Somebody on Twitter dug this up - sometime during a desperate late April stretch of the 1975 ABA playoffs, the Denver Nuggets called on a professional witch to hex their competition, the Indiana Pacers, into a Game 5 loss for the Western Division finals. Via the Sports Illustrated vault: “Robota The Rent-A-Witch… arrived complete with broom, to stir a cauldron at mid-court before Sunday’s game” and “stuck pins into a poster of [George] McGinnis.” Her hex seems to have failed, since McGinnis led the Pacers to smash the Nuggets in a 109-90 win and gain a 3-2 lead in the series.
Then again, the Pacers moved on only to lose in the Finals 1-4. And after the ABA and NBA merged in 1976, the Pacers would post mostly losing records for the next decade and would fail to win any post-season series at all for the next 17 years, the fourth-longest drought in league history, so Robota’s hex may have worked, after all… happy Playoffs.