SWC75
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Perhaps the hardest thing for a championship team is the year after. The Players, coaches, fans and journalists now realize that any goal is obtainable and lose their tolerance for failure. They fell from first, (with a 43-29 record) to last, (35-37) in the Eastern Division in 1955-56 and the last place Philadelphia Warriors, (33-39) of the previous year became the Eastern champions at 45-27 and went on to win the NBA title. It was a close-packed, highly competitive league and the difference between last and first just wasn’t all that great.
Actually, the Nats tied for last with the Knicks, winning their last regular season game to catch them and then beat them in a playoff. For the third straight year they had the pleasure of eliminating Red Auerbach’s Celtics in the playoffs, (an article in a Boston newspaper suggested that Auerbach might be through in that town- not quite yet). According to David Ramsey, “Cervi liked to call Auerbach ‘loudmouth’ and ‘loser’”. Auerbach, for his part, thought so highly of Syracuse that if his team performed badly there, he’d punish them my making then stay in town an extra day. Years later, Cervi was in Boston and saw a statue of Auerbach outside the Boston Garden. He made a mock salute to the man he’d beaten three years running and marched away. He had to wonder what his statue might have looked like if he’d been Bill Russell’s coach.
But the Warriors, who had added Tom Gola from LaSalle’s national champions to Neil Johnston and Paul Arizin, were too much for the Nationals, beating them in a five game series, before taking on Fred Zollner’s Pistons in the finals and beating them in the same number of games. The Pistons had made it back to the finals despite the suspicious nature of their owner. One of the key figures in the gambling scandals of the time was a player named Jack Molinas, who had once been with the Pistons. After seeing his team slide downward after a hot start the previous year and then lost to the Nats in the Finals, he had a detective shadow his team throughout the 1955-56 season.
After the final loss to the Warriors, the Nats did something petty that every player, according to Ramsey’s book, came to regret, although no one spoke up at the time. They voted not to give a playoff share to their coach, Al Cervi. Only one of them voted in his favor. Danny Biasone forked up the money himself to give Cervi the equivalent of a share. Cervi was the Bobby Knight of his time and his aggressive “in your face” style of coaching had worn on the players. With the disappointing season, they no longer had any tolerance for him. Cervi gave a speech before one game, saying, in typical fashion, “This is the BIG one!” Red Rocha said “This makes the 78th big one in a row. When do we get a little one?”
Typically Cervi had another explanation for the problem: he had grown soft, lightened up on his players. “I blame myself because I let go.” He admitted that “They felt like I had an attitude where I was winning all the games and they were losing all the games”. He also said that he’d grown tired of hearing from the teams many stockholders. “Every player had a different stockholder’s ear”
“Shove it Down His Throat”
The next year the team started 4-8 when Cervi announced he was quitting, probably as a gesture to get the team going. Cervi had angrily resigned on several occasions before only to have Danny Biasone beg him to come back. This time he didn’t. Instead he called Paul Seymour and offered him a job as player-coach. After consulting with Schayes, he accepted. He managed after a struggle to get the team back on track. They won 21 of their last 31 games to finish second behind the Boston Celtics.
The Celtics had been transformed by the greatest draft any team ever had. They got Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn and KC Jones in the same draft- all Hall of Famers. Jones wouldn’t be available for a couple of years due to an Army stint. Heinsohn became the team’s power forward, averaging 20 pints and ten rebounds a game for years. But Russell was the one who changed everything- for everybody. He was the next great “big” man in basketball, but totally different from George Mikan. Mikan was the focus of the offense, the #1 option who clogged up the middle for everyone else and won games by dominating the man in front of him. Russell became the focus of the Celtics defense, grabbing rebounds and blocking shots to ignite the Celtic’s fast break. The Celtics really didn’t care who scored on the other end, as long as it was a Celtic. (Harry Truman would have loved them.) And they loved beating the other team downcourt and avoiding the half court traffic jams that had characterized the sport prior to this. They did it so well that in February 1959 game, they scored 173 points on Mikan’s old team, the Minneapolis Lakers. Commissioner Maurice Podoloff respected Auerbach but didn’t much like him. He once personally came down from the stands to break up a fight between Auerbach and Paul Seymour. He told Neil Isaacs, “When he’d light his victory cigar in those televised games, I always wished someone would shove it down his throat.”
