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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 2230288, member: 289"] 1946-47 The Washington Capitols proved the class of the new league, running off a 17 game winning streak early in the season and finishing with a 49-11 record, easily the best in the league, making a name for Red Auerbach, who had previously been coaching high school ball in the DC area. He’d also been coaching service ball and thus had a connection to some of the best players coming back from the war. (You will find a number of successful coaches in multiple sports from this era who had coached service ball and thus had an inside track on returning players: Frank Leahy and Paul Brown in football were in a similar positon.) Red was already using his fast breaking tactics and the Caps averaged 73.8 points per game. But this was a high scoring league in a time when scoring was increasing toward modern levels: the BAA averaged 67 points per team per game. The NBL averaged 60. In fact the Caps were the second highest scoring team in the league, behind Chicago, who had the second best record at 39-22 and averaged 77 points a game. Auerbach’s big scorer was Bob Feerick, a 26 year old 6-3 forward/guard from Santa Clara who averaged 16.8 points a game. 5-11 Freddie Scolari scored 12.6. 6-6 Bones McKinney, later a successful coach at Wake Forest, averaged 12.0. 6-3 Johnny Norlander scored 10.4. 6-8 220 center John Mahnken was the only starter not in double figures and he scored 9.3. In the old days the ABL had that many double figure scorers as a league – at best. The Stags, coached by one Ole Olsen, were even more balanced. Former St. John’s star Max Zaslofsky led them with 14.4 points per game. 6-9 225 center Chick Harbert averaged 12.7 and 6 foot guard Swede Carlson scored 10.7. But six other players averaged at least 5 points a game. But the big scorer in the league, by far, was Philadelphia’s Joe Fulks. He’d played at little known Murray State and then joined the Marines. Pre-war SPHAs star Petey Rosenberg had recommended Joe to Eddie Gottlieb. Gottlieb almost turned Joe down when Fulks had the temerity to demand $8,000 of the $50,000 Gottlieb had to spend on player contracts to sign. He proved worth it. A 6-5 forward, Fulks was a gunner like basketball had never seen, with the possible exception of Bobby McDermott at his best. He only shot 30.5%, (Feerick led the league at 40.1) but that was still better than the league as a whole shot (27.9). But Joe was a volume shooter. He led the league with 1,557 field goal attempts 403 more than anyone else. He also got to the line (where he shot 73%, compared to 64% for the league). He attempted 601 free throws, 216 more than anyone else. That was 26 field goal attempts per game for Joe, (29% of his team’s shots) and 10 free throw attempts (38% of his team’s). It all added up to 23.2 points per game, with high games of 37 points against Providence and later 41 against Toronto. The league had its first star. And it also had its first champion when Fulks led the Warriors to the first ever BAA, and thus, (by extension) the first NBA champion. Somehow, the league’s playoff schedule had the two divisional champions playing each other in the first round, with the second and third place teams doing the same. The 1st place series was best of 7, the others best of three. Then the winners of the 2-3 series played each other in another best of three series, by which time the top series would be over. Chicago beat Washington in 6 games, including wins in the first two games in Washington, where the Caps had been 29-1 during the regular season. The Warriors beat St. Louis 2-1, as did the Knicks vs. Cleveland. The Warriors then swept the Knicks 2-0 and went on to beat the Stags 4-1 for the title. Fulks was at his best in the final series, with another 37 point game in the opener, an 84-71 win in Philadelphia. He got plenty of attention in the second game and was held to 13 points but the final score was almost the same, 85-74 as his teammates took up the slack. Fulks scored 26 in the third game in Chicago. The Warriors pulled that out 75-72 to give the Warriors a 3-0 lead in games. The Stags finally won game four, but barely 74-73. They gave it all they had back in Philly and were tied 80-80 with a minute left, despite 34 points from Fulks. But Howie Dallmar scored the go ahead basket and the Warriors closed it out with a 83-80 win. The worst team in the Eastern Division was the Boston Celtics, coached by Honey Russell, who had been an Original Celtic and also the head coach and Seton Hall, (and would be the latter again). One of his players at the Hall was Kevin “Chuck Connors” whom Russell named as starting center for the Celtics first game. That game was delayed, however when Chuck became the first player to break a glass backboard, which he did during the pre-game warm up. He didn’t do it with a dunk. He did it with a two hand set shot! The story goes that an arena worker made the mistake of not installing a protective piece between the basket rim and the backboard. Chuck’s shot hit the front rim and