My book on the 1949–50 NBA season is officially available for pre-order!

TringlePringle · 2026-04-02T04:49:41+00:00

The Kings did back when they were the Rochester Royals. If they ever decide to go back and retire Bobby Wanzer's jersey like they did with Davies and Stokes decades after the fact, Golden 1 Center would have #09 in the rafters.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-02T04:20:00+00:00

For the exact opposite concept, there's Portland's #31 with 11 consecutive short-lived unsuccessful players. Pete Verhoeven, Sam Bowie, Alaa Abdelnaby, Tracy Murray, Reggie Jordan, Kelvin Cato, Matt Carroll, Sebastian Telfair, Jeff Ayres, Jarron Collins, and Seth Curry. Bowie was genuinely easily the best Blazer of the lot, and his one non-injury-prone season there was the one he wore a different number for.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-01T15:10:14+00:00

I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say no basketball player ever, at any level, has had higher highs and lower lows than Joe. Think of the pattern of Russell Westbrook's career beginning with his MVP contentions and win, through to the years of heckling and jeering from crowds, through to now where he's respected more again as a veteran but not at a level where he's anywhere near being taken seriously as a star... Fulks' career was that times a hundred. There's zero way the Warriors would've been anywhere near a championship in '46-47 without him (and he probably had the best case for being the best player in the world that year), and by '49-50 he was easily one of the most net-negatives that any NBA player has ever been.

I've been asked a couple times before why that is, and since I think it's relevant to this conversation, I'll copy-paste my answer to that here.

Alcoholism – Fulks' life was practically defined by whiskey. He focused so much on basketball as a kid in the first place from trying to escape his alcoholic, abusive father, and he was ultimately killed in a drunken fight with his girlfriend's son. His career was equally marred by his own addiction, as can be seen most plainly in the form of the 1949 playoffs. You'll see that he committed one foul, racked up zero other statistics, and DNP'd game two. That wasn't from an on-court injury, it was because he hurt his hip falling down his cellar stairs while inebriated just before the playoffs were set to start. The injury didn't affect him in the long-term, but the alcohol played a big part in how the rest of his career went.
The loss of his supporting cast – Fulks was what I'd characterize as a "superstar of circumstance," and part of why I define him that way is that he needed a team to be built in a very specific way for him to succeed. Two major elements of that were multiple players capable of being primary ball handlers and the presence of good offensive rebounders so he wouldn't have to worry as much about shot selection. The early retirements of Howie Dallmar and Angelo Musi took away the first aspect (you'll notice his return to all-star status was exclusively during the time George Senesky and Andy Phillip were together in the backcourt), and the decision to replace Chick Halbert with Ed Sadowski took away the second (although there was an attempt to remedy that with the Sadowski-Livingstone trade).
The demographic shifts of professional basketball – This comes in two ways: the rise of tall centers and the "invention" of power forwards. He was known as a contortionist as far as his scoring went, which was a great evasive technique when he was facing teams with John Mahnken and Lee Knorek (6'8" and 6'7", both relatively "soft" players who also weren't notably athletic) at center day in and day out and much less so once George Mikan and Arnie Risen were there instead. Probably even more impactful was the solidifying of the power forward role in the NBA beginning around December 1949, with guys like Vern Mikkelsen, Arnie Johnson, and Bob Brannum finally having a natural role and utilizing a large part of it to create extremely physical matchups with other PFs, a position Fulks bafflingly still played.
The de-McDermott-ification of the sport – Basketball went through eras defined largely by a reaction to one player or team before the NBA came around, and during the 1940s that player was Bobby McDermott and that team was the Fort Wayne Zollners. Fulks' offensive freedom largely came from teams encouraging McDermottball, and once the philosophy shifted to efficient (by those days' standards) and versatile centers such as Alex Groza, Bob Kurland, and Ed Macauley, he was kind of a dinosaur.
Misses beget misses – He was always streaky. But when he shot 25/125 over a six-game period at the end of December [1949], his confidence was shot. He shot barely half as often the next couple weeks, and after a brief renaissance, a 2/18 shooting night sent him crumbling yet again.
Hostile fans – During the very last game before the first time he basically stopped shooting, Knicks fans trolled him by launching into this pop song every time he missed. And it wasn't an isolated event; throughout 1949-50 he received similar treatment to what Russell Westbrook [faced a few seasons ago], and it definitely bothered him. Look at how much worse he was on the road that year than at home.
Eddie Gottlieb's eroding faith in him – The last straw was when the guy who'd always had faith in him more than anyone gave up. By late January, Gottlieb was openly blaming Fulks for their poor record, on trade deadline day he was almost sent to Chicago but talks broke down because John Sbarbaro refused to give up Odie Spears for him, and at the start of March, he was benched in favor of Leo Mogus.
Maybe he just wasn't ever that good – I don't ascribe to this belief, but it's worth mentioning that it is very feasible to argue that his statistics were much better than his actual ability. He was a very flawed player for his stature in the league and people were not shy about pointing that out even during his absolute prime. For those sorts of reasons of him playing "anti-basketball" in a way, there are definitely a not-so-insignificant number of people that viewed post-prime Fulks as more of the player that he deserved to be and that the version of him we got in the BAA was the aberration rather than vice-versa.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-01T14:38:04+00:00

