SWC75
Bored Historian
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The Team
The “Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball” by Zander Hollander” says “There once was a team, a wonderful team, the night after night gave the simplest, most exciting display of pure basketball ever seen in the National Basketball Association. It wasn’t a big team and it did not have a roster full of All-Americans or towering front-courtmen. What the Syracuse Nationals did have was a distinct spirit…Watching the Nationals play was treat. They believed in a team game and a patterned but exciting offense.”
The Nats didn’t start out a “wonderful” team. That team had to be put together, piece by piece. In the beginning the coach was the white-haired, stately, dignified Benny Borgmann. He had been a star in the early days of touring professional teams and also had a career in baseball. In fact, he had been the manager of the Syracuse Chiefs at one time. The local reporters found him more interested in talking baseball than basketball when they interviewed him. Now THERE was a big time-sport. One player said “He was an easy-going man. I never heard him raise his voice or stomp up and down the court or anything.” Not that he didn’t have reason to. The early Nats were a revolving door of a team, using as many as 20 players in a season. The closest the team had to a star was 6-9 Mike Novak, who liked to stand outside and shoot set shots rather than mix it up down below. His teammates would complain. The easy-going Novak would say “I’m sorry, guys” and promise to do better but then go back to the outside where he was more comfortable and let his teammates do things like blocking shots and getting rebounds. The first two teams had a combined record of 45 wins and 59 losses.
The Coach
In 1948 Al Cervi, the Rochester Royals, scrappy guard, had a scrap with his owner, Les Harrison, and jumped to Syracuse as player coach. He’d been playing pro basketball since 1935 and was a notable stomper and shouter as well as a guy who would dive into the stands for loose balls and defend in “a frantic, hustling, mauling style”. His nickname was “digger”. He brought that style to his new team. “Poor Syracuse, always the losers." I felt sorry for them”. Cervi could recall playing games in a dance hall where players had to leap up onto the stage to drive to the basket and one place where there was a pot bellied stove in mid-court that always had a fire going because it was the main source of heat in the building. He was not noted to have much sympathy for player complaints. Dolph Schayes said “He wasn’t a college man and we all were and he was out to show us something. He showed it to us, all right.” Paul Seymour remembers sitting in a car Cervi was driving while Al was analyzing a game. He ran red lights at Lodi Street and Teall Ave and was about to do it again when Seymour pointed out Cervi was ignoring the lights. “Huh, Cervi said, and continued his narrative”. (Sounds like they were on James Street, heading for Biasone’s Eastwood Sports Center, which was a James and Midler.)
The Star
The next step was the signing of Dolph Schayes, a New York City native and NYU grad whom Biasone outbid the Knicks for with the promise of a princely salary of $7500.00. (That was in 1948: that would be about $62,000 today). Draft picks were territorial in those days and while still in the NBL, the Nats had New York City as part of their territory. The New York Knicks were in the “other” league. They outbid the Knicks who were handicapped by a $5000.00 salary cap their owner, Ned Irish, had insisted upon. The Nats, still in the NBL, were under no such limit.
Hollander on Schayes: “Schayes personified the spirit of the Nats. Each time he scored a goal, he would run to the opposite end of the court, fist clenched triumphantly above his head. …Schayes was 6-8 and a forward but he was such a versatile performer that he was one of the last of the deadly two handed set shooters. This helped make him great. He could score from the outside as easily as he could drive underneath for a lay-up….Schayes was a rugged rebounder…not afraid to become involved with the tough play under the boards, (hear that Mike Novak?)…Schayes’ hustle has become legendary when people speak of and write about NBA history. He played with broken wrists, he played with other injuries and he played when he was sick because he had to-for all those years- carry the burden of the Syracuse offence.” When Schayes hurt his right wrist, he learned to play with his left hand. When he hurt his left wrist, it strengthened his game with his right hand.
