SWC75
Bored Historian
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Both leagues- the American Basketball league, (ABL) and the National Basketball League, (NBL) survived the war but it was difficult, as it was for most sporting enterprises. The NBL had a special problem because they were the product of the industrial leagues of the AAU and the corporate sponsors for the teams needed the players on the job to produce war materials. The two Akron teams, the Firestone Non-Skids and the Goodyear Wingfoots, had to withdraw from the league. That left it to the Oshkosh All-Stars, the Sheboygan Redskins, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons and the Rochester Royals, all of whom had originated as touring teams, to dominate the league.
The All-Stars, behind their dominant center, Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, had lost to The Non-Skids 2 games to 3 in the finals in both 1939 and 1940. But they swept them in the semis 2-0, in 1941 and then did the same in three games to Sheboygan for the title. They repeated in 1942, beating a coming power, Fort Wayne, 2-1 in the finals. It was Sheboygan’s turn in 1943, beating Oshkosh 2-0 and then Fort Wayne 2-1 in the finals. They beat Oshkosh 2-1 in 1944 but got swept by Fort Wayne 0-3 in the finals. They lost to Fort Wayne again, 2-3 in 1945 and to Rochester 0-3 in 1946. The Redskins, (nobody protested in those days), were led by their “Twin Towers”, 6-9 Mike Novak, (who delighted in shooting from outside: think Elvir Ovcina) and 6-7 Ed Dancker.
But the greatest team of the war era was the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. Fred Zollner and his sister owned a foundry that made pistons for Ford, GM and International Harvester. He employed more than 1,200 people. He founded the Pistons as an independent team in 1939 and joined the NBL the next year. Fred took a personal interest in the team, making most of the decisions himself and paying the highest salaries, (sort of a George Steinbrenner of his day). He recruited a team that had some of the best players of the day, including high scoring Bobby McDermott, steady guard Buddy Jeanette and well-travelled 6-5 245 center Ed Sadowski. Not only did Zollner’s Pistons become the most successful team of the era but Zollner himself became the most famous and influential owner. (We’ll see in the next chapter what role he played in creating the NBA.)
They were dethroned by Lester Harrison’s Rochester Royals, led by three guards, the scrappy Al Cervi, brilliant point man Bob Davies and Red Holzman. On the front line they had 6-8 John Mahnken and 6-6 George Glamack, known as the “Blind Bomber” due to the glasses he wore to correct his near-sightedness. The reserves included two multi-sport athletes: Chuck Connors, who was also a pro baseball player and much later became TV’s “The Rifleman” and, believe it or not, Otto Graham, who had been both a football and basketball star at Northwestern and would soon begin a hall-of-fame career with the Cleveland Browns.
Still, the league was shredding teams during the war. They were helped out when George Halas, who had decided to disband his Chicago Bruins, changed his mind and sold the team to the United Auto Workers, the only major league professional team ever to be owned by a union. They became the “Chicago Studebacker Flyers”. Another distinction of this team is that it was integrated. Several of the Harlem Globetrotters, (despite the name, still a Midwest-centered organization), had gotten war-production jobs at the Studebacker plant and thus got spots on the team. Unfortunately, dissension between the team’s black and white players was cited as a reason for their 8-15 record and the team finally folded.
Some highlights form the NBL playoffs in the era: In 1942 Cowboy Edwards put on quite a show against the Pistons, scoring 22 points in a 43-61 opening loss. Then he carried the team on his back with an astonishing 35 points in a 68-60 second game win. The Pistons decided to stop him at any cost in the final game and they did, holding him to just one point. But his wide-open teammates scored 51 in a 52-46 title-clinching victory. I’m sure he didn’t mind all the attention.
The league was down to 4 teams in 1942-43 and all made the playoffs. Oshkosh had lost more players to the military than anyone and so Fort Wayne and Sheboygan played for the title. The Redskins overcame a 21-27 halftime deficit to win the opener 55-50. In second game, Buddy Jeanette of the Pistons hit a buzzer shot to tie at 44 and send it into overtime. The Pistons then outscored the Redskins 6-1 in the OT period to knot the series. Each team had won on the other’s home court. The final was a tight defensive duel won by Sheboygan 30-29, for their only title.