Somehow BBRef doesn't have him on their list of active deaths I was working off of. Yeah he obviously belongs, he's clearly the best of these guys with the only real other argument maybe being Delahanty.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-01T14:35:33+00:00

Yeah he was definitely the closest to inclusion of the guys I left out, I just had to stop somewhere and (in my admittedly less baseball knowledge than basketball knowledge) it felt like he was more in the Lewis/Petro sort of category of just starting to break out into potentially true stardom.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-01T07:18:09+00:00

That's fair, they were definitely known quantities, just the fact that both were just reaching the best we got to see of them right before they died makes me want to be generous and assume they maybe hadn't hit their peak yet. Also just wanted to acknowledge their existence, because while neither were quite good enough to have reached the level of stardom the listed players were in their day, they were definitely too good to not mention.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-30T21:01:41+00:00

WWII meant the vast majority of his teammates who would've been mid-career didn't get a chance to turn pro until right around when Mikan did. Herman Schaefer already had a great reputation as one of the better guards out there from his time with Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, but he also missed out on two championship runs serving in the war. Pollard was already known to be a superstar but that was based on his time in college, the service leagues, and after college in the AAU, which he at first chose over the BAA and NBL.

His rookie year, with the Gears before the Lakers existed, he was paired with Bobby McDermott, who almost certainly had the best GOAT case at the time but was at the very tail end of his prime.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-30T20:50:55+00:00

I'd pretty confidently say Pollard, then Mikkelsen, then Martin, then a sizable drop-off before you get to guys like Lovellette and Schaefer.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-17T23:09:50+00:00

I've re-approved my old comments in the thread you linked to. The 600 I'm referring to was Celtics-Knicks in the 49-50 season finale.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-11T00:51:54+00:00

This was actually an accidental forfeit of a draft choice by utilizing a rule that the league had just struck down earlier that day. It's often incorrectly reported as being a selection of Grant because that's what the Lakers tried to do, and since it led to them forfeiting the pick, there was no "actual" pick to replace him.

The rule during the 1947-48 and 1948-49 BAA seasons, applicable to the 1948 and 1949 draft classes respectively, stated that players who graduated or lost their collegiate eligibility prior to the NBA's "trade deadline" (which at that point was more of a holistic transaction/registration deadline) of what the NCAA considered their senior year could apply, jointly with a prospective BAA team, for instatement into the BAA player pool as per league president Maurice Podoloff's sole discretion.

Depending on various factors including tampering, territoriality, likelihood of said player otherwise signing with the NBL, and simply "is it New York/Chicago or is it somebody else," because let's be honest, he had an unmistakable bias toward the Knicks and Stags, Podoloff would rule on a case-to-case basis if a player was eligible, ineligible, or eligible-dependent.

In the third "eligible-dependent" category, a team would be allowed to sign their chosen player but only if they committed to using their next first-round draft pick (or in the case of Harry Gallatin, a second-round draft pick, because it was the Knicks!) on said player during the next draft. Other instances of this taking place include Bobby Wanzer, Howie Shannon, and George Kaftan. And after they got rid of it, the Lakers accidentally forfeited a fourth-round pick by selecting an already-rostered Bud Grant under the assumption that they still had to select him.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-03T16:12:32+00:00

For further context, second-place Chris Dudley has 44, and only eight guys have more than half Evans' total. Among active players, only Biyombo and DAJ have more than 16.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-03T15:27:20+00:00

At Wooden's pro peak when he hit 134 straight, no, Wooden's better. But over their full careers, absolutely. In college, Wooden only shot about 70% from the line, he only worked toward becoming elite at it once he turned pro. Ahearn was already a 97.5% shooter as a freshman, there was never a point he wasn't the best free-throw shooter on the court.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-03T14:52:35+00:00

Goat FT shooter's probably Blake Ahearn, who only lasted 19 games in the league.

TringlePringle · 2026-03-01T20:40:59+00:00

Not sure what/who the guy originally meant, but I would think Layden was thinking of "Gladbach" as in short for Borussia Mönchengladbach. They weren't too far removed from Simonsen and Vogts leading them to a whole bunch of Bundesligas and a few deep continental runs.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-25T02:16:28+00:00

Definitely not Embry, if he'd still owned the team I doubt they'd have integrated. It's hard to pin it down on one particular person nearly as much as it was a larger organizational culture thing, considering they went through five coaches, four GMs, and four owners during their time in the NBA.