According to David Ramsey’s book, “Nats, a City a Team and Era”, “Schayes was a basketball-rule breaker, one of the first. He didn’t want to stand around. He wanted to move, always move. He was a superb rebounder, especially on the offensive boards, but otherwise he played more like a guard than the power forward he was. He tossed up long, two-handed set shots. He ran the floor on the break. He revolutionized his position.” His concentration was legendary. Ramsey: “He once, fell into such a deep pre-game trance that he forgot an important fact. He forgot his wife. He had left her at home.” I guess single-mindedness was another characteristic of the Nats- to heck with red lights and wives. They were all about basketball.
He was a highly consistent player, one who never led the league in scoring but was its all-time scoring leader when he retired, (Wilt Chamberlain soon took care of that). He also was the all-time leader in free throws made, ((he shot 85% for his career). He also led in fouls committed, showing he was far from just a finesse player. Ironically he was only #4 in rebounds, since that was the only major individual category he ever led the league in, (1950-51, 16.4). He was the Larry Bird of his time.
But still, he wasn’t quite a “Cervi” player. Ramsey: “The men would squabble for years about the manner Schayes played defense but Cervi was wise enough to see the genius in the young man’s game. “ Dolph has said that his attitude was: “If I outscore my guy and everyone else outscores his guy, how are we going to lose?” (Defenders had “guys” then- not “zones”.) Dolph’s teams did enough winning to make the playoffs every year he played here- 15 years in a row. He also held records for playoff appearances and games played when he retired. He may not have been a “Cervi-type player” but Cervi and his successors saw to it that Dolph had also played more minutes than anyone in NBA history when he finally left the game.
The Protégé
Paul Seymour was a “Cervi-type” player, or at least he became one under The Digger’s tutelage. Ramsey: “In Cervi, he had the prefect role model. Both men believed in defense. And both men chased victories with the same vigor. They often clashed but Cervi molded Seymour into a defensive terror and one of pro basketball’s best guards. He tells a story of playing an exhibition game in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic and getting an elbow to the face that required 17 stitches to close. The PA announcer asked if there was a doctor in the house and 500 fans stood up.
He told David Ramsey that one should never say “I wanted to”. If you really wanted to do something you’d do it. Seymour was in New Orleans in 1947, the team he was playing for, in something called the “Pro Basketball League of America”, which lasted only a few weeks, was out of business because their tiny arena had burned down. He got a call from an old friend, Sid Goldberg, owner of the Toledo Jeeps of the NBL, saying that if he could get to Baltimore, where Sid had another old friend, they’d give him a try-out. He was broke but noticed that each room in his hotel had a radio in it that you turned on by inserting quarters. He snuck around the hotel, stealing those quarters until he had the $33.00 fare. He wound up playing for the BAA champion Baltimore Bullets, although he was let go and wound up in Syracuse before that title was won. But he’d proven that he “wanted to” play professional basketball.
The Bullet
In some ways the most important player in the early days was “Bullet” Billy Gabor, the Syracuse University star. Billy was an exciting player, probably the fastest in basketball at the time. Schayes: “Billy was a very motivated, very aggressive, a bull in a china shop type of guy. Once he was dribbling down the court full blast and he stopped. He had been going so fast that his sneakers couldn’t take it. They ripped right in half. And they were new sneakers.” But Gabor never became a big star in the NBA. In 7 seasons he averaged 9.8 points a game. But his hustle helped the team and, more importantly, he brought with him Syracuse University basketball fans who soon filled the State Fair Coliseum and the War Memorial- or filled them to some extent, at least.
Two Redheads
It takes all kinds and Red Rocha was one of them. Born and raised in Hawaii, (where he would later become the state university’s basketball coach), he loathed Syracuse’s winters but loved its loud fans. But he wouldn’t be disturbed during his pre-game naps or while sipping the tea he would have after them. It is an indication of life in the NBA in those days that Rocha actually left the team, missing the 1953-54 season, for a higher-paying job as a salesman for the McCormick Spice Company in Baltimore. But he missed the game so much he was back for the 1954-55 season. Those spices don’t seem to have encouraged him to eat much as he stood 6-9 and weighed only 185 pounds. But he was the quickest and best defensive forward in the league. Nicknamed “Bones Almighty”, Bud Vander Meer of the Herald Journal said of him, “He is most feared in the NBA because of his leech-like guarding”. Eeeew… leech-like guarding!. But the blood didn’t put much meat on his bones, either.