There were again only four teams in 1943-44, a new club called the “Cleveland Chase Brass” replacing the dissention-riddled Chicago team, and again they all made the playoffs. But nobody could handle the Pistons who went 18-4 in the regular season and then 9-0 in the playoffs and the WPBT. Sheboygan was the only other team with a winning record at 14-6 and the Pistons beat them three times in a row, 55-53, 36-26 and 48-38. McDermott won the only close game with a mid-court bomb at the buzzer.
Things began to loosen up in 1944-45 and league added the Chicago American Gears and the Pittsburgh Raiders. But Fort Wayne, (25-6) and Sheboygan (19-11) were again the class of the league. The Redskins shocked the Pistons with 50-47 and 65-53 wins in Sheboygan, forcing the favorite to win three in a row in Fort Wayne. Which they did, decisively 58-47, 58-41 and 59-49.
The NBA took in two independent teams for the 1945-46 season to bring their membership back up to 8 teams. One of them, the Indianapolis Kautskys, had been in the league at the beginning, only to break away and play as an independent. The other was the Rochester Royals, who surprised everyone by winning the championship. The Pistons had again been dominant with a 26-8 regular season record but the Royals were not far behind at 24-10. They met in the semi-finals. The Pistons won the opener on their home court 54-44, with Ed Sadowski scoring 21 points. But the Royals won game two on the same court 58-52 and then won the third game in Rochester by the same score. Glamack and Davies both scored 23 as the Royals closed out the two time defending champions 70-54. The game was looking more like the basketball we’ve come to know. The Royals then swept Sheboygan in the finals, 60-50, 61-54 and 66-48 for the championship.
The ABL continued to limp on. A team called the Wilmington Bombers won both halves of the split season in 1942 and were simply awarded the championships without a playoffs. Ed Sadowski, who seemed to annually move from team to team and league to league, was on that team with Moe Spahn. Nat Frankel led the league in scoring with 9.5ppg. That would have placed him 10th in the NBL, which was led by Chuck Chuckovits, (I kid you not) of the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets with 18.5ppg.
Per Robert W. Peterson’s book “Cages to Jumpshots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years”, eastern coaches didn’t think much of Midwestern basketball, as played in the NBL: “There has been such a profound change in the theory, technique, and tactics of the game that a bloc of conservative coaches and free-lance critics, concentrated in the East, no longer call it basketball. They refer to it, rather contemptuously and caustically, as "scarom," an ingenious trade name which is derived by combining the word "carom" and the second element of harum-scarum. "Scarom" described perfectly the general scheme under which too many teams operate these days. The big idea is to barge down the court in harum-scarum fashion, let someone unload a wild shot, and, if it fails, have one of those 6-foot 6-inch human skyscrapers - standard equipment for every top-notch team - slap the carom off the backboard into the basket or grab the rebound and dunk the ball through the hoop.” (What would they think of the Warriors?)
The next year there were only five teams in the league and they again dropped the split season format. Trenton easily won the pennant with an 11-2 record, behind their big, mobile center, 6-6 Mike Bloom. The Philadelphia SPHAs had the only other winning record at 8-6 and beat the Tigers 4-3 in a playoff that represented a third of the team’s seasons. The league had decided not to bother with the last three weeks of the regular season! The seventh game of the final was played before 4,000 fans at the Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia. Neither team had a lead of more than 7 points and The SPHAs took a 25-24 halftime lead on a 70 foot shot by Irv Torgoff and held on to win 44-42. The league actually had three double-figure scorers, led by one Steve Juenger of Harrisburg with 11.6. Sadowski, now playing for Brooklyn, was second with 11.4. Bobby McDermott led the NBL with 12.3, nipping Edwards with 12.0.
The ABL returned to a split season in 1943-44, Wilmington winning the first half and Philadelphia the second. The Bombers beat the SPHAs in seven games for the title, after falling behind 3 games to 1. The shocker was a 57-36 in game 6 in Philly, where the SPHAs had expected to close out the series. Mike Bloom of Trenton and the SPHA’s Ossie Schectman tied for the scoring title at 10.5 while McDermott again led the NBL with 13.4.