the force and vibration cracked the back board. Still, when you break a back board with a set shot, you might think of finding another line of work and he did. [MEDIA=youtube]TUiF41tqfX8[/MEDIA] One irony of that first season is that Ned Irish’s Knicks played only 6 games in Madison Square Garden because of all the various events that were scheduled there, many of them due to the previous efforts of one Ned Irish. His new team played more of their home games in the 69th Regiment Armory. They would continue to play some of their games there each year until 1960. The BAA also began keeping track of stats other than just scoring. They kept track of assists and personal fouls There weren’t a lot of assists recorded Ernie Calverley of Providence led the league with 3.4 per game and that was 1.1 more than second place Kenny Sailors of Cleveland. They also kept track of both field and free throw attempts. My “net points” formula at this point had two positives: points and assists, vs. three negatives: missed field goals and missed free throws plus fouls committed. Joe Fulks comes to a -29: 1389 points + 25 assists minus 1,082 missed field goals, 162 miss free throws and 199 fouls. But I’ll still use it as a ranking of players, even if some of them have some strange-looking numbers. The ABL still existed but its days were numbered. They still paid on a per game basis rather than a yearly salary and they didn’t have the big arenas. The BAA almost immediately displaced them as the “eastern’ league and started signing their players. But the BAA didn’t yet attempt to raid the more powerful NBL. The BAA was more interested in young players coming out of college and the military, rather than the “old pros” of the NBL. They also weren’t quite ready to make financial war on the more established league. The NBL was so dominant at this time that, when their teams started to migrate to the BAA/NBA, ex-NBL teams won seven championships in a row before the Warriors could resurface as an original BAA team winning and NBA title. The also won the final two World Professional Basketball Tournament titles in 1947 and 1948. The tournament then disbanded when the NBL and BAA combined to form the NBA and it was obvious that their champion was also the professional champion. In their last year as anything approaching a major league, the ABL had one good team: the Baltimore Bullets, who were close to unbeatable. This is not the franchise now known as the Washington Wizards. This Bullet team was founded in 1944 and was named after the sneakers they played in, which were called Bata Bullets). They also played in an armory, (which a lot of teams did) and “Baltimore Bullets” is alliterative. Their star was player-coach Buddy Jeanette, who had starred with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons when they dominated the ABL. Jeannette teamed with Mike Bloom, who averaged 14.9 ppg and Jeanette 11.9. This team tore through the tattered ABL with a 31-3 record. They didn’t even bother with the ABL title: they quit the playoffs after beating Brooklyn in their opening series, (leaving the Trenton Tigers, who had finished 17-17, to win the ABL title). Instead they went right to the WPBT, only to lose 46-57 to the NBL’s Tri-Cities Black Hawks, (you know them now as the Atlanta Hawks). The next year they jumped as a team to the BAA. From that point on, the ABL was clearly a minor league. I looked over the players listed for the period 1947-1951 on this site, (about 80% of the way down the page), and I just don’t see familiar names, (and no names at all in the league’s final two years). [URL="http://www.apbr.org/abl2552.html"]American Basketball League 1925-26 to 1930-31, 1933-34 to 1952-53[/URL] There are no BAA or NBL players here – they are all in the BAA and the NBL. The league suspended operations in 1953. I’m going to cut bait with the ABL after the 1946-47 season. They will no longer be part of the narrative or the statics in the “net points” section. The NBL also benefited from players coming back from the service. They expanded from 8 to 12 teams to accommodate them. One of the new teams was called the Anderson (Indiana) Duffey Packers, after the meat packing plant the owners, Ike and John Duffey also owned. The Toledo Jeeps were named after a plant that produced those vehicles. The Detroit Gems, (who didn’t shine, going 4-40) would shortly pass from history but would make some in their next incarnation: they became the Minneapolis Lakers the next year. As mentioned, the Tri-Cities, (Moline, Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa) Black Hawks now reside in Atlanta as the Hawks. They had spent their first 38 days as the Buffalo Bisons.” On the team was William "Pop" Gates, who, along with William "Dolly" King, was one of the first two African-American players in the NBL.” (Wikipedia) The Bisons first ever game came against another new team, the Syracuse Nationals. (The Nats had already won their own first game, 67-64 over the Youngstown Bears.) Danny Biasone, owner of a combined restaurant/bowling alley called the Eastwood Sports Center, thought it would be a good