He was not the only player on the team called “Red”. The other was Johnny Kerr, a rookie from Illinois who joined the team for the 1954-55 season. He was also 6-9 but showed up weighing 248 pounds, having trained in the off-season on “pizza and beer”. That made him a couple of steps too slow for Cervi but Johnny worked his way into shape and was down to 210 pounds at the end of the year and Cervi began to use him more and more. He brought a new dimension to the team- a strong center, one with a good high post game on offense but who could rebound well on both ends. He would be a mainstay for the Nats for their remaining 9 seasons in the Salt City. He was known for keeping the team loose with his sense of humor. One time, after the team started taking charter flights to games, a rookie named Connie Dierking confessed he was afraid of flying. Kerr decided to comfort him. “What are you worried about? More people get killed in train wrecks than plane crashes- 42 people were killed in one recently.” Dierking asked him how that train crash had occurred. “Oh, a plane fell on it.”
Black is Beautiful
Earl Lloyd was one of only two black players on the team in 1954-55. He was a solidly muscled and athletic 6-6 220 and was called “The Big Cat” for his quick and easy movements. He was the team’s strongest player and it’s “enforcer”. But he was also a productive player, averaging double figures for the only time in his career that season with 10.2 points to go with 7.7 rebounds a game in the championship year. Schayes called Lloyd, “a prototypical defensive forward. In those days, teams had a defensive forward and a scoring forward, a scoring guard and a defensive guard. Earl would take the best scorer on the other team. It was a selfless job.” I wonder if Al Cervi thought of one forward as being for defense and the other for offense?
Lloyd is part of a triumvirate that did for pro basketball, (at least the NBA version) what Jackie Robinson did for major league baseball. The first black player drafted by an NBA team was Chuck Cooper by the Boston Celtics. The first black player signed was Sweetwater Clifton, off the Globetrotters by the New York Knicks. But Earl Lloyd, then with the Washington Capitols, was, due to the schedule, the first black ever to play in an NBA game. His era was so long ago that the Caps were the first integrated team he’d ever played on. He told David Ramsey that he wanted to see if he could cover white men and score over white men. “I kept asking myself, ‘What do you think you are doing here?’ These were the people I had read about. I had no fears but you have to understand, if you have been treated as inferior all your life, it’s easy to believe you are inferior. When I finally realized I did belong, it was an awakening, really. Those white people put their pants on the same way I did. It meant a lot to figure that out.” Lloyd found out he could play with and against anybody, including Bob Brannum of the Boston Celtics, who greeted him with an elbow to the ribs. Lloyd chased him down court and gave Brannum an elbow to the face. “You could hear it all over the gym”, Paul Seymour said. “It was beautiful”.
It Takes a Team
George King was a high scoring guard in the small colleges at Morris Harvey who found trouble with his previously reliable free throw shot in the pros but was a consistent double figure scorer anyway. Wally Osterkorn was a defensive specialist, also from Illinois, who must have warmed Cervi’s heart when he told an opposing star after he drove the lane “Come back and I’ll murder you.” Osterkorn recalls a game where he got into a fight with the Warrior’s Zeke Zawoluk and found himself being attacked by Zawoluk’s mother who chased him all over the court with an umbrella. Billy Kenville, known as “The Kid” was a second year guard from St. Bonaventure. Dick Farley, a 6-4 swingman, was a rookie from Indiana, “one of the early big guards”.
