SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 32,486
- Like
- 62,665
This is the 60th anniversary of the Syracuse Nationals NBA title and I've decided to re-post a series I did on that season that I first created a decade ago for the 50th anniversary.
"Syracuse Wins World Series"
That was the headline 50 years ago. No, the Syracuse Chiefs had not been promoted to the major leagues and knocked off the mighty Yankees. Back then any seven game playoff for a professional championship was called a “world series”. This was for the championship of professional basketball, a sport that would really come into its own years later when the Nats were long gone, having morphed into the Philadelphia 76ers. But in 1955 they were the Syracuse Nationals and they gave this burgh the only major league professional sports championship it will likely ever enjoy.
I have compiled this history, which I will post in sections on successive days, from several sources. The major sources have been the Post Standard and Herald Journal, which I have accessed from Newspaper Archive.com.
I also used David Ramsey’s book: “The Nats: A Team. A City. An Era.”, Neil Isaac’s book: “Vintage NBA: The Pioneer Era”, Roland Lazenby’s book: “The NBA Finals: A Fifty Year Celebration”, The Sporting News' “Official NBA Guide”, “The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Basketball”, by David Neft and Richard Cohen, the “Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball” by Zander Hollander”, “Basketball: The American Game” by Joe Jares and “The Official NBA Basketball Encyclopedia”.
The NBA in the 1950’s
The four greatest things ever to happen to this town in the world of sports are the 1955 NBA title, Carmen Basilio’s 1957 victory over Sugar Ray Robinson, Ben Schwartzwalder’s 1959 national football championship and Jim Boeheim’s 2003 NCAA basketball title. The Nats win was the first one and, at least to modern eyes, the most significant because it is a professional sports title and because it was the victory of a team- one that had the name “Syracuse” on their uniform. Ironically, it was won in front of the smallest crowds of any of them.
Boxing was king in the 1950s, at the height of its popularity before scandals, ring deaths and over-exposure caused its popularity to wane. Ben’s teams played before crowds of 40,000 people. Jimmy Boeheim’s troops could probably top that for some games if they used the whole Dome. Danny Biasone’s heroes played before crowds of 2-3,000 in the War Memorial, (before that in the Fair Grounds Coliseum), under constant threat that they would be moved to another city where the arenas and the crowds could be larger. That would eventually happen but it would be postponed by the events of 1955.
The smallness of the city and the arena was a problem. Syracuse was in the same division with teams from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Another problem was that the NBA simply wasn’t “big-time” yet. Looking at the old editions of the Post Standard from that time, the NBA and its local team do not seem to have been that much of a big deal at the time. I found no special pre-season supplement about the team, (they don’t seem to have done that sort of thing for anyone in those days). The games were given summaries of maybe 3-4 paragraphs and there was often no article at all about the team after off days. If there was, it read more like a press release. I found no feature articles on any of the players. The only thing you could count on was that the NBA standings would be printed somewhere on the sports page each day, although they were sometimes hard to find and not always up to date.
The coverage was similar to but probably a little less extensive than what the Syracuse Chiefs get today. In fact it was a little short of what the Syracuse Chiefs got in that day. The sports editor and lead columnist for the Herald Journal was now Jack Slattery, who had taken over for the now-deceased Lawrence J. Skiddy, spent the NBA playoffs in Florida watching the Chiefs spring training games, although he did mention the Nats in one column, saying it was frustrating not to be able to see the games but that he wished them well. During the winter the SU basketball team, which was playing its games, not in the Carrier or even the Manley Dome but in Archbold Gym or the Jefferson Street Armory in those days, got as much coverage as the Nats. Even LeMoyne did. They were just the city’s three basketball teams. Actually high school basketball probably got more coverage than the three of them combined.
In the Beginning
The NBA itself was less than a decade old. Professional basketball for years was just about touring teams like the “Original” Celtics, the Harlem Rens, the Cleveland Roseblums and the “Savoy Five”, representing the Savoy Hotel in Chicago, who had been organized into a team by Abe Saperstein, who subsequently named them the “Harlem Globetrotters”. There had been an “American Basketball League” from 1925-31, which even featured a Syracuse team in the 1929-30 season, but not for long. They lost 20 of 24 games and then folded.
In 1937 the National Basketball league was formed but it consisted entirely of midwestern teams, one of which was based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. In 1941 that franchise was bought by Fred Zollner, who owned a company that made auto parts. He named them the “Zollner Pistons”. They are, in fact, the current NBA team with the longest history. Zollner, the richest owner in the league, made sure he had the best team in the league and the Pistons won the regular season title in four consecutive seasons from 1943-46 and won the playoffs in 1944-45. They were pro basketball’s first “dynasty”.
