NEW ORLEANS — Almost three decades later, people remember the back-to-back 50-point games with the Knicks in Texas, the quick-release turnaround jumper on the way up, the preternatural ability to slither through the tiniest cracks in transition defense along the left side on the fast break.

They typically forget the near-mythic context in which Bernard King shaped and reshaped himself as an irresistible offensive N.B.A. force and a Hall of Fame player, as of Monday’s class of 2013 announcement.

Players of King’s era (late 1970s to 1980s) who battled substance abuse and the legal entanglements they could spawn often had their careers aborted in midair. And no N.B.A. player had ever recovered from what then was a virtual kiss of career death — surgery to repair a torn knee ligament — to regain elite status, if not the same body propulsion.

One early Sunday morning in the summer of 1980, the telephone rang in my Brooklyn apartment. It was King calling from out west to talk about sobriety, his new best friend, a fragile relationship he had cultivated during the previous weeks at a rehabilitation center in Santa Monica, Calif.