The league began to recover as the war wound down and played a 30 game season in 1944-45, the SPHAs winning the pennant at 22-8, just nipping Trenton who went 21-9 only to be upset in the playoffs by the Baltimore Bullets, who had bene only 14-16. The SPHAs then beat the Bullets in a 3 game series for their 7th ABL title in 12 years. After an easy 57-32 opening win, they got upset 46-47 in game two but restored order with a 46-40 win in the final game. Steve Juenger, (10.9) and Mike Bloom (10.7) were the leading scorers. The NBL’s Mel Riebe, a 5-11 hook shot artist, (it was a different game), almost topped them put together, scoring 20.5 for the Cleveland Allmen Transfers, (sponsored by a moving company), of the NBL, with McDermott second at 15.0.
The Bullets and SPHAs tied at 21-13 in 1945-46 but the Bullets, who added Mike Bloom from Trenton to an already good team, beat them in 5 games for the title, a series interrupted by both team’s appearance in an invitational tournament, (apparently an attempt to rival the WPBT), in Schenectady.. The Bullets beat the SPHAs 63-61, (an NBL-type score) to resolve the regular season title. In the final, they traded one-sided games, the SPHAs winning 63-48 in Philly, the Bullets winning 65-48 in Baltimore before it was off to Schenectady, where the two teams played a close game in a consolation match, Baltimore winning 61-58 in OT. Then the Bullets ended the SPHA’s glory era with crushing wins of 68-45 in Philadelphia and 54-39 in Baltimore. There had been a post-war infusion of talent and the entire top ten scorers in the league were in double figures, led by Art Hillhouse, a 6-7 center for Philly who averaged 12.4, beating out Baltimore’s Stan Modzelewski, also known as “Stan Stutz”, at 12.2. Ed Sadowski, by now with the Pistons, led the NBL with 14.3.
Touring teams really suffered in this period due to the scarcity of transportation, especially gasoline. As explained in the previous chapter, the Globetrotters got around this by playing at or near military bases, where they might be able to get gas. But league ball was really taking over at this point. One team besides the Trotters did have a breakthrough. The Washington Bears, composed mostly of former members of the New York Rens, upset the league teams to win the 1943 World Professional Basketball Tournament, beating the Oshkosh All-Stars 43-31 in the final. League teams won every other WPBT title from 1941-48 when the tournament folded as, with the formation of the NBA and the further decline of touring teams, it became a redundancy.
It was an all-NBL final in for the 1941 and 1942 WPBTs as the Detroit Eagles and the Oshkosh All Stars faced off against each other, Detroit, coached by old Celtic Dutch Dehnert won in ’41 39-37 behind the ubiquitous Mr. Sadowski. The All-Stars got a 43-41 revenge the next year. Cowboy Edwards was on the bench most of the game with a knee injury but came in the late going to score 5 crucial points and give his team the win. Then came the renaissance of the Rens, in the form of the Bears, in 1943.
Zollner’s Pistons then steamrollered their way to three straight ‘world’ titles, including a clean sweep of the post season in 1944, when they went undefeated in both the NBL playoffs and the WPBT. As in the NBL playoffs, they had only one close game, a 42-38 win over the reconstituted New York Rens, (who had many of the Washington Bears players from the previous year), in the second game. Zollner’s steamroller crushed the Dayton Aviators 59-34 in the opener, the Globetrotters 63-41 in the semis and the Brooklyn Eagles, (basically an all-star team of ABL players brought together for the tournament), 50-33. That game was 28-11 at halftime and the lead grew to 40-15 at one point. They repeated the next year, beating Oshkosh 63-52, the Rens 68-45 and the Dayton Acmes, a team mostly made up of servicemen, 78-52 in the finals. The Pistons reigned supreme!
The 1946 Pistons won the tournament a third straight time, to assuage their loss to the Royals in the NBL playoffs. They beat an independent team, the Midland Dows by only 65-62, the ABL champ, the Baltimore Bullets 50-49 before winning a best of three series from Oshkosh in the final, 59-61, 56-47 and 73-57. But the Rochester Royals didn’t play in the tournament, content to rest on their laurels. So you could debate who the real championship team was that year. I wonder how many Detroit Piston fans know that their franchise has won as many as six championships, not three? I wonder how many Sacramento Kings fans know that their team actually owns two titles, both won by the Rochester Royals, (who won the 1951 NBA title, then became the Cincinnati Royals, the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, the Kansas City Kings and finally the Sacramento Kings)?