In 1945 Les Harrison organized a team in Rochester which he called the Royals, (several peregrinations have left them in Sacramento where they are called the Kings). One of the players he hired was a tough point guard named Al Cervi. But their best guard was former Seton Hall star Bob Davies. A back-up to them was Red Holtzman, later the coach of the Knicks when they won their two titles. Another was former Northwestern multi-sport star Otto Graham, who would shortly become the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns. Davies’ former Seton Hall teammate, Kevin “Chuck” Connors, also rode the bench a dozen years before he became “The Rifleman”. They finished second to the Pistons but beat them in the playoffs for the 1946 NBL title.
The next year, five teams were added to the league. Four of them represented Detroit, Buffalo, Toledo and Anderson, Indiana. The Buffalo team had moved to “Tri-Cities”, an area representing Davenport Iowa, and Moline and Rockford Illinois just after Christmas and called themselves the “Blackhawks” after the Indian tribe that used to live there. They later became the Milwaukee Hawks, the St. Louis Hawks and are now the Atlanta Hawks.
The other team added that year was the Syracuse Nationals. Danny Biasone, the moderately wealthy owner of a liquor store and bowling alley, had tried to get les Harrison to bring his mighty Rochester Royals to Syracuse for an exhibition game. When Harrison turned him down, the miffed Biasone called NBL Headquarters in Chicago and told them he wanted to start a franchise to compete with Harrison’s team. He was told it would cost $5,000.00. This owner of a bowling alley and liquor store somehow scrapped up the money and had himself a professional basketball team. Harrison who lived to be 93, forever insisted he had never turned down Biasone and that he had helped Danny get his franchise. People Ramsey interviewed favored Biasone’s version.
In 1947 the NBL title was won by the Chicago-American Gears, led by the game’s outstanding big man, DePaul’s George Mikan. The Gears then jumped to a new league, the Professional Basketball League of America. However, that league folded two weeks into the season and all the players were free agents. Mikan signed with a new NBL team, the Minneapolis Lakers, who immediately became the best team in basketball, winning the 1948 NBL title over the Royals.
There was another rival league out there, the “Basketball Association of America”, which started up in 1946 with 11 teams, including the New York Knickerbockers, the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia Warriors. They were owned by the owners of big city arenas who wanted a way to make money when NHL hockey teams were out of town and no big fights were lined up. This league had the worst teams but the biggest arenas and largest potential fan base and thus the biggest future.
The Warriors won the first title with the league’s first superstar, Jumping Joe Fulks, who scored a then amazing 23.2 points a game. He scored 63 points in a 1949 game, which would be a pro basketball record until Elgin Baylor broke it ten years later. A short-lived Baltimore Bullet team won the second title in 1948. But then the top teams from the NBL, Minneapolis, Rochester and Fort Wayne, jumped over to the new league with it’s big arenas and fan bases. Mikan’s Lakers won the BAA title in 1949, then again in 1950, 52, 53 and 54. The Royals won the 1951 title after upsetting the Lakers in the semi-finals. Mikan retired after the 1954 season, having won 7 titles in his 8 years of dominating pro basketball.
To try to compete, the NBL adopted an innovative strategy: they essentially invited entire teams to come into the league and represent cities. The Harlem Renaissance became the Dayton Rens, (this also represented another innovation: they used black players while the BAA didn’t). Later the league invited the core of the University of Kentucky’s two-time national championship team, (Alex Groza, Ralph beard and Wah-Wah Jones), to join the Indianapolis Olympians as a unit for the 1949-50 season. That coup essentially forced the merger of the leagues for the 1949-50 season.
The Nationals stuck it out with the NBL through 1948-49, finishing second to the Anderson Duffy Packers and then losing to them in the playoffs. After that the NBL and BAA agreed to a merger and in 1949-50 the combined league became the NBA. The NBA is usually said to have begun in 1946 but since this was a merger it seems it should trace its roots back to the NBL’s founding in 1937. Certainly the NBL’s teams dominated the new league as no original BAA team won the title between the Bullet’s 1948 win and the Warrior’s second title in 1956. Thus, the ZPistons had 5 titles, not 3. The Kings have two titles, although Sacramento fans haven’t seen either one of them. And the Lakers have 17 titles, not 16 and are tied with the Celtics for the most titles.
The new league had 17 teams that first year but dropped to 11 the next season , then 10 and by the 1954-55 season, 9. The Bullets folded 14 games into the season, (they were 3-11), and their games were simply dropped from the standings, (games among the remaining teams were scheduled so everybody could play 72 games), while their players were distributed around the league. That left the league with the Syracuse Nationals, the Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia Warriors in the Eastern Division and the Fort Wayne Pistons, the Minneapolis Lakers, the Rochester Royals and the Milwaukee Hawks in the western division.
