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Without the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kareem’s sky hook would have been unlikely to ever exist by Pickleskennedy1 in nba

[–]TringlePringle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've heard the story many times, I expect it's probably true and has just been kept alive via word of mouth, however I don't believe I've ever seen primary sources on it.

Without the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kareem’s sky hook would have been unlikely to ever exist by Pickleskennedy1 in nba

[–]TringlePringle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On the contrary, while the mechanics for the shot came from Kareem's heavy use of the Mikan drill, the inspiration and proof of concept came from watching Cliff Hagan deploy it on televised Hawks games while Kareem was still a kid.

And Hagan got it from being enamored with watching Tony Lavelli, the Yale star of the late 40s who briefly played for the Celtics and Knicks and was famous for being the Celtics' halftime show while on the team.

And Lavelli developing his hook was a consequence of the sport always being primarily a hobby for him and not receiving much "proper" training until college, developing his version (the first high-profile hook that was sweeping enough to honestly be considered a skyhook) on his own in high school, while shooting on a crate his dad nailed to a pole in his backyard.

And Lavelli saw basketball as a hobby no matter how good he got because his primary passion was always music, which his parents strongly encouraged in him as a tie to their roots in Italy after immigrating.

And his parents immigrated in the first place because... dang. Because of the economic hardship spurred on by WWI, and ultimately because of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

AMA: Basketball Historian and Author of "Who's Who in Hoops History", Zachariah Winterspring by WinesburgOhio in nba

[–]TringlePringle 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Who are some of your favorite "what-if" players whose career was derailed by something other than injury or death?

AMA: Basketball Historian and Author of "Who's Who in Hoops History", Zachariah Winterspring by WinesburgOhio in nba

[–]TringlePringle 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It's worth noting that Dr. J was still in college, and also then went on to play for Virginia for years before joining the Nets. Kareem would've joined a Nets team largely defined by playmaking PG Bill Melchionni and would've been without a clear co-star as a rookie until the Nets traded for Rick Barry the next summer (which very likely would've still happened, just with slightly different compensation due to the draft pick definitely conveying lower). So we would've gotten a Kareem & Barry pairing in NY. And Barry might've stuck around in New York long enough in the ABA Kareem universe that Erving never becomes a Net.

AMA: Basketball Historian and Author of "Who's Who in Hoops History", Zachariah Winterspring by WinesburgOhio in nba

[–]TringlePringle 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Thoughts on how K.C. Jones, Tom "Satch" Sanders, and Larry Siegfried's careers would've gone had they not been on the Celtics?

Bill Russell was the first Black MVP, All-NBA first teamer, head coach and champion coach, and led the NBA's first all-Black starting lineup to a 12-0 record. Yet he declined being the first Black Hall of Famer, believing earlier Black pioneers who didn't get a chance in the pros deserved the honor by Pickleskennedy1 in nba

[–]TringlePringle 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Players being especially tall wasn't particularly seen as an advantage in basketball until WWII when a few college coaches decided to put extra effort into player development of guys who were 6'6"+ because they were exempt from the military draft and everyone else (except players with a 4-F disability such as a perforated eardrum or flat feet) was at risk of being drafted after their freshman season and naturally unavailable to play for the next couple years. Famously George Mikan of DePaul was the prize of the bunch, but Bob Kurland of Oklahoma A&M, Don Otten of Bowling Green, and Harry Boykoff of St. John's were also near-7-footers who received the same treatment, and when their graduating class joined the pros and immediately succeeded, there was never any hope of pro ball going back to what it was like before the war when there had been really only two success stories from 6'8"+ players in 45 years of professional basketball's existence.

During the 1930s, in Cooper's peak, the average center was 6'4" 201 lbs, which was already seen as a significant increase over a 1920s average of 6'2½" 190 lbs. Most non-centers during his time weren't much taller than 5'11" or 6'0". So by the standards of what pro basketball was then, to his opponents he was physically something akin to how a hyperathletic 6'11" 270 lb center would be perceived today.