The 1946 WPBT final featured a dramatic confrontation between the two greatest players of the era, Leroy Edwards, who scored 24 points, and Bobby McDermott who scored 20 but led his team to victory. But neither was the tournament MVP. That award went to a young man who had not played any regular season or NBL playoff games but was just signed by the Chicago American Gears for the tournament, where he made his pro debut and scored 100 points in five games. His name was George Mikan.
The All-Stars, behind their dominant center, Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, had lost to The Non-Skids 2 games to 3 in the finals in both 1939 and 1940. But they swept them in the semis 2-0, in 1941 and then did the same in three games to Sheboygan for the title. They repeated in 1942, beating a coming power, Fort Wayne, 2-1 in the finals. It was Sheboygan’s turn in 1943, beating Oshkosh 2-0 and then Fort Wayne 2-1 in the finals. They beat Oshkosh 2-1 in 1944 but got swept by Fort Wayne 0-3 in the finals. They lost to Fort Wayne again, 2-3 in 1945 and to Rochester 0-3 in 1946. The Redskins, (nobody protested in those days), were led by their “Twin Towers”, 6-9 Mike Novak, (who delighted in shooting from outside: think Elvir Ovcina) and 6-7 Ed Dancker.
But the greatest team of the war era was the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. Fred Zollner and his sister owned a foundry that made pistons for Ford, GM and International Harvester. He employed more than 1,200 people. He founded the Pistons as an independent team in 1939 and joined the NBL the next year. Fred took a personal interest in the team, making most of the decisions himself and paying the highest salaries, (sort of a George Steinbrenner of his day). He recruited a team that had some of the best players of the day, including high scoring Bobby McDermott, steady guard Buddy Jeanette and well-travelled 6-5 245 center Ed Sadowski. Not only did Zollner’s Pistons become the most successful team of the era but Zollner himself became the most famous and influential owner. (We’ll see in the next chapter what role he played in creating the NBA.)
They were dethroned by Lester Harrison’s Rochester Royals, led by three guards, the scrappy Al Cervi, brilliant point man Bob Davies and Red Holzman. On the front line they had 6-8 John Mahnken and 6-6 George Glamack, known as the “Blind Bomber” due to the glasses he wore to correct his near-sightedness. The reserves included two multi-sport athletes: Chuck Connors, who was also a pro baseball player and much later became TV’s “The Rifleman” and, believe it or not, Otto Graham, who had been both a football and basketball star at Northwestern and would soon begin a hall-of-fame career with the Cleveland Browns.
Still, the league was shredding teams during the war. They were helped out when George Halas, who had decided to disband his Chicago Bruins, changed his mind and sold the team to the United Auto Workers, the only major league professional team ever to be owned by a union. They became the “Chicago Studebacker Flyers”. Another distinction of this team is that it was integrated. Several of the Harlem Globetrotters, (despite the name, still a Midwest-centered organization), had gotten war-production jobs at the Studebacker plant and thus got spots on the team. Unfortunately, dissension between the team’s black and white players was cited as a reason for their 8-15 record and the team finally folded.
Some highlights form the NBL playoffs in the era: In 1942 Cowboy Edwards put on quite a show against the Pistons, scoring 22 points in a 43-61 opening loss. Then he carried the team on his back with an astonishing 35 points in a 68-60 second game win. The Pistons decided to stop him at any cost in the final game and they did, holding him to just one point. But his wide-open teammates scored 51 in a 52-46 title-clinching victory. I’m sure he didn’t mind all the attention.
The league was down to 4 teams in 1942-43 and all made the playoffs. Oshkosh had lost more players to the military than anyone and so Fort Wayne and Sheboygan played for the title. The Redskins overcame a 21-27 halftime deficit to win the opener 55-50. In second game, Buddy Jeanette of the Pistons hit a buzzer shot to tie at 44 and send it into overtime. The Pistons then outscored the Redskins 6-1 in the OT period to knot the series. Each team had won on the other’s home court. The final was a tight defensive duel won by Sheboygan 30-29, for their only title.
There were again only four teams in 1943-44, a new club called the “Cleveland Chase Brass” replacing the dissention-riddled Chicago team, and again they all made the playoffs. But nobody could handle the Pistons who went 18-4 in the regular season and then 9-0 in the playoffs and the WPBT. Sheboygan was the only other team with a winning record at 14-6 and the Pistons beat them three times in a row, 55-53, 36-26 and 48-38. McDermott won the only close game with a mid-court bomb at the buzzer.