There would be two acquisitions during the season. When the Bullets broke up, the Nats by luck of the draw, had the first pick of their players. It was a golden opportunity to obtain the services of the game’s most exciting young player, scoring machine Frank Selvy, who had amazed the college basketball world by scoring 41 points a game, including 100 in one game while a senior at Furman. Selvy was the leading scorer in the NBA at the time and the defensive oriented Nats could sure have used a second major scoring threat to supplement Schayes. But Cervi went for veteran forward Connie Simmons, a 6-8 225 pounder who had been a double figure scorer and solid rebounder for four different teams, playing in every season of the league’s nine year history. This decision looked pretty bad when Simmons went down with an injury midway through the year but Johnny Kerr moved into the line-up and stayed for a decade. It took the sting out of missing out on Selvy, who went to the Hawks, where he faded to fourth in scoring with a 19.0 average. He continued to fade after that, scoring 11.0 and 3.6 in successive injury-plagued seasons before becoming a back-up for the Lakers. His most famous moment in the pros was when the old gunner barely missed a shot, (around and around and out), that would have beaten the Celtics in regulation in the seventh game of the 1962 NBA finals. The Celtics won in overtime, the first of many times they would beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the finals.
The other midseason acquisition was 6-7 ½ 185 pound Jim Tucker, a star forward at Duquesne. It’s indicative of the level of importance of the NBA at that time that the Nats had to agree to let Tucker finish out his fall studies at Duquesne so he could get his degree before he would join them. A background story was that Abe Saperstein wanted Tucker for the Globetrotters and had a personal rule that the Trotters would not make an appearance in a town where the NBA had outbid him for a player for at least a year afterwards as punishment, a serious threat as the Globies were the biggest drawing card in the game and popularized the early NBA by playing double-headers with NBA teams in the “other” game. Danny Biasone and Al Cervi deemed Tucker worth it and outbid Saperstein anyway. Tucker did not turn out to be the star they had hoped for, playing only 99 games in three seasons and averaging 4.1 points per game but he added some quickness and athleticism off the bench.
That, then was the “wonderful team” that went into the 1954-55 season, for the first time ever, as favorites to win the title.
The “Modern Encyclopedia of Basketball” by Zander Hollander” says “There once was a team, a wonderful team, the night after night gave the simplest, most exciting display of pure basketball ever seen in the National Basketball Association. It wasn’t a big team and it did not have a roster full of All-Americans or towering front-courtmen. What the Syracuse Nationals did have was a distinct spirit…Watching the Nationals play was treat. They believed in a team game and a patterned but exciting offense.”
The Nats didn’t start out a “wonderful” team. That team had to be put together, piece by piece. In the beginning the coach was the white-haired, stately, dignified Benny Borgmann. He had been a star in the early days of touring professional teams and also had a career in baseball. In fact, he had been the manager of the Syracuse Chiefs at one time. The local reporters found him more interested in talking baseball than basketball when they interviewed him. Now THERE was a big time-sport. One player said “He was an easy-going man. I never heard him raise his voice or stomp up and down the court or anything.” Not that he didn’t have reason to. The early Nats were a revolving door of a team, using as many as 20 players in a season. The closest the team had to a star was 6-9 Mike Novak, who liked to stand outside and shoot set shots rather than mix it up down below. His teammates would complain. The easy-going Novak would say “I’m sorry, guys” and promise to do better but then go back to the outside where he was more comfortable and let his teammates do things like blocking shots and getting rebounds. The first two teams had a combined record of 45 wins and 59 losses.
The Coach
In 1948 Al Cervi, the Rochester Royals, scrappy guard, had a scrap with his owner, Les Harrison, and jumped to Syracuse as player coach. He’d been playing pro basketball since 1935 and was a notable stomper and shouter as well as a guy who would dive into the stands for loose balls and defend in “a frantic, hustling, mauling style”. His nickname was “digger”. He brought that style to his new team. “Poor Syracuse, always the losers." I felt sorry for them”. Cervi could recall playing games in a dance hall where players had to leap up onto the stage to drive to the basket and one place where there was a pot bellied stove in mid-court that always had a fire going because it was the main source of heat in the building. He was not noted to have much sympathy for player complaints. Dolph Schayes said “He wasn’t a college man and we all were and he was out to show us something. He showed it to us, all right.” Paul Seymour remembers sitting in a car Cervi was driving while Al was analyzing a game. He ran red lights at Lodi Street and Teall Ave and was about to do it again when Seymour pointed out Cervi was ignoring the lights. “Huh, Cervi said, and continued his narrative”. (Sounds like they were on James Street, heading for Biasone’s Eastwood Sports Center, which was a James and Midler.)