"Syracuse Wins World Series"
That was the headline 50 years ago. No, the Syracuse Chiefs had not been promoted to the major leagues and knocked off the mighty Yankees. Back then any seven game playoff for a professional championship was called a “world series”. This was for the championship of professional basketball, a sport that would really come into its own years later when the Nats were long gone, having morphed into the Philadelphia 76ers. But in 1955 they were the Syracuse Nationals and they gave this burgh the only major league professional sports championship it will likely ever enjoy.
I have compiled this history, which I will post in sections on successive days, from several sources. The major sources have been the Post Standard and Herald Journal, which I have accessed from Newspaper Archive.com.
I also used David Ramsey’s book: “The Nats: A Team. A City. An Era.”, Neil Isaac’s book: “Vintage NBA: The Pioneer Era”, Roland Lazenby’s book: “The NBA Finals: A Fifty Year Celebration”, The Sporting News' “Official NBA Guide”, “The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Basketball”, by David Neft and Richard Cohen, the “Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball” by Zander Hollander”, “Basketball: The American Game” by Joe Jares and “The Official NBA Basketball Encyclopedia”.
The NBA in the 1950’s
The four greatest things ever to happen to this town in the world of sports are the 1955 NBA title, Carmen Basilio’s 1957 victory over Sugar Ray Robinson, Ben Schwartzwalder’s 1959 national football championship and Jim Boeheim’s 2003 NCAA basketball title. The Nats win was the first one and, at least to modern eyes, the most significant because it is a professional sports title and because it was the victory of a team- one that had the name “Syracuse” on their uniform. Ironically, it was won in front of the smallest crowds of any of them.
Boxing was king in the 1950s, at the height of its popularity before scandals, ring deaths and over-exposure caused its popularity to wane. Ben’s teams played before crowds of 40,000 people. Jimmy Boeheim’s troops could probably top that for some games if they used the whole Dome. Danny Biasone’s heroes played before crowds of 2-3,000 in the War Memorial, (before that in the Fair Grounds Coliseum), under constant threat that they would be moved to another city where the arenas and the crowds could be larger. That would eventually happen but it would be postponed by the events of 1955.
The smallness of the city and the arena was a problem. Syracuse was in the same division with teams from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Another problem was that the NBA simply wasn’t “big-time” yet. Looking at the old editions of the Post Standard from that time, the NBA and its local team do not seem to have been that much of a big deal at the time. I found no special pre-season supplement about the team, (they don’t seem to have done that sort of thing for anyone in those days). The games were given summaries of maybe 3-4 paragraphs and there was often no article at all about the team after off days. If there was, it read more like a press release. I found no feature articles on any of the players. The only thing you could count on was that the NBA standings would be printed somewhere on the sports page each day, although they were sometimes hard to find and not always up to date.
The coverage was similar to but probably a little less extensive than what the Syracuse Chiefs get today. In fact it was a little short of what the Syracuse Chiefs got in that day. The sports editor and lead columnist for the Herald Journal was now Jack Slattery, who had taken over for the now-deceased Lawrence J. Skiddy, spent the NBA playoffs in Florida watching the Chiefs spring training games, although he did mention the Nats in one column, saying it was frustrating not to be able to see the games but that he wished them well. During the winter the SU basketball team, which was playing its games, not in the Carrier or even the Manley Dome but in Archbold Gym or the Jefferson Street Armory in those days, got as much coverage as the Nats. Even LeMoyne did. They were just the city’s three basketball teams. Actually high school basketball probably got more coverage than the three of them combined.
In the Beginning
The NBA itself was less than a decade old. Professional basketball for years was just about touring teams like the “Original” Celtics, the Harlem Rens, the Cleveland Roseblums and the “Savoy Five”, representing the Savoy Hotel in Chicago, who had been organized into a team by Abe Saperstein, who subsequently named them the “Harlem Globetrotters”. There had been an “American Basketball League” from 1925-31, which even featured a Syracuse team in the 1929-30 season, but not for long. They lost 20 of 24 games and then folded.
In 1937 the National Basketball league was formed but it consisted entirely of midwestern teams, one of which was based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. In 1941 that franchise was bought by Fred Zollner, who owned a company that made auto parts. He named them the “Zollner Pistons”. They are, in fact, the current NBA team with the longest history. Zollner, the richest owner in the league, made sure he had the best team in the league and the Pistons won the regular season title in four consecutive seasons from 1943-46 and won the playoffs in 1944-45. They were pro basketball’s first “dynasty”.