Sink the Celtics
Still the Nats were confident they could beat The Celtics, as they had for three seasons in a row. They’d won 7 of the 12 regular season games, (although not all were against Russell, who played in the Melbourne Olympics- held in our winter but the Australian summer- and only played in the last 48 games of the regular season). After beating the Warriors in the first round, they met the new powerhouse in the Eastern Finals. Russell had 46 points, 71 rebounds and innumerable blocks, (the Nats were 4 for 29 in the third quarter of the first game), in a three game sweep. The Celtics then beat another new power, The St. Louis, (formerly Milwaukee) Hawks for the title.
Biasone and Seymour now had to build a team that could beat the Celtics. They decided they needed more firepower. The acquired Minoa’s Larry Costello from the Warriors. He played for the Nats the remaining six years of their existence, averaging as much as 15.8 points a game in a season and played great defense as well. Ed Conlin was picked up from Fordham and averaged as high as 15.0.
But the big acquisition came from Fred Zollner’s Pistons, who were now in Detroit. George Yardley didn’t look like much with his bald head and skinny frame. He looked like an accountant, (a 6-5 accountant) but was called “The Bird”, long before Larry Bird. But he could play. He was an excellent leaper and a fine shooter. In 1957-58, the franchise’s first year in Detroit, he led the NBA in scoring with a 27.8 average. He became the first player to score 2000 points in a season with a fast break dunk Paul Seymour couldn’t stop in the final regular season game at the War Memorial.
The Nats went 41-31 that year but they lost in the first round to the Warriors. Meanwhile Fred Zollner wasn’t as happy as he should have been with Yardley. He was to some extent the George Steinbrenner of the era, willing to spend big money to get the best players but getting jealous when one of them drew more headlines than he did. People were thinking of them as Yardley’s Pistons, not Zollner’s. When Yardley broke his arm in a game against the Celtics in Boston, (he fell to the parquet floor and Tommy Heinsohn greeted him with a swift kick). He went to the locker room for treatment and was told that the owner wanted to see him in his box when they were done. Yardley went to Zollner expecting sympathy but Zollner told him he was through. He told him to go home to California. He was preparing to do so when he got a call from Seymour, who wanted him in Syracuse. A quick trade was arranged and “The Bird” was a Nat.
Dolph Schayes called Yardley “probably the most talented player Syracuse ever had”, (quite a statement coming from Dolph). He may have been referring to Yardley’s off court talents, as well. George had an engineer’s degree from Stanford and in his spare time designed missiles and complicated model airplanes. He also played the piano, upholstered furniture and sewed his own shirts. Dolph, however, was concerned that Yardley was making $21,000 a year. Seymour told him “You oughta kiss that bald-headed guy’s head. He just got you a $6,000 raise.” Actually it was $6001.00, allowing Dolph to continue as the team’s highest paid player. He and Yardley became roommates and scoring partners at forward, both averaging 20 points a game. That same year brought another major acquisition with the arrival of Hal “High Gear” Greer, a deadly jump shooter who set an NBA record, (which didn’t last long thanks to Mr. Chamberlain), of 39 points in one half- and he did it vs. Bill Russell and the Celtics.
The Zenith
The 1949-50 Syracuse Nationals had the best regular season record in the franchise’s history at 51-13. In fact that the NBA’s best record until the Celtics topped it a decade later. The 1954-55 Nationals finally broke through and won the NBA title. But nearly everybody involved with the team feels the peak was in the late 1950’s The ’49-’50 team accumulated their record in a bloated 17 team league that was the result of an awkward merger between the old BAA and NBL. Six of those teams would fold at the end the year. The 1954-55 team was a defense-oriented team that won a title between the era of the two great dynasties, Mikan’s Lakers and Russell’s Celtics. The 1958-59 team, by the end of the season and the 1959-60 team were offensive powerhouses that still knew how to play defense in a stronger league than in the earlier years.
