Spencer Haywood goes against the Cavaliers in 1972, the same team he burned for 48 points on Jan. 7 that year. Haywood made four All-Star teams for the Sonics and was twice named first team All-NBA.

Now that the Thunder has soared to six victories and put plenty of breathing room between itself and the Philadelphia 9-and-73ers, we can turn away from ritual mockery and consider some franchise trivia.

Like, for intance, who owns Oklahoma City's single-season scoring and rebounding records? (Yes, you already know this if you read the previous, wholly unsatisfactory post.)

He's the same fellow who holds the ABA's record for single-season rebounding average with a whopping 19.5: Spencer Haywood of Silver City, Mississippi.

Haywood averaged 29.2 points per game for the team that, way back in the 1972-73 season, called Seattle home and went by the name of the SuperSonics. He averaged 13.4 rebounds per game the following season, which also has a place in the Thunder record book.

Before he arrived in Seattle, Spencer Haywood tore a red, white and blue streak through the American Basketball Association. In his lone ABA season, Haywood averaged 30 points and 19.5 rebounds a game for the Denver Rockets. That was 1969-70, a season that was nearly over by the time Haywood turned 21.

Having ruled the ABA, Haywood looked elsewhere for a challenge and decided to take on the NBA power structure.

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He signed with the SuperSonics, despite the fact that NBA rules prohibited him from doing so until his college class graduated, which wouldn't happen until the spring of 1971. The NBA tried to stop him in court, and the case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Warren Burger, William Douglas & Co. dealt the league a 7-2 defeat.

The court's historic ruling declared that Haywood, one of 10 children growing up in hardscrabble poverty in the Mississippi Delta, was "hardship case" and had a right to play for pay in the NBA. Haywood was on his way to Seattle, where he would play the final 33 games of the '70-71 season and represent the Sonics in the next four All-Star games.

Spencer Haywood beat the NBA in the Supreme Court in 1971, becoming the league's first "hardship" case and joining the Sonics for the final 33 games of the 70-71 season.

He averaged 26.2 points per game in his first full NBA season, which included the 48-point tour de force he dropped on the Cleveland Cavaliers 37 years ago this month. That was Jan. 7, 1972, and the Sonics won, 125-111, with "Woody" falling a point shy of Bob Rule's then-club record of 49 points.

Haywood's big night wasn't the only NBA news of the day. In the following day's TNT, a headline reported that the "Fabulous Lakers keep winning streak alive." Jim McMillian scored 26 points, and Gail Goodrich added 23 as the Lakers routed the Hawks in Atlanta, 134-90, to stretch their record winning streak to 33 games.

That fabled run would come to an end in Milwaukee two days later, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 39 points to lead the Bucks to a 120-104 victory over Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and the Lakers.

Thanks to the archival wonder that is YouTube, you can enjoy Kareem teasing Wilt with that feathery sky hook, Keith Jackson describing the action with his sweet-as-molasses Georgia drawl and players scurrying up and down the court in their long socks and short shorts. You might even notice that each quarter begins with a tipoff at center court.

It was a different time, obviously, though not without a hint of familiarity. The News Tribune reported that unemployment had hit a 10-year high at 6.1 percent, though that figure can't match the 7.2 percent we've reached in these troubled economic times.

The Sonics-Cavs game wasn't on local television, though you could listen to Bob Blackburn describe Haywood's exploits by setting the AM dial on your transistor radio to KOMO-1000.

The Sonics faced some pretty stiff competition from ABC's prime time TV lineup, which was stacked with a murderer's row of legendary status that went from "The Brady Bunch" at 8 to "The Partridge Family" to "Room 222" to "The Odd Couple" and finally "Love, American Style" at 10 o'clock. Channel 11 countered with "I Dream of Jeannie" at 7, "Dragnet" at 7:30 and "Star Trek" at 8.

On the big screen, Sean Connery was back as James Bond 007 in "Diamonds are Forever," which was playing for a "3RD BIG WEEK" at the Roxy. Paul Newman and Henry Fonda starred in the movie version of Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion," which was featured at the Tacoma Mall.

The news pages reveal Hijacking airplanes still was all the rage among common criminals back in the early 1970s.

Atop page 2 of the Jan. 7 TNT was this headline: Hijackers vanish in wild blue yonder." Two people, a man wielding a shotgun and a woman carrying a baby in one hand and a pistol in the other, hijacked a plane bound to Los Angeles from in the middle of the night. The scoundrels ordered all 134 passengers off the plane in L.A., then flew to Tampa, Fla. After refueling, the Associated Press story reported, the plane, with 10 Pacific Southwest Airlines employees on board, "took off for an unknown destination."

And that's the last that was heard from them that day.

Elsewhere in the paper was a story marveling over the growing legend of D.B. Cooper, who had hijacked a Northwest Airlines flight the previous Thanksgiving and bailed out of a 727 somewhere above southwestern Washington, never to be seen or heard from again.

Back on the basketball court, Spencer Haywood had no interest in even hijacking a basketball game. He had an opportunity to eclipse Rule's mark, but he didn't seem all that interested.

"His teammates, realizing he was near Bob Rule's club record of 49, sought to deliver the ball to the 6-9 cornerman on several occasions in the late going," wrote News Tribune writer Ranny Green. "But sometimes he was nowhere to be found."

Haywood, who made 21 of 25 field-goal attempts and grabbed 15 rebounds that Friday night, was asked if he knew he was closing in on Rule's 49.

"Yes, I knew it," said Haywood, who once scored 59 points in an ABA game. "But we were moving the ball so well I wanted the other guys to get some good shots. And they did."

Just not as many as he did.