Things began to loosen up in 1944-45 and league added the Chicago American Gears and the Pittsburgh Raiders. But Fort Wayne, (25-6) and Sheboygan (19-11) were again the class of the league. The Redskins shocked the Pistons with 50-47 and 65-53 wins in Sheboygan, forcing the favorite to win three in a row in Fort Wayne. Which they did, decisively 58-47, 58-41 and 59-49.
The NBA took in two independent teams for the 1945-46 season to bring their membership back up to 8 teams. One of them, the Indianapolis Kautskys, had been in the league at the beginning, only to break away and play as an independent. The other was the Rochester Royals, who surprised everyone by winning the championship. The Pistons had again been dominant with a 26-8 regular season record but the Royals were not far behind at 24-10. They met in the semi-finals. The Pistons won the opener on their home court 54-44, with Ed Sadowski scoring 21 points. But the Royals won game two on the same court 58-52 and then won the third game in Rochester by the same score. Glamack and Davies both scored 23 as the Royals closed out the two time defending champions 70-54. The game was looking more like the basketball we’ve come to know. The Royals then swept Sheboygan in the finals, 60-50, 61-54 and 66-48 for the championship.
The ABL continued to limp on. A team called the Wilmington Bombers won both halves of the split season in 1942 and were simply awarded the championships without a playoffs. Ed Sadowski, who seemed to annually move from team to team and league to league, was on that team with Moe Spahn. Nat Frankel led the league in scoring with 9.5ppg. That would have placed him 10th in the NBL, which was led by Chuck Chuckovits, (I kid you not) of the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets with 18.5ppg.
Per Robert W. Peterson’s book “Cages to Jumpshots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years”, eastern coaches didn’t think much of Midwestern basketball, as played in the NBL: “There has been such a profound change in the theory, technique, and tactics of the game that a bloc of conservative coaches and free-lance critics, concentrated in the East, no longer call it basketball. They refer to it, rather contemptuously and caustically, as "scarom," an ingenious trade name which is derived by combining the word "carom" and the second element of harum-scarum. "Scarom" described perfectly the general scheme under which too many teams operate these days. The big idea is to barge down the court in harum-scarum fashion, let someone unload a wild shot, and, if it fails, have one of those 6-foot 6-inch human skyscrapers - standard equipment for every top-notch team - slap the carom off the backboard into the basket or grab the rebound and dunk the ball through the hoop.” (What would they think of the Warriors?)
The next year there were only five teams in the league and they again dropped the split season format. Trenton easily won the pennant with an 11-2 record, behind their big, mobile center, 6-6 Mike Bloom. The Philadelphia SPHAs had the only other winning record at 8-6 and beat the Tigers 4-3 in a playoff that represented a third of the team’s seasons. The league had decided not to bother with the last three weeks of the regular season! The seventh game of the final was played before 4,000 fans at the Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia. Neither team had a lead of more than 7 points and The SPHAs took a 25-24 halftime lead on a 70 foot shot by Irv Torgoff and held on to win 44-42. The league actually had three double-figure scorers, led by one Steve Juenger of Harrisburg with 11.6. Sadowski, now playing for Brooklyn, was second with 11.4. Bobby McDermott led the NBL with 12.3, nipping Edwards with 12.0.
The ABL returned to a split season in 1943-44, Wilmington winning the first half and Philadelphia the second. The Bombers beat the SPHAs in seven games for the title, after falling behind 3 games to 1. The shocker was a 57-36 in game 6 in Philly, where the SPHAs had expected to close out the series. Mike Bloom of Trenton and the SPHA’s Ossie Schectman tied for the scoring title at 10.5 while McDermott again led the NBL with 13.4.
The league began to recover as the war wound down and played a 30 game season in 1944-45, the SPHAs winning the pennant at 22-8, just nipping Trenton who went 21-9 only to be upset in the playoffs by the Baltimore Bullets, who had bene only 14-16. The SPHAs then beat the Bullets in a 3 game series for their 7th ABL title in 12 years. After an easy 57-32 opening win, they got upset 46-47 in game two but restored order with a 46-40 win in the final game. Steve Juenger, (10.9) and Mike Bloom (10.7) were the leading scorers. The NBL’s Mel Riebe, a 5-11 hook shot artist, (it was a different game), almost topped them put together, scoring 20.5 for the Cleveland Allmen Transfers, (sponsored by a moving company), of the NBL, with McDermott second at 15.0.