Unfortunately, that league was moving to another level. Not only were the Celtics reinventing the game but huge talents like Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West were carrying it to another level, as can be seen by the scores teams were accumulating and the stats their players started putting up. It was the equivalent of the “live ball” era in baseball, except the ball was the same. The players were different.
The high water mark for the Nats was their series in the Eastern finals vs. the Celtics in 1959. The Nats had blown them out in the last game of the regular season at the War Memorial, 141-118. After sweeping the Knicks the Nationals took on the Celtics in perhaps the greatest series in NBA history. The Celtics won the first, big time, 109-131 at the Boston Garden. The teams then had a cozy joint flight to Syracuse where Schayes, (34 pts), and Yardley, (27) led the Nats to a 120-118 win. They both went right at Russell the whole game.
Then they went back to Boston, Schayes feeling under the weather with a stomach virus and got blown out again 111-133. Again the Nationals answered with a 119-107 win at the War Memorial with Schayes scoring 28 and Costello outscoring Cousy, 26-13.
A third Garden blow-out, 108-129 was followed by another Nats win in Syracuse, 133-121. Schayes, despite a toe injury, scored 39 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and passed for 8 assists. This set the stage for what Johnny Most called “the most perfectly played basketball game I’ve ever seen”. Red Auerbach said it was “the greatest game I have ever been a part of.” Tommy Heinsohn called it the best basketball game he’d ever played in. At one point Most got so excited his dentures fell out and nearly went over the rail of the press deck before he managed to retrieve them.
Back in the Garden where the Celtics had won three games by a total of 65 points, they moved to a 12-19 lead. The Nats had a 30-10 run to make it 43-29, (ironically their regular season record in their championship year). The visitors pushed it to 58-42 and still led 83-73 midway through the third quarter. At this point the Nationals began to grow tired and the Celtics came back to tie it at 90. They took the lead at 94-95 and pushed that to 108-115.
But Syracuse rallied with ten straight points to make it 118-115. The Celtics rallied themselves to take a 120-121 lead with 2:40 left; Cousy scoring after Russell stole the ball from Schayes, who swore he was fouled across the arms. A three point play by Russell made it 120-124. But then Yardley drew Russell’s 6th foul but could make only one free throw, then missed a shot after Kerr got the rebound. Cousy hit a jumper at the 24 second buzzer with 46 seconds left. A Schayes lay-up made it 123-126. Hal Greer then made a steal with 40 seconds left. Expecting Russell to block his shot- and forgetting he was out of the game- he blew a lay-up. Sam Jones grabbed the rebound but stepped out of bounds. But the refs didn’t see it- or wouldn’t call it. There were 25 seconds left. Sam Jones hit two free throws. Larry Costello hit a jumper with 6 seconds left. Cousy clinched it with two more foul shots, (125-130), and was carried off the floor by the screaming Boston fans after the buzzer. He shouted “We’re the better team! We’re the better team!”
He had 25 points, Frank Ramsey 28, Heinsohn 20, Sam Jones 19 and Russell 18. It was barely enough to beat Schayes’ 35, Yardley’s 32, Kerr’s 23 and Costello’s 20 points. Yardley said “It’s a rotten shame. They’re really not that good”. He knew better. The Celtics then swept Baylor’s Lakers, (they would move to LA and Jerry West would join him in 1960) for the title. The Nats would never come so close again. “That was the zenith, said Schayes. “That was the best team we ever had.”
Meanwhile Red Auerbach was puffing on what David Ramsey describes as “a ridiculously long cigar, close to a foot long and fat as a giant’s thumb”.
Wilt the Stilt
The 1959-60 Nats went 45-30 and finished third in the East behind the Celtics and the Warriors, who had obtained the services of the giant Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain, (his best nick-name, “The Big Dipper”, would come later). Wilt stunned the basketball world by averaging 38 points and 27 rebounds a game. He was a greater talent than Russell but his team played the old-fashioned “get it to the star” game rather than working off the defense and the fast break. But the big guy was too much for the Nats, dumping 53 points on them in the final of the best of three first round series.
