Soul Power: The League That Refused to Play by the Rules

There is a version of basketball history that feels clean, inevitable—one league, one evolution, one uninterrupted rise to global dominance. And then there is the truth.

Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association doesn’t just revisit a forgotten chapter—it reopens a wound in the official story of the game. It asks a simple, destabilizing question: what if the league that changed basketball forever wasn’t the one that survived?

The answer unfolds in color—red, white, and blue.

A League Born in Defiance

The series begins not with triumph, but with rebellion. In 1967, the American Basketball Association emerges as a challenger to the National Basketball Association, not by imitating it, but by rejecting its very logic. Where the NBA was structured, the ABA was improvisational.Where the NBA was disciplined, the ABA was expressive. This tension becomes the spine of the series. Not just two leagues competing for players and markets—but two philosophies colliding over what basketball should be.

The storytelling is patient, deliberate. It resists the temptation to rush toward the merger, instead lingering in the chaos of creation—the unstable franchises, the experimental rules, the audacity of trying to build something new in a system that didn’t want it. What emerges is not a league, but a movement.

The Sound of the Game Changing

If Soul Power has a defining achievement, it’s this: it makes you feel how different the ABA was.

The footage—grainy, vibrant, alive—moves at a different rhythm. The ball snaps faster. The court breathes wider. The game feels less contained, more like performance. This wasn’t just basketball. It was expression under pressure. The now-familiar elements—the three-point line, the slam dunk contest, the pace—appear here not as inevitabilities, but as risks. Experiments. Ideas that could have failed.

And yet they didn’t. Instead, they rewrote the visual language of the sport.

Voices from the Margins of History

The series is carried by those who lived it—players, broadcasters, witnesses to something that felt urgent at the time and invisible in retrospect. Among them is Julius Erving, whose presence anchors the narrative. Erving is not framed simply as a star, but as a bridge—a figure who embodies the ABA’s ethos and carries it forward into the NBA. His reflections are measured, almost restrained. There is no bitterness in his voice, only clarity. He understands what the ABA was, and what it wasn’t. He understands that history has a way of compressing complexity into outcomes. And yet, through these voices, the series resists that compression. It insists that what mattered wasn’t just who won—but how the game was changed along the way.

Aesthetic as Argument

Director Kenan Kamwana Holley approaches the material with a clear thesis: style is not decoration—it is meaning. The visual contrast between the ABA and the NBA is not subtle. The ABA footage bursts with color and motion, while the NBA of the era appears more restrained, more institutional.

This contrast becomes an argument. That innovation often begins on the margins.That culture rarely originates from the center. Even the narration, delivered by Common, reinforces this tone—grounded, reflective, attuned to the cultural undercurrents that traditional sports narratives often overlook.

The result is a documentary that feels less like a recap and more like a reclamation.

The Cost of Being First

But Soul Power is not romantic. It does not ignore the instability that defined the ABA—financial collapse, franchise movement, uncertainty at every level. This is where the series finds its tension.

Because the same freedom that allowed the ABA to innovate also made it fragile. The league burned brightly, but not sustainably. It expanded too quickly, stretched too thin, and ultimately could not survive the economic realities of the era. The merger with the NBA is presented not as victory or defeat, but as absorption. The ideas lived on. The identity did not. And that distinction matters.

What the Series Gets Right—and Where It Holds Back

At its best, Soul Power is expansive—connecting basketball to broader cultural shifts, tracing the ways in which the ABA gave players, particularly Black players, more room to express themselves as individuals.

This is where the series feels most urgent, most necessary.

Yet there are moments where it pulls back. Individual stories—so rich, so complex—are sometimes sketched rather than fully explored. The narrative prioritizes the collective over the personal, the movement over the man. It’s a deliberate choice, but one that leaves certain emotional depths just out of reach. Still, the trade-off is coherence. The series never loses sight of its central idea.

The Legacy That Refuses to Disappear

By the time the series reaches its conclusion, the question is no longer what the ABA was.

It’s what it left behind. Watch a modern NBA game—the spacing, the tempo, the celebration of individuality—and you begin to see it. Not as influence, but as inheritance. The ABA didn’t survive.

But its vision did.

Final Reflection

Soul Power is not interested in nostalgia. It does not ask you to mourn the ABA.

It asks you to recognize it. To understand that the game you see today—the way it moves, the way it feels, the way it expresses identity—was shaped by a league that existed briefly, imperfectly, and brilliantly.

A league that didn’t just challenge the establishment. But changed it. Quietly. Permanently. And then disappeared.