The Bullets and SPHAs tied at 21-13 in 1945-46 but the Bullets, who added Mike Bloom from Trenton to an already good team, beat them in 5 games for the title, a series interrupted by both team’s appearance in an invitational tournament, (apparently an attempt to rival the WPBT), in Schenectady.. The Bullets beat the SPHAs 63-61, (an NBL-type score) to resolve the regular season title. In the final, they traded one-sided games, the SPHAs winning 63-48 in Philly, the Bullets winning 65-48 in Baltimore before it was off to Schenectady, where the two teams played a close game in a consolation match, Baltimore winning 61-58 in OT. Then the Bullets ended the SPHA’s glory era with crushing wins of 68-45 in Philadelphia and 54-39 in Baltimore. There had been a post-war infusion of talent and the entire top ten scorers in the league were in double figures, led by Art Hillhouse, a 6-7 center for Philly who averaged 12.4, beating out Baltimore’s Stan Modzelewski, also known as “Stan Stutz”, at 12.2. Ed Sadowski, by now with the Pistons, led the NBL with 14.3.
Touring teams really suffered in this period due to the scarcity of transportation, especially gasoline. As explained in the previous chapter, the Globetrotters got around this by playing at or near military bases, where they might be able to get gas. But league ball was really taking over at this point. One team besides the Trotters did have a breakthrough. The Washington Bears, composed mostly of former members of the New York Rens, upset the league teams to win the 1943 World Professional Basketball Tournament, beating the Oshkosh All-Stars 43-31 in the final. League teams won every other WPBT title from 1941-48 when the tournament folded as, with the formation of the NBA and the further decline of touring teams, it became a redundancy.
It was an all-NBL final in for the 1941 and 1942 WPBTs as the Detroit Eagles and the Oshkosh All Stars faced off against each other, Detroit, coached by old Celtic Dutch Dehnert won in ’41 39-37 behind the ubiquitous Mr. Sadowski. The All-Stars got a 43-41 revenge the next year. Cowboy Edwards was on the bench most of the game with a knee injury but came in the late going to score 5 crucial points and give his team the win. Then came the renaissance of the Rens, in the form of the Bears, in 1943.
Zollner’s Pistons then steamrollered their way to three straight ‘world’ titles, including a clean sweep of the post season in 1944, when they went undefeated in both the NBL playoffs and the WPBT. As in the NBL playoffs, they had only one close game, a 42-38 win over the reconstituted New York Rens, (who had many of the Washington Bears players from the previous year), in the second game. Zollner’s steamroller crushed the Dayton Aviators 59-34 in the opener, the Globetrotters 63-41 in the semis and the Brooklyn Eagles, (basically an all-star team of ABL players brought together for the tournament), 50-33. That game was 28-11 at halftime and the lead grew to 40-15 at one point. They repeated the next year, beating Oshkosh 63-52, the Rens 68-45 and the Dayton Acmes, a team mostly made up of servicemen, 78-52 in the finals. The Pistons reigned supreme!
The 1946 Pistons won the tournament a third straight time, to assuage their loss to the Royals in the NBL playoffs. They beat an independent team, the Midland Dows by only 65-62, the ABL champ, the Baltimore Bullets 50-49 before winning a best of three series from Oshkosh in the final, 59-61, 56-47 and 73-57. But the Rochester Royals didn’t play in the tournament, content to rest on their laurels. So you could debate who the real championship team was that year. I wonder how many Detroit Piston fans know that their franchise has won as many as six championships, not three? I wonder how many Sacramento Kings fans know that their team actually owns two titles, both won by the Rochester Royals, (who won the 1951 NBA title, then became the Cincinnati Royals, the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, the Kansas City Kings and finally the Sacramento Kings)?
The 1946 WPBT final featured a dramatic confrontation between the two greatest players of the era, Leroy Edwards, who scored 24 points, and Bobby McDermott who scored 20 but led his team to victory. But neither was the tournament MVP. That award went to a young man who had not played any regular season or NBL playoff games but was just signed by the Chicago American Gears for the tournament, where he made his pro debut and scored 100 points in five games. His name was George Mikan.