The Star
The next step was the signing of Dolph Schayes, a New York City native and NYU grad whom Biasone outbid the Knicks for with the promise of a princely salary of $7500.00. (That was in 1948: that would be about $62,000 today). Draft picks were territorial in those days and while still in the NBL, the Nats had New York City as part of their territory. The New York Knicks were in the “other” league. They outbid the Knicks who were handicapped by a $5000.00 salary cap their owner, Ned Irish, had insisted upon. The Nats, still in the NBL, were under no such limit.
Hollander on Schayes: “Schayes personified the spirit of the Nats. Each time he scored a goal, he would run to the opposite end of the court, fist clenched triumphantly above his head. …Schayes was 6-8 and a forward but he was such a versatile performer that he was one of the last of the deadly two handed set shooters. This helped make him great. He could score from the outside as easily as he could drive underneath for a lay-up….Schayes was a rugged rebounder…not afraid to become involved with the tough play under the boards, (hear that Mike Novak?)…Schayes’ hustle has become legendary when people speak of and write about NBA history. He played with broken wrists, he played with other injuries and he played when he was sick because he had to-for all those years- carry the burden of the Syracuse offence.” When Schayes hurt his right wrist, he learned to play with his left hand. When he hurt his left wrist, it strengthened his game with his right hand.
According to David Ramsey’s book, “Nats, a City a Team and Era”, “Schayes was a basketball-rule breaker, one of the first. He didn’t want to stand around. He wanted to move, always move. He was a superb rebounder, especially on the offensive boards, but otherwise he played more like a guard than the power forward he was. He tossed up long, two-handed set shots. He ran the floor on the break. He revolutionized his position.” His concentration was legendary. Ramsey: “He once, fell into such a deep pre-game trance that he forgot an important fact. He forgot his wife. He had left her at home.” I guess single-mindedness was another characteristic of the Nats- to heck with red lights and wives. They were all about basketball.
He was a highly consistent player, one who never led the league in scoring but was its all-time scoring leader when he retired, (Wilt Chamberlain soon took care of that). He also was the all-time leader in free throws made, ((he shot 85% for his career). He also led in fouls committed, showing he was far from just a finesse player. Ironically he was only #4 in rebounds, since that was the only major individual category he ever led the league in, (1950-51, 16.4). He was the Larry Bird of his time.
But still, he wasn’t quite a “Cervi” player. Ramsey: “The men would squabble for years about the manner Schayes played defense but Cervi was wise enough to see the genius in the young man’s game. “ Dolph has said that his attitude was: “If I outscore my guy and everyone else outscores his guy, how are we going to lose?” (Defenders had “guys” then- not “zones”.) Dolph’s teams did enough winning to make the playoffs every year he played here- 15 years in a row. He also held records for playoff appearances and games played when he retired. He may not have been a “Cervi-type player” but Cervi and his successors saw to it that Dolph had also played more minutes than anyone in NBA history when he finally left the game.
The Protégé
Paul Seymour was a “Cervi-type” player, or at least he became one under The Digger’s tutelage. Ramsey: “In Cervi, he had the prefect role model. Both men believed in defense. And both men chased victories with the same vigor. They often clashed but Cervi molded Seymour into a defensive terror and one of pro basketball’s best guards. He tells a story of playing an exhibition game in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic and getting an elbow to the face that required 17 stitches to close. The PA announcer asked if there was a doctor in the house and 500 fans stood up.
