with the Portland Trail Blazers and Cleveland Cavaliers. They played their home games at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, along with another Buffalo team that would begin play that year, the National Hockey League's Buffalo Sabres. After two bad seasons, the Braves' fortunes started to change under coach Jack Ramsay and star forward/center Bob McAdoo. McAdoo led the NBA in scoring for three consecutive seasons and was named the league's MVP in the 1974–75 season. The Braves qualified for the playoffs three times in a row, losing twice to the eventual Eastern Conference champions (the Boston Celtics in 1974 and 1976, and the Washington Bullets in 1975). Despite the team's modest success in Buffalo, Braves owner Paul Snyder and the league found it impossible to schedule home games at the auditorium because of the Canisius Golden Griffins men's basketball team, which had a pre-existing lease on the arena and priority on game dates over the Braves, with the next best dates in turn taken by the much more successful Sabres. At a time where the NBA was nearing a nadir and the league did not have its current prestige, the Griffins saw the Braves as a threat to their own success, and purposely scheduled all the best dates at the arena to prevent the Braves from succeeding. As a result, after a failed attempt to sell the team to an owner who intended to move it to South Florida, Snyder sold the team to Kentucky Colonels owner John Y. Brown, Jr., who decimated the team's roster, traded away all of its stars, and drove attendance down to the point where they could break their own lease on the arena. Eventually, Brown met with Celtics owner Irv Levin in 1978 so they could trade franchise ownerships. Southern California resident Levin then decided to move the Braves to San Diego, something the league would have never allowed him to do with the Celtics. Asked about the move, Levin nominated a shorter commute for himself as a key reason. 1978–1984: San Diego Clippers In 1978, San Diego welcomed the relocation of the Buffalo Braves franchise, as the city's previous NBA franchise, the San Diego Rockets, had relocated to Houston seven years earlier in 1971. Another failed basketball franchise in the city had been the San Diego Conquistadors. San Diego team officials did not think "Braves" was a proper representative nickname for the club in