Sixers great Bobby Jones to enter Hall of Fame

CHICAGO – Former 76er Bobby Jones has reached basketball immortality.

The eight-time All-NBA First-Team defender is the 14th player in franchise history elected into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The 2019 Hall of Fame inductees were announced Saturday at the NCAA Final Four in Minneapolis. The Class of 2019 will be enshrined during Hall of Fame festivities in Springfield, Mass., in September.

Jones, 67, joins Bill Fitch, Sidney Moncrief, Jack Sikma, Paul Westphal, Teresa Weatherspoon, Al Attles, Charles “Chuck” Cooper, Vlade Divac, Carl Braun, the Tennessee A&I teams of 1957-59, and Wayland Baptist University teams of 1948-82 in the latest class.

Jones played for eight seasons with the Sixers, averaging 10.7 points and 4.8 rebounds in 617 games. His real value to the team, however, came at the defensive end where he stopped or controlled some of the league’s best players.

“On behalf of the club and our current coaching staff and players, congratulations to Bobby,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said before Saturday night’s game against the Chicago Bulls at the United Center.

The highlight of his career came in the 1982-83 season when the Sixers won 65 games and went 12-1 in the playoffs to win their first NBA championship since 1966-67. Jones becomes the fourth member of that team to make the Basketball Hall of Fame, joining Julius Erving, Moses Malone, and Maurice Cheeks.

“Bobby Jones is among the all-time greats in the history of 76ers basketball and we are thrilled that he has been selected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame,” Sixers managing partner Josh Harris said in a press release. “Bobby’s impact on the game of basketball, the city of Philadelphia and his hometown of Charlotte [N.C.] cannot be overstated. A true gentleman and legendary basketball player, he is the embodiment of a Hall of Famer.”

Jones, who played at the University of North Carolina under Dean Smith and was a 1972 Olympian, was originally drafted by the NBA’s Houston Rockets in 1974, but opted to play for the ABA’s Denver Nuggets. He played under fellow Tar Heel and now fellow Hall of Famer Larry Brown in Denver. The leagues merged in 1976 and Jones was traded from Denver to the Sixers after the 1977-78 season along with Ralph Simpson in exchange for George McGinnis. He averaged 13.2 points in his first four seasons with the team.

As NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year on the 1982-83 championship team, his scoring average dropped to 9.0, a career low at the time. But he meshed seamlessly with whomever he played with coming off the bench both on defense and getting out on the fast break with a hustling, full-throttle style of play.

Jones retired after the end of the 1985-86 season. In 941 games (774 in the NBA, 167 ABA), he averaged 12.6 points, 6.1 rebounds and 2.7 assists. Besides being first-team all-defense, Jones was a four-time NBA All-Star, and was second-team all-defense in 1985. His No. 24 jersey has been retired by the 76ers.

He has fond memories of his time in Philly.

“When I retired, the thing that I missed most was the camaraderie of those players -- Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney. Charles Barkley my last two years I was there, " Jones said. "Just knowing that we were all striving for one thing and that we pushed aside any individual goals that we might have to try to accomplish that final championship push was special, and that was my fondest memory of winning in the championship in ’83.”

Attles, another inductee, began his career in the NBA with the then-Philadelphia Warriors in 1960. He has spent nearly 60 years with the franchise – which moved to San Francisco in 1962 and became the Golden State Warriors in 1971 – as a player and coach and in other capacities.

Staff writer Joe Juliano contributed to this article.