He told David Ramsey that one should never say “I wanted to”. If you really wanted to do something you’d do it. Seymour was in New Orleans in 1947, the team he was playing for, in something called the “Pro Basketball League of America”, which lasted only a few weeks, was out of business because their tiny arena had burned down. He got a call from an old friend, Sid Goldberg, owner of the Toledo Jeeps of the NBL, saying that if he could get to Baltimore, where Sid had another old friend, they’d give him a try-out. He was broke but noticed that each room in his hotel had a radio in it that you turned on by inserting quarters. He snuck around the hotel, stealing those quarters until he had the $33.00 fare. He wound up playing for the BAA champion Baltimore Bullets, although he was let go and wound up in Syracuse before that title was won. But he’d proven that he “wanted to” play professional basketball.
The Bullet
In some ways the most important player in the early days was “Bullet” Billy Gabor, the Syracuse University star. Billy was an exciting player, probably the fastest in basketball at the time. Schayes: “Billy was a very motivated, very aggressive, a bull in a china shop type of guy. Once he was dribbling down the court full blast and he stopped. He had been going so fast that his sneakers couldn’t take it. They ripped right in half. And they were new sneakers.” But Gabor never became a big star in the NBA. In 7 seasons he averaged 9.8 points a game. But his hustle helped the team and, more importantly, he brought with him Syracuse University basketball fans who soon filled the State Fair Coliseum and the War Memorial- or filled them to some extent, at least.
Two Redheads
It takes all kinds and Red Rocha was one of them. Born and raised in Hawaii, (where he would later become the state university’s basketball coach), he loathed Syracuse’s winters but loved its loud fans. But he wouldn’t be disturbed during his pre-game naps or while sipping the tea he would have after them. It is an indication of life in the NBA in those days that Rocha actually left the team, missing the 1953-54 season, for a higher-paying job as a salesman for the McCormick Spice Company in Baltimore. But he missed the game so much he was back for the 1954-55 season. Those spices don’t seem to have encouraged him to eat much as he stood 6-9 and weighed only 185 pounds. But he was the quickest and best defensive forward in the league. Nicknamed “Bones Almighty”, Bud Vander Meer of the Herald Journal said of him, “He is most feared in the NBA because of his leech-like guarding”. Eeeew… leech-like guarding!. But the blood didn’t put much meat on his bones, either.
He was not the only player on the team called “Red”. The other was Johnny Kerr, a rookie from Illinois who joined the team for the 1954-55 season. He was also 6-9 but showed up weighing 248 pounds, having trained in the off-season on “pizza and beer”. That made him a couple of steps too slow for Cervi but Johnny worked his way into shape and was down to 210 pounds at the end of the year and Cervi began to use him more and more. He brought a new dimension to the team- a strong center, one with a good high post game on offense but who could rebound well on both ends. He would be a mainstay for the Nats for their remaining 9 seasons in the Salt City. He was known for keeping the team loose with his sense of humor. One time, after the team started taking charter flights to games, a rookie named Connie Dierking confessed he was afraid of flying. Kerr decided to comfort him. “What are you worried about? More people get killed in train wrecks than plane crashes- 42 people were killed in one recently.” Dierking asked him how that train crash had occurred. “Oh, a plane fell on it.”
Black is Beautiful
Earl Lloyd was one of only two black players on the team in 1954-55. He was a solidly muscled and athletic 6-6 220 and was called “The Big Cat” for his quick and easy movements. He was the team’s strongest player and it’s “enforcer”. But he was also a productive player, averaging double figures for the only time in his career that season with 10.2 points to go with 7.7 rebounds a game in the championship year. Schayes called Lloyd, “a prototypical defensive forward. In those days, teams had a defensive forward and a scoring forward, a scoring guard and a defensive guard. Earl would take the best scorer on the other team. It was a selfless job.” I wonder if Al Cervi thought of one forward as being for defense and the other for offense?