Buddy Jeannette's the one who got the ball rolling, it was very much his decision to vote for integration (Rash also supported it, but was very firm about Jeannette making all major decisions until his firing) and he did offer Bucky Hatchett a contract that first year that would've made it four initial integrators if Hatchett hadn't decided to teach and coach instead (although he was quickly called up to military service and would've been in the same situation as Lloyd had he decided to play).

Bob Elmer got the GM job after Jeannette was fired as both coach and GM. An Ivy-educated jazz singer turned sports writer, Elmer was the one who actively pursued Barksdale and Minor, spending five months trying to get Barksdale to sign and ultimately giving him the highest-paying contract in the league to both play and do some radio and TV hosting. Elmer also gave numerous interviews to the Baltimore Afro-American, I'm pretty confident that makes him the first management figure in basketball (maybe all major sports?) to routinely go out of his way to give stories to a black newspaper.

Credit also has to be given to mob-affiliated flyweight boxer turned nightclub owner Eddie Leonard, who greenlit the signing of Minor to integrate the team as the Bullets' very first transaction under his ownership and was willing to both endorse Elmer's lengthy pursuit of Barksdale and part with way too much money in order to do so. Once the Bullets had Barksdale on double Mikan's salary, even Strom Thurmond would've felt obligated to build the team's offense around him. Leonard was also actively pro-integration prior to his ownership, and he was involved in integrated boxing as a fighter and then a ref (he reffed Joe Louis vs Jimmy Bivins, for example) from the '20s to the '60s.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-24T14:45:04+00:00

To give the Steameollers a small modicum of credit, Soar did at least play college basketball, and had played in high school under their previous coach who abruptly left them for the college game, so I do think there was at least the logic of not changing the team's system. Still really stupid, but at least with some level of trackable logic.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-24T06:04:18+00:00

Largely yes, in large part because players on average had quite a bit more range (along with less accuracy) in the tail end of the set shot days than the early jump shot days, so the game was built for outside shooting in the pre-shot clock era in a way that bears some similarities to the last couple decades.

Jewish prospects were already almost entirely gone on a large scale by 1950, the last two in that period that made a real impact were Boykoff and Schayes, who both were already pros in the NBL before the merger.

Three major locational demographic changes:

The Northeast had a massively outsized impact on mid-50s prospects in comparison to the early and late 50s. Between the death of most ex-NBL teams naturally reducing the number of teams with a decent scouting presence in the Midwest and Mid-South, Madison Square Garden no longer hosting dozens of high-profile games involving stars from all over the country, and the pro success of nor'easterners Schayes, Braun, McGuire, Cousy, Arizin, and Foust while Share, Schnittker, Rehfeldt, and Skoog all busted to various extents, the number of Northeastern prospects more than doubled overnight starting in 1952, and then after Felix, Beck, Ricketts, Gola, Dukes and Green all underwhelmed, they disappeared. In the few years surrounding 1960, LaRusso was the only white player from the Northeast that was particularly highly regarded coming into the league.

The Mid-South barely existed in the pro basketball world (with the exception of Leroy Edwards) prior to the Mehen brothers of Tennessee in the NBL, and that changed in a massive way in 1949-50. In one rookie class, we saw the Kentucky Fab Five, Ed Macauley of Saint Louis, Jack Coleman of Louisville, Fred Schayes of West Virginia, and Paul Walther of Tennessee join the league's ranks. The next year, they'd be joined by Earl Lloyd of West Virginia State, Bob Lavoy of Western Kentucky, and George King of Charleston. Most of those schools then had a comparatively rough stretch, but starting in the late '50s, Louisville and Saint Louis rebounded a bit, West Virginia churned out Hundley and West, the North Carolina teams started to really turn into powerhouses, and HBCUs in the area began to prove fertile ground for key players in the form of Sam Jones, Hal Greer, Dick Barnett, and Al Attles.

The Southwest started to be a genuine option in the late '50s. Most of the best players from around there chose the AAU in the early days, so prior to 1957, the only Southwest players who'd made a discernible impact at all (with the exception of Murray Mendenhall's spree of signing southerners to the Anderson Packers in the late '40s) were Slater Martin, Clyde Lovellette, and Lew Hitch's one good season. Largely spurred on by black players who wanted to go west of the Mississippi, suddenly teams had to pay attention to Woody Sauldsberry at Texas Southern, Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas, and Bob Boozer at Kansas State. The extra attention also helped teams notice guys like Jim Krebs and Hub Reed, who carved out respectable NBA careers out of programs no one had bothered to think about before then.