thing to get the famous Rochester Royals, owned by Lester Harrison and the 1946 NBL champions, to play a game in Syracuse against a team of Syracuse All-Stars. David Ramsey, who wrote “Nats: A team, a City, An Era” says that Harrison turned down Biasone twice. Mark Allen Baker in “Hoops Roots: Basketball History in Syracuse” said that the games were scheduled twice but Harrison cancelled twice. Harrison told Ramsey that neither was true that he encouraged Biasone to get a team and helped him to do it. Whatever, Danny contacted the league offices in Chicago and found that for $5,000, he could have a franchise. (The Philadelphia 76ers are now worth $800 million). He hired Benny Borgmann, the big star of the early days of the ABL, (and also the manager of the 1941 Syracuse Chiefs), to coach the team. He got Big (6-9), Mike Novak from Sheboygan to go with a 5-8 150 guard named Jerry Rizzo. And Johnny Gee, a 6-9 baseball pitcher who had pitched for Borgmann with the Chiefs, (Johnny was MLB’s tallest player prior to Randy Johnson). Ramsey and Baker on Borgmann: “he was an easy going man, Benny was. I never head him raise his voice. He didn’t stomp up and down the court or anything…..He spent as much time talking baseball and he did basketball.” On Novak: “Novak didn’t enjoy banging in the middle. He wanted to roam outside shooting long set shots. This angered his shorter teammates , who often yelled at him in team meetings. “Go inside…get Tough…get Mean…Get Nasty!” Novak would say “I’m sorry guys” and promise to travel inside the dangerous jungle underneath the basket. The next game he would return to the court’s outer limits and launch his set shot.” The team played in the Jefferson Street Armory, (now the Museum of Science and Technology). They finally got to play Harrison’s Royals- and were defeated four times. Still, they finished with a respectable 21-23 record and actually made the playoffs where they were matched with the powerful Royals and went down 1 game to 3. The one win, in game two in the Armory, 64-61, must have given Danny Biasone a moment of consolation. The Royals stormed to a 31-13 regular season record, the best in the NBL, beating out Fort Wayne by 6 games for the Eastern Division title. They were the only two teams with winning records in that division, (Buffalo/Tri Cities went only 19-25). The Oshkosh All-Stars had enough left to win the west with a 28-16 record. The Indianapolis Kautskys were one game back at 27-17 and the Chicago American Gears and Sheboygan Redskins two back at 26-18. Any of those teams probably would have won either the ABL or the BAA. Eight of the 14 teams in the WPBT were NBL teams. They went 5-1 against the six non-ABL teams in the first round, (the only loser being Syracuse, who lost to the Midland Dows by an embarrassing 39-71). The quarterfinalists were all NBL teams and Indianapolis beat Toledo 62-47 for the tile. And the Chicago American Gears weren’t even in the tournament, even though it was held in Chicago and George Mikan had made his debut in that tournament the year before. Mikan had missed six weeks due to a contract dispute and when he came back the team was only 9-12. The team not only gained his services but also those of Bobby McDermott from Fort Wayne as a player- coach. The combination of Mikan’s inside game and McDermott’s outside game got the Gears in gear and they finished the regular season winning 17 of 23. In the playoffs the Gears subdued the Kautsky’s, with Mikan dominating their skinny 6-9 center, Arnie Risen, in five games. Then then swept Oshkosh, beat Rochester (3 games to 1 for the title, the first of seven in 8 years for Mikan, who at 6-10 245, intimidated everyone in the league. Since Rochester had not played in the WPBT the previous year, I wonder if the NBL winner felt they didn’t have any more to prove and didn’t see a reason to play in the tournament, which had become a sort of professional NIT. (“The Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball” by Zander Hollander makes this statement, which I have not read from any other source: “A new league rule, however, gave the championship to the team with the best record for the entire season and on this basis, Rochester was declared the champion.” Rochester, including the playoffs had a record of 37-18, Chicago 36-21. It seems strange that teams would play in a playoff just to try to accumulate more wins or a better winning percentage so they would have “the best record for the whole season.”) Mikan had the league’s highest scoring average at 16.5 and upped that to 19.7 in the playoffs. Al Cervi of Rochester was technically the league’s leading scorer with 632 points, (his average was 14.4). The NBL All-Star team is interesting. It included Mikan and McDermott as well as Al Cervi and Bob Davies of Rochester. The other player was a 6-2 forward for Sheboygan named Fred Lewis. This All-Star team thus included both the coach of the 1954-55 Syracuse National NBA champions and the coach of the 1965-66 Syracuse University team that averaged almost 100 points per game. [/QUOTE]

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