In 1945 Les Harrison organized a team in Rochester which he called the Royals, (several peregrinations have left them in Sacramento where they are called the Kings). One of the players he hired was a tough point guard named Al Cervi. But their best guard was former Seton Hall star Bob Davies. A back-up to them was Red Holtzman, later the coach of the Knicks when they won their two titles. Another was former Northwestern multi-sport star Otto Graham, who would shortly become the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns. Davies’ former Seton Hall teammate, Kevin “Chuck” Connors, also rode the bench a dozen years before he became “The Rifleman”. They finished second to the Pistons but beat them in the playoffs for the 1946 NBL title.
The next year, five teams were added to the league. Four of them represented Detroit, Buffalo, Toledo and Anderson, Indiana. The Buffalo team had moved to “Tri-Cities”, an area representing Davenport Iowa, and Moline and Rockford Illinois just after Christmas and called themselves the “Blackhawks” after the Indian tribe that used to live there. They later became the Milwaukee Hawks, the St. Louis Hawks and are now the Atlanta Hawks.
The other team added that year was the Syracuse Nationals. Danny Biasone, the moderately wealthy owner of a liquor store and bowling alley, had tried to get les Harrison to bring his mighty Rochester Royals to Syracuse for an exhibition game. When Harrison turned him down, the miffed Biasone called NBL Headquarters in Chicago and told them he wanted to start a franchise to compete with Harrison’s team. He was told it would cost $5,000.00. This owner of a bowling alley and liquor store somehow scrapped up the money and had himself a professional basketball team. Harrison who lived to be 93, forever insisted he had never turned down Biasone and that he had helped Danny get his franchise. People Ramsey interviewed favored Biasone’s version.
In 1947 the NBL title was won by the Chicago-American Gears, led by the game’s outstanding big man, DePaul’s George Mikan. The Gears then jumped to a new league, the Professional Basketball League of America. However, that league folded two weeks into the season and all the players were free agents. Mikan signed with a new NBL team, the Minneapolis Lakers, who immediately became the best team in basketball, winning the 1948 NBL title over the Royals.
There was another rival league out there, the “Basketball Association of America”, which started up in 1946 with 11 teams, including the New York Knickerbockers, the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia Warriors. They were owned by the owners of big city arenas who wanted a way to make money when NHL hockey teams were out of town and no big fights were lined up. This league had the worst teams but the biggest arenas and largest potential fan base and thus the biggest future.
The Warriors won the first title with the league’s first superstar, Jumping Joe Fulks, who scored a then amazing 23.2 points a game. He scored 63 points in a 1949 game, which would be a pro basketball record until Elgin Baylor broke it ten years later. A short-lived Baltimore Bullet team won the second title in 1948. But then the top teams from the NBL, Minneapolis, Rochester and Fort Wayne, jumped over to the new league with it’s big arenas and fan bases. Mikan’s Lakers won the BAA title in 1949, then again in 1950, 52, 53 and 54. The Royals won the 1951 title after upsetting the Lakers in the semi-finals. Mikan retired after the 1954 season, having won 7 titles in his 8 years of dominating pro basketball.
To try to compete, the NBL adopted an innovative strategy: they essentially invited entire teams to come into the league and represent cities. The Harlem Renaissance became the Dayton Rens, (this also represented another innovation: they used black players while the BAA didn’t). Later the league invited the core of the University of Kentucky’s two-time national championship team, (Alex Groza, Ralph beard and Wah-Wah Jones), to join the Indianapolis Olympians as a unit for the 1949-50 season. That coup essentially forced the merger of the leagues for the 1949-50 season.
The Nationals stuck it out with the NBL through 1948-49, finishing second to the Anderson Duffy Packers and then losing to them in the playoffs. After that the NBL and BAA agreed to a merger and in 1949-50 the combined league became the NBA. The NBA is usually said to have begun in 1946 but since this was a merger it seems it should trace its roots back to the NBL’s founding in 1937. Certainly the NBL’s teams dominated the new league as no original BAA team won the title between the Bullet’s 1948 win and the Warrior’s second title in 1956. Thus, the ZPistons had 5 titles, not 3. The Kings have two titles, although Sacramento fans haven’t seen either one of them. And the Lakers have 17 titles, not 16 and are tied with the Celtics for the most titles.
The new league had 17 teams that first year but dropped to 11 the next season , then 10 and by the 1954-55 season, 9. The Bullets folded 14 games into the season, (they were 3-11), and their games were simply dropped from the standings, (games among the remaining teams were scheduled so everybody could play 72 games), while their players were distributed around the league. That left the league with the Syracuse Nationals, the Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia Warriors in the Eastern Division and the Fort Wayne Pistons, the Minneapolis Lakers, the Rochester Royals and the Milwaukee Hawks in the western division.
