Despite Coach Kevin Loughery's awesome leisure suit, the Nets had the NBA's worst record that season.

I got my chapped, cracked, crusty hands on a copy of the Nets 1976-77 yearbook, which cost a cool two bucks back in the day. The Nets were then a New York franchise that played on Long Island. The ’76-’77 season was their first in the NBA, after winning the final ABA championship. Unfortunately, finances forced them to sell off their best player, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, instantly turning them into the worst team in the NBA.

I can’t tell you that the level of pro basketball play was better back in those days, but clothes and hairstyles were certainly superior. From Coach Kevin Loughery rocking the leisure suits to “Super” John Williamson’s ‘fro to Jan van Breda Kollf’s long locks and short mustache, it was a disco-fabulous scene.

The Nets are playing out the string of a terrible season, but they’ve actually come a long way from the team’s astoundingly modest beginnings. The yearbook recalls the early days of the franchise. An excerpt:

“Maybe you could appreciate how far the franchise of the New York Nets has come in 10 years if you had seen them play–as the New Jersey Americans–at Teaneck Armory. Or, going back even further, when they played their first NBA exhibition game against the Pittsburgh Pipers in Paterson, N.J.

Jan van Breda Kollf summons the mighty power of his shaggy hair and mustache as he takes a jumper.

Walt Simon was there. Simon, one of the most popular players in those early days, recalls that some players helped to put a strip of black tape on the court to indicate the three-point zone. Then, the Pipers used white chalk to draw numbers on the back of their uniforms.

Maybe you had to see them play when they shifted their home base to Long Island and changed their name to the New York Nets and played their games at Commack Arena. Freddie Lewis remembers.

‘The basketball floor was put down directly over the ice, without any insulation,’ recalls Lewis, one of the few pros still active who can remember that scene, or better yet, who survived that scene. ‘It was so cold in there that you could actually see your breath. I swear that it was colder inside the building than it was outside. We used to wear our coats when we sat on the bench.'”