Seymour was replaced by ex-Nat Alex Hannum for the 1960-61 season. He had coached the Hawks when they beat the Celtics in the 1958 finals. Yardley had retired by now- he found he could make more money as a salesman for a company that made equipment for oil refineries and chemical plants. The Nats fell to 38-41 but upset Chamberlain’s Warriors in the first round, using a new acquisition, 7-3 Swede Halbrook to try to bother Chamberlain. Wilt scored 46 in the first game but missed 20 shots. He had only 14 rebounds in the second game to Swede’s 12. Halbrook and Kerr held Wilt to 33 points in the final game. They then lost to the Celtics in five games in the Eastern Finals in five games, as Halbrook was not the answer for Russell.
Dolph Schayes left knee started to bother him in 1961-62, his 14th year of pro basketball. His scoring average plummeted from 23.6 to 14.7 points per game and Greer took over as the team’s big gun. The team was still good enough to come in with a winning record at 41-39 and extend the Warriors to a fifth game in the best of five series. Chamberlain slammed dunked the Nats in the final with 56 points and 35 rebounds.
You shoulda been there…
January 17, 1961 was quite a night in Syracuse as, for the only time, this town hosted the NBA All-Star game. The West All-Stars beat the East, 153-131, led by 29 points from Bob Pettit, 23 from Oscar Robertson, 21 from Clyde Lovellette, 15 each from Elgin Baylor and Gene Shue, 14 from “Hot Rod Hundley and 13 from Bailey Howell. The east was led by Bill Russell, of all people, with 24, Dolph Schayes with 21, Paul Arizin with 17, Tom Gola and Hal Greer with 14 each, Wilt Chamberlain with only 12, (but a game high 18 rebounds), and Richie Guerin with 11. Jerry West, Wayne Embry, Cliff Hagan, Walter Dukes, Tom Heinsohn, Bob Cousy, Willie Naulls and Larry Costello also saw action. Oscar Robertson, with 14 assists, was MVP. There were 232 field goal attempts in the game. The West jumped out to a surprising 28-9 lead. Auerbach tried putting Chamberlain and Russell in the same at the same time but it wasn’t enough to come back, although it must have been quite a sight for the 8,016 fans at the War Memorial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_NBA_All-Star_Game
Perhaps the hardest thing for a championship team is the year after. The Players, coaches, fans and journalists now realize that any goal is obtainable and lose their tolerance for failure. They fell from first, (with a 43-29 record) to last, (35-37) in the Eastern Division in 1955-56 and the last place Philadelphia Warriors, (33-39) of the previous year became the Eastern champions at 45-27 and went on to win the NBA title. It was a close-packed, highly competitive league and the difference between last and first just wasn’t all that great.
Actually, the Nats tied for last with the Knicks, winning their last regular season game to catch them and then beat them in a playoff. For the third straight year they had the pleasure of eliminating Red Auerbach’s Celtics in the playoffs, (an article in a Boston newspaper suggested that Auerbach might be through in that town- not quite yet). According to David Ramsey, “Cervi liked to call Auerbach ‘loudmouth’ and ‘loser’”. Auerbach, for his part, thought so highly of Syracuse that if his team performed badly there, he’d punish them my making then stay in town an extra day. Years later, Cervi was in Boston and saw a statue of Auerbach outside the Boston Garden. He made a mock salute to the man he’d beaten three years running and marched away. He had to wonder what his statue might have looked like if he’d been Bill Russell’s coach.
But the Warriors, who had added Tom Gola from LaSalle’s national champions to Neil Johnston and Paul Arizin, were too much for the Nationals, beating them in a five game series, before taking on Fred Zollner’s Pistons in the finals and beating them in the same number of games. The Pistons had made it back to the finals despite the suspicious nature of their owner. One of the key figures in the gambling scandals of the time was a player named Jack Molinas, who had once been with the Pistons. After seeing his team slide downward after a hot start the previous year and then lost to the Nats in the Finals, he had a detective shadow his team throughout the 1955-56 season.
After the final loss to the Warriors, the Nats did something petty that every player, according to Ramsey’s book, came to regret, although no one spoke up at the time. They voted not to give a playoff share to their coach, Al Cervi. Only one of them voted in his favor. Danny Biasone forked up the money himself to give Cervi the equivalent of a share. Cervi was the Bobby Knight of his time and his aggressive “in your face” style of coaching had worn on the players. With the disappointing season, they no longer had any tolerance for him. Cervi gave a speech before one game, saying, in typical fashion, “This is the BIG one!” Red Rocha said “This makes the 78th big one in a row. When do we get a little one?”