Lloyd is part of a triumvirate that did for pro basketball, (at least the NBA version) what Jackie Robinson did for major league baseball. The first black player drafted by an NBA team was Chuck Cooper by the Boston Celtics. The first black player signed was Sweetwater Clifton, off the Globetrotters by the New York Knicks. But Earl Lloyd, then with the Washington Capitols, was, due to the schedule, the first black ever to play in an NBA game. His era was so long ago that the Caps were the first integrated team he’d ever played on. He told David Ramsey that he wanted to see if he could cover white men and score over white men. “I kept asking myself, ‘What do you think you are doing here?’ These were the people I had read about. I had no fears but you have to understand, if you have been treated as inferior all your life, it’s easy to believe you are inferior. When I finally realized I did belong, it was an awakening, really. Those white people put their pants on the same way I did. It meant a lot to figure that out.” Lloyd found out he could play with and against anybody, including Bob Brannum of the Boston Celtics, who greeted him with an elbow to the ribs. Lloyd chased him down court and gave Brannum an elbow to the face. “You could hear it all over the gym”, Paul Seymour said. “It was beautiful”.
It Takes a Team
George King was a high scoring guard in the small colleges at Morris Harvey who found trouble with his previously reliable free throw shot in the pros but was a consistent double figure scorer anyway. Wally Osterkorn was a defensive specialist, also from Illinois, who must have warmed Cervi’s heart when he told an opposing star after he drove the lane “Come back and I’ll murder you.” Osterkorn recalls a game where he got into a fight with the Warrior’s Zeke Zawoluk and found himself being attacked by Zawoluk’s mother who chased him all over the court with an umbrella. Billy Kenville, known as “The Kid” was a second year guard from St. Bonaventure. Dick Farley, a 6-4 swingman, was a rookie from Indiana, “one of the early big guards”.
There would be two acquisitions during the season. When the Bullets broke up, the Nats by luck of the draw, had the first pick of their players. It was a golden opportunity to obtain the services of the game’s most exciting young player, scoring machine Frank Selvy, who had amazed the college basketball world by scoring 41 points a game, including 100 in one game while a senior at Furman. Selvy was the leading scorer in the NBA at the time and the defensive oriented Nats could sure have used a second major scoring threat to supplement Schayes. But Cervi went for veteran forward Connie Simmons, a 6-8 225 pounder who had been a double figure scorer and solid rebounder for four different teams, playing in every season of the league’s nine year history. This decision looked pretty bad when Simmons went down with an injury midway through the year but Johnny Kerr moved into the line-up and stayed for a decade. It took the sting out of missing out on Selvy, who went to the Hawks, where he faded to fourth in scoring with a 19.0 average. He continued to fade after that, scoring 11.0 and 3.6 in successive injury-plagued seasons before becoming a back-up for the Lakers. His most famous moment in the pros was when the old gunner barely missed a shot, (around and around and out), that would have beaten the Celtics in regulation in the seventh game of the 1962 NBA finals. The Celtics won in overtime, the first of many times they would beat the Los Angeles Lakers in the finals.
The other midseason acquisition was 6-7 ½ 185 pound Jim Tucker, a star forward at Duquesne. It’s indicative of the level of importance of the NBA at that time that the Nats had to agree to let Tucker finish out his fall studies at Duquesne so he could get his degree before he would join them. A background story was that Abe Saperstein wanted Tucker for the Globetrotters and had a personal rule that the Trotters would not make an appearance in a town where the NBA had outbid him for a player for at least a year afterwards as punishment, a serious threat as the Globies were the biggest drawing card in the game and popularized the early NBA by playing double-headers with NBA teams in the “other” game. Danny Biasone and Al Cervi deemed Tucker worth it and outbid Saperstein anyway. Tucker did not turn out to be the star they had hoped for, playing only 99 games in three seasons and averaging 4.1 points per game but he added some quickness and athleticism off the bench.
That, then was the “wonderful team” that went into the 1954-55 season, for the first time ever, as favorites to win the title.