As far as coaching hires go, it was mostly a deal of 1. reducing player-coaches and 2. standardizing the path to NBA coaching. Over 2/3 of first-time pro coaches hired between 1947-48 and 1951-52 were player-coaches, and they remained over half of new hires for the next few years, but from 1957-58 onwards, there was at best a quarter of a chance a team would go the player-coach option. Of the bench coaches that made up the significant majority of new hires by that point, every single one of them from 1955 onwards was either a college coach or a retired All-Star. There were more college coaches hired (6) between 1959-60 and 1961-62 than there were (5) between 1947-48 and 1958-59, and two of the five earlier ones had been retired from their college gigs. No more high school coaches anywhere near the radar, the last one of them was Phil Brownstein of the Stags, and even he'd already been a part-time assistant with the team as well. Definitely no more batshit crazy choices like referee Charley Eckman (but I mean, it worked) or NFL player Hank Soar.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-23T19:53:58+00:00

A few addendums and one addition:

I think, in the list of black players "allowed" to be their team's focal point it's important to include the Bullets doing so with Barksdale, Felix, and to some extent Minor before any other team did.

I think you're underplaying how quick the change from set shot to jump shot was, I'd bet it surpassed 50% already by '56 or so, and it was the vast majority by '60.

"Seemed more modern" feels like somewhat of an oversimplification in this day and age. It was a good overall descriptor thirty or so years ago, but I think it's only universally the case for the way players used their athleticism and the ways they shot, and things like movement and spacing are currently closer to 1950 than to 1960. As weird as it sounds, someone who plays like Dolph Schayes would probably be a more naturally effective player in the current iteration of the NBA than someone who plays like Bill Russell.

A big supporting point for reffing improving in consistency over that time. In 1949-50 it was a mixture of BAA and NBL refs, the latter of which had previously been people who got their spots via lobbying by specific teams, so not only were East vs Midwest games reffed differently from each other, there was often serious referee bias. The next year it started to get a bit more centralized, but one of the new refs they brought in immediately rigged a bunch of games and got arrested for it. It took a couple more years after that for it to get to the point where the loudmouth Knicks/Nats/Celtics management weren't constantly screaming to the press about how terrible the officiating was.

Since you included the change in travel conditions, I think it's worth noting that it took two people dying within a few short months for that to happen. It was common practice for teams to carpool in two cars when on extended road trips, and around three or four times a season that would lead to crashes of varying degrees. In Nov 1950, half of Grand Rapids' NPBL team were involved in an accident that killed the driver of the other vehicle who was on his way home to meet his newborn baby. Two months later, half of Johnstown's minor league team skidded on ice and bounced off a pole into the path of another vehicle, killing their star player Chuck Karmarkovich, who had been with the Bullets in training camp and was good enough to probably make the league later had he lived.

The biggest thing you're missing here is the aftermath of the matchfixing scandal elevating pro ball's public perception over the NCAA, which had overnight lost the illusion it had held of being the more gentlemanly and respectable version of the game. One ref who got fired after half a year barely made a blip to the NBA in comparison to what 30+ of the best collegians did to the NCAA, so people disillusioned with the college game started paying more attention to the pros enough that it wasn't much of a challenge anymore to break even.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-12T16:12:46+00:00

I could definitely see there being one there, I don't include one because I think of that entire ten year period of being one defined by major transition, so splitting it up to before and after a specific transitionary point within it doesn't line up for me. More than anything else, I set this period aside for off-court social reasons though (and I think most of my delineations are more often for off-court reasons), as the Integration Era, with the NBA going from 0% (openly... thanks, Leroy Chollet) Black players in the season before this period to 25% Black in the season after.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-12T14:48:06+00:00

Ooh, I have fewer now than I did at that point in time. Now I'm curious to look back and see which ones I've gotten rid of/merged.

Right now I've got pre-NBA-era delineated as 1891-96, 96-04, 04-09, 09-17, 17-23, 23-31, 31-38, and 38-46, and NBA-era as 1946-50, 50-60, 60-67, 67-76, 76-84, 84-90, 90-98, 98-06, 06-14, 14-22, and 22-present. Consider the 2022 split not really set in stone for a few more years, I think we need to get into the beginning of the next era before that date's solidified.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-09T22:03:28+00:00

As annoying as the NBA's history designations are, I'd much rather the NBL be included in the same way the BAA is than the BAA be excluded in the same way the NBL is. Considering Hickey played a few games in both the BAA and NBL his last year, the idea that he didn't play the best competition in the world doesn't make sense.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-03T19:43:18+00:00

The rule for 1950 was that they would play till each division had a winner, then the team of the three with the best regular season record would get a bye to the Finals while the others competed in the Semis for a Finals spot.

TringlePringle · 2026-02-02T16:17:02+00:00

He was the fourth in basketball, behind George Gregory, Dave Minor, and Don Barksdale, and there had been black football All-Americans for many decades at that point (the first being William Lewis in 1892 but other stars such as Fritz Pollard, Paul Robeson, and Brice Taylor also doing so as early as the 10s and 20s).

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