Typically Cervi had another explanation for the problem: he had grown soft, lightened up on his players. “I blame myself because I let go.” He admitted that “They felt like I had an attitude where I was winning all the games and they were losing all the games”. He also said that he’d grown tired of hearing from the teams many stockholders. “Every player had a different stockholder’s ear”
“Shove it Down His Throat”
The next year the team started 4-8 when Cervi announced he was quitting, probably as a gesture to get the team going. Cervi had angrily resigned on several occasions before only to have Danny Biasone beg him to come back. This time he didn’t. Instead he called Paul Seymour and offered him a job as player-coach. After consulting with Schayes, he accepted. He managed after a struggle to get the team back on track. They won 21 of their last 31 games to finish second behind the Boston Celtics.
The Celtics had been transformed by the greatest draft any team ever had. They got Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn and KC Jones in the same draft- all Hall of Famers. Jones wouldn’t be available for a couple of years due to an Army stint. Heinsohn became the team’s power forward, averaging 20 pints and ten rebounds a game for years. But Russell was the one who changed everything- for everybody. He was the next great “big” man in basketball, but totally different from George Mikan. Mikan was the focus of the offense, the #1 option who clogged up the middle for everyone else and won games by dominating the man in front of him. Russell became the focus of the Celtics defense, grabbing rebounds and blocking shots to ignite the Celtic’s fast break. The Celtics really didn’t care who scored on the other end, as long as it was a Celtic. (Harry Truman would have loved them.) And they loved beating the other team downcourt and avoiding the half court traffic jams that had characterized the sport prior to this. They did it so well that in February 1959 game, they scored 173 points on Mikan’s old team, the Minneapolis Lakers. Commissioner Maurice Podoloff respected Auerbach but didn’t much like him. He once personally came down from the stands to break up a fight between Auerbach and Paul Seymour. He told Neil Isaacs, “When he’d light his victory cigar in those televised games, I always wished someone would shove it down his throat.”
Sink the Celtics
Still the Nats were confident they could beat The Celtics, as they had for three seasons in a row. They’d won 7 of the 12 regular season games, (although not all were against Russell, who played in the Melbourne Olympics- held in our winter but the Australian summer- and only played in the last 48 games of the regular season). After beating the Warriors in the first round, they met the new powerhouse in the Eastern Finals. Russell had 46 points, 71 rebounds and innumerable blocks, (the Nats were 4 for 29 in the third quarter of the first game), in a three game sweep. The Celtics then beat another new power, The St. Louis, (formerly Milwaukee) Hawks for the title.
Biasone and Seymour now had to build a team that could beat the Celtics. They decided they needed more firepower. The acquired Minoa’s Larry Costello from the Warriors. He played for the Nats the remaining six years of their existence, averaging as much as 15.8 points a game in a season and played great defense as well. Ed Conlin was picked up from Fordham and averaged as high as 15.0.
But the big acquisition came from Fred Zollner’s Pistons, who were now in Detroit. George Yardley didn’t look like much with his bald head and skinny frame. He looked like an accountant, (a 6-5 accountant) but was called “The Bird”, long before Larry Bird. But he could play. He was an excellent leaper and a fine shooter. In 1957-58, the franchise’s first year in Detroit, he led the NBA in scoring with a 27.8 average. He became the first player to score 2000 points in a season with a fast break dunk Paul Seymour couldn’t stop in the final regular season game at the War Memorial.
The Nats went 41-31 that year but they lost in the first round to the Warriors. Meanwhile Fred Zollner wasn’t as happy as he should have been with Yardley. He was to some extent the George Steinbrenner of the era, willing to spend big money to get the best players but getting jealous when one of them drew more headlines than he did. People were thinking of them as Yardley’s Pistons, not Zollner’s. When Yardley broke his arm in a game against the Celtics in Boston, (he fell to the parquet floor and Tommy Heinsohn greeted him with a swift kick). He went to the locker room for treatment and was told that the owner wanted to see him in his box when they were done. Yardley went to Zollner expecting sympathy but Zollner told him he was through. He told him to go home to California. He was preparing to do so when he got a call from Seymour, who wanted him in Syracuse. A quick trade was arranged and “The Bird” was a Nat.
