Ozzie Silna, who devised a plan that brought him and his brother more than $750 million in television money from the National Basketball Association without owning a team in that league, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, his family said.

He and his brother, Daniel, owned the Spirits of St. Louis, a team in the American Basketball Association, the upstart league that brought a red, white and blue ball and the 3-point shooting line to the sport. But by 1976, the league was dying and in merger talks with the N.B.A.

“Logic was that you take six of the seven A.B.A. teams and make the N.B.A. a 24-team league,” Daniel Silna recalled on Tuesday. “It would make scheduling easier. So Ozzie said, ‘Look, if one of the seven does not get taken into the league, they’re still our partners, so we should give them one-seventh of our TV revenues going forward.’ ”

But the N.B.A. absorbed only four of the teams: the New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the San Antonio Spurs and the Indiana Pacers. A fifth team, the Virginia Squires, was a financial wreck; a sixth, the Kentucky Colonels, took a $3.3 million payment and folded.