moves the ball through the defenses in astonishing ways. At times he appears to violate the laws of physics.

He doesn’t of course - all magic is explainable - but you’ll have to watch some of these more than once to understand what he did.

You can imagine that young Larry Bird, in French Lick, Indiana, and young Earvin Johnson, in Lansing, soaked it up and tried out some of his moves in their own games (in his final season, when he was nearly washed up as a player, Maravich was signed by the Boston Celtic and was, briefly, a teammate of Bird’s).

It’s even more amazing because Maravich played his entire career with a lethal heart defect that killed him at the age of 40.