When former Denver Nuggets guard Roland “Fatty” Taylor roamed the boards 40 years ago, he was known for playing a hard-nosed game that was stingy on defense.

With more than 2,500 rebounds and 2,500 assists in a professional career that twice took him through Denver, Taylor wasn’t accustomed to giving the ball back.

Now, the 70-year-old former defensive star of the old American Basketball Association – the one with the red-white-and-blue ball – is being sued by the league’s retirement plan for refusing to return more than $320,000 in benefits it says he’s not entitled to have.

The ABA Player’s Retirement Plan says it miscalculated when it paid Taylor a lump sum for $329,471 in October 2013 and now wants nearly $324,000 of it back.

The payment, according to the ABA’s lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, was money from 20 years of interest the plan said had accrued on about $90,000 it thought it had shorted the two-time all-defensive first-teamer when he collected his retirement benefits in a lump sum in 1994.

Turns out the plan dropped the ball when it forgot to calculate money it had paid years ago to Taylor’s ex-wife, Janice, after their divorce.

So instead of underpaying Taylor by $90,081 as it said it had, it had only shorted him $1,519, the lawsuit notes. That means the Hail Mary check that dropped in his hands was way fatter than Fatty was supposed to get.

The plan says it’s unsuccessfully tried for years to get Taylor to return the over-payment, but much like his years as a teammate to the likes of Julius “Dr. J” Erving and George “Iceman” Gervin – he coined Gervin’s nickname, by the way – Taylor has held on tightly.

Efforts to reach Taylor, an Aurora resident, were unsuccessful and the attorneys for the pension plan refused to comment.

The lawsuit does not say how the mix-up occurred, but says Taylor is entitled to just $5,557.57.

A native of Washington, D.C., Taylor first played in the ABA with the Washington Capitals, then with the Virginia Squires. He made two stops in Denver, first with the ABA Nuggets, then with the NBA version of the team in the 1976-77 season, his last and the team’s first in the senior league.

In retirement, he has worked with at-risk youths and helped bring awareness to the fight against male breast cancer, himself a survivor of the disease.