Dolph Schayes called Yardley “probably the most talented player Syracuse ever had”, (quite a statement coming from Dolph). He may have been referring to Yardley’s off court talents, as well. George had an engineer’s degree from Stanford and in his spare time designed missiles and complicated model airplanes. He also played the piano, upholstered furniture and sewed his own shirts. Dolph, however, was concerned that Yardley was making $21,000 a year. Seymour told him “You oughta kiss that bald-headed guy’s head. He just got you a $6,000 raise.” Actually it was $6001.00, allowing Dolph to continue as the team’s highest paid player. He and Yardley became roommates and scoring partners at forward, both averaging 20 points a game. That same year brought another major acquisition with the arrival of Hal “High Gear” Greer, a deadly jump shooter who set an NBA record, (which didn’t last long thanks to Mr. Chamberlain), of 39 points in one half- and he did it vs. Bill Russell and the Celtics.
The Zenith
The 1949-50 Syracuse Nationals had the best regular season record in the franchise’s history at 51-13. In fact that the NBA’s best record until the Celtics topped it a decade later. The 1954-55 Nationals finally broke through and won the NBA title. But nearly everybody involved with the team feels the peak was in the late 1950’s The ’49-’50 team accumulated their record in a bloated 17 team league that was the result of an awkward merger between the old BAA and NBL. Six of those teams would fold at the end the year. The 1954-55 team was a defense-oriented team that won a title between the era of the two great dynasties, Mikan’s Lakers and Russell’s Celtics. The 1958-59 team, by the end of the season and the 1959-60 team were offensive powerhouses that still knew how to play defense in a stronger league than in the earlier years.
Unfortunately, that league was moving to another level. Not only were the Celtics reinventing the game but huge talents like Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West were carrying it to another level, as can be seen by the scores teams were accumulating and the stats their players started putting up. It was the equivalent of the “live ball” era in baseball, except the ball was the same. The players were different.
The high water mark for the Nats was their series in the Eastern finals vs. the Celtics in 1959. The Nats had blown them out in the last game of the regular season at the War Memorial, 141-118. After sweeping the Knicks the Nationals took on the Celtics in perhaps the greatest series in NBA history. The Celtics won the first, big time, 109-131 at the Boston Garden. The teams then had a cozy joint flight to Syracuse where Schayes, (34 pts), and Yardley, (27) led the Nats to a 120-118 win. They both went right at Russell the whole game.
Then they went back to Boston, Schayes feeling under the weather with a stomach virus and got blown out again 111-133. Again the Nationals answered with a 119-107 win at the War Memorial with Schayes scoring 28 and Costello outscoring Cousy, 26-13.
A third Garden blow-out, 108-129 was followed by another Nats win in Syracuse, 133-121. Schayes, despite a toe injury, scored 39 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and passed for 8 assists. This set the stage for what Johnny Most called “the most perfectly played basketball game I’ve ever seen”. Red Auerbach said it was “the greatest game I have ever been a part of.” Tommy Heinsohn called it the best basketball game he’d ever played in. At one point Most got so excited his dentures fell out and nearly went over the rail of the press deck before he managed to retrieve them.
Back in the Garden where the Celtics had won three games by a total of 65 points, they moved to a 12-19 lead. The Nats had a 30-10 run to make it 43-29, (ironically their regular season record in their championship year). The visitors pushed it to 58-42 and still led 83-73 midway through the third quarter. At this point the Nationals began to grow tired and the Celtics came back to tie it at 90. They took the lead at 94-95 and pushed that to 108-115.
But Syracuse rallied with ten straight points to make it 118-115. The Celtics rallied themselves to take a 120-121 lead with 2:40 left; Cousy scoring after Russell stole the ball from Schayes, who swore he was fouled across the arms. A three point play by Russell made it 120-124. But then Yardley drew Russell’s 6th foul but could make only one free throw, then missed a shot after Kerr got the rebound. Cousy hit a jumper at the 24 second buzzer with 46 seconds left. A Schayes lay-up made it 123-126. Hal Greer then made a steal with 40 seconds left. Expecting Russell to block his shot- and forgetting he was out of the game- he blew a lay-up. Sam Jones grabbed the rebound but stepped out of bounds. But the refs didn’t see it- or wouldn’t call it. There were 25 seconds left. Sam Jones hit two free throws. Larry Costello hit a jumper with 6 seconds left. Cousy clinched it with two more foul shots, (125-130), and was carried off the floor by the screaming Boston fans after the buzzer. He shouted “We’re the better team! We’re the better team!”
He had 25 points, Frank Ramsey 28, Heinsohn 20, Sam Jones 19 and Russell 18. It was barely enough to beat Schayes’ 35, Yardley’s 32, Kerr’s 23 and Costello’s 20 points. Yardley said “It’s a rotten shame. They’re really not that good”. He knew better. The Celtics then swept Baylor’s Lakers, (they would move to LA and Jerry West would join him in 1960) for the title. The Nats would never come so close again. “That was the zenith, said Schayes. “That was the best team we ever had.”
Meanwhile Red Auerbach was puffing on what David Ramsey describes as “a ridiculously long cigar, close to a foot long and fat as a giant’s thumb”.
Wilt the Stilt
The 1959-60 Nats went 45-30 and finished third in the East behind the Celtics and the Warriors, who had obtained the services of the giant Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain, (his best nick-name, “The Big Dipper”, would come later). Wilt stunned the basketball world by averaging 38 points and 27 rebounds a game. He was a greater talent than Russell but his team played the old-fashioned “get it to the star” game rather than working off the defense and the fast break. But the big guy was too much for the Nats, dumping 53 points on them in the final of the best of three first round series.
Seymour was replaced by ex-Nat Alex Hannum for the 1960-61 season. He had coached the Hawks when they beat the Celtics in the 1958 finals. Yardley had retired by now- he found he could make more money as a salesman for a company that made equipment for oil refineries and chemical plants. The Nats fell to 38-41 but upset Chamberlain’s Warriors in the first round, using a new acquisition, 7-3 Swede Halbrook to try to bother Chamberlain. Wilt scored 46 in the first game but missed 20 shots. He had only 14 rebounds in the second game to Swede’s 12. Halbrook and Kerr held Wilt to 33 points in the final game. They then lost to the Celtics in five games in the Eastern Finals in five games, as Halbrook was not the answer for Russell.
Dolph Schayes left knee started to bother him in 1961-62, his 14th year of pro basketball. His scoring average plummeted from 23.6 to 14.7 points per game and Greer took over as the team’s big gun. The team was still good enough to come in with a winning record at 41-39 and extend the Warriors to a fifth game in the best of five series. Chamberlain slammed dunked the Nats in the final with 56 points and 35 rebounds.
You shoulda been there…
January 17, 1961 was quite a night in Syracuse as, for the only time, this town hosted the NBA All-Star game. The West All-Stars beat the East, 153-131, led by 29 points from Bob Pettit, 23 from Oscar Robertson, 21 from Clyde Lovellette, 15 each from Elgin Baylor and Gene Shue, 14 from “Hot Rod Hundley and 13 from Bailey Howell. The east was led by Bill Russell, of all people, with 24, Dolph Schayes with 21, Paul Arizin with 17, Tom Gola and Hal Greer with 14 each, Wilt Chamberlain with only 12, (but a game high 18 rebounds), and Richie Guerin with 11. Jerry West, Wayne Embry, Cliff Hagan, Walter Dukes, Tom Heinsohn, Bob Cousy, Willie Naulls and Larry Costello also saw action. Oscar Robertson, with 14 assists, was MVP. There were 232 field goal attempts in the game. The West jumped out to a surprising 28-9 lead. Auerbach tried putting Chamberlain and Russell in the same at the same time but it wasn’t enough to come back, although it must have been quite a sight for the 8,016 fans at the War Memorial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_NBA_All-Star_Game