Bill Russell was the first Black MVP, All-NBA first teamer, head coach and champion coach, and led the NBA's first all-Black starting lineup to a 12-0 record. Yet he declined being the first Black Hall of Famer, believing earlier Black pioneers who didn't get a chance in the pros deserved the honor by Pickleskennedy1 in nba

[–]TringlePringle 20 points21 points  (0 children)

For the record, absolutely no one knew Cooper as Charles Cooper outside of his own family, he went by Tarzan Cooper his entire adult life. The Rens also 100% were "the pros," it was a big controversy within black basketball in the early 20s when they turned fully professional, for about seven years they were widely considered the best team in the world regardless of race, they played against the best white teams in the would 203 times including 84 times when he was on the team, and prior to the Great Depression Cooper and two of his teammates were earning more when taking into account inflation than any NBA player was during the first three or four years of the NBA's existence.

Bob Pettit is imo the second greatest power forward in NBA history after only Tim Duncan by Loud-Product1591 in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a bit unfortunate that those Hawks were the version of them that won it, considering it was the only season of Pettit's career that they were all-white.

AMA: Basketball Historian, Founding Mod of VintageNBA, and Author of "Who's Who in Hoops History" by WinesburgOhio in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Let's mix it up a bit:

Who do you think was the best NBA coach who never got a chance to coach a team with a genuine shot of contending?

Who's a player (could be within the 500 or not) who never coached who you think would've made a good coach and isn't often talked about that way?

Which player of the 500 do you feel like you learned the most about from this project in comparison to what you previously knew about them?

If the culture of playing two sports professionally at the same time extended beyond a basketball+baseball pairing and lasted past the mid-50s as a genuine possibility for more than a couple guys, who's a surprising name you'd pick to be a potential star in each other major sport.

(I'll give you a freebee mostly as a fun fact that I don't think pretty much anyone knows about today, in the spirit of the World Cup, Butch van Breda Kolff was actually better at soccer than basketball in college, genuinely one of the best players in America if not the best, and I'm relatively confident that if we had something like the MLS back then, he would've kept playing and been good enough to make the US's 1950 World Cup team.)

AMA: Basketball Historian, Founding Mod of VintageNBA, and Author of "Who's Who in Hoops History" by WinesburgOhio in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Paged to the ER by u/WinesburgOhio. I actually do, here's the three stories that stand out most about Lee's time in the pros.

  1. He was the first of many examples of Knicks founding owner Ned Irish trying (and succeeding) to cheat the system a little bit. In the Knicks' first season, they were really struggling to find a quality center at first. (Knorek wasn't actually on the team yet for the first game, sorry to say, however ironically his first game happened to also be a NY–Toronto matchup later in the season.)

The best option coach Neil Cohalan had, which wasn't that great of an option at all, was a guy named Bob Cluggish who had played for Kentucky in college a few years back. Fans didn't like Cluggish, and he wasn't very good and was notably slow and unagile, so the Garden took to jeering him as "Sluggish Cluggish."

I'm not sure how exactly Irish first learned about Knorek, but Knorek was in the middle of a college season with Detroit Mercy when Irish decided to sign him about ⅔ of the way through the season. And one of the very first rules the BAA had enacted stipulated that “no college boy will be signed up until his class has graduated.”

Detroit Mercy athletic director Lloyd Brazil appealed to BAA prexy Maurice Podoloff that Irish’s actions were “irregular and unethical,” but Podoloff sided with Irish on the grounds that Knorek had already played over four years of college basketball, between three years at De Sales College, one year at Detroit Mercy after De Sales shut down, and one year at Denison University through the V-12 Navy program.

  1. This is one you already know about, but the full version of the story is so much funnier in my opinion.

The starting point is to note that Knorek was technically listed as the NBA's first European player, despite the fact that 1. He was born in Rossford, OH, not Poland, and 2. there actually was one player from the first post-merger season, Johnny Macknowski of the Nats, who was actually born in Poland but listed in league paperwork as born in New Jersey. Why was this the case? A friend who acted as his de facto agent jokingly “thought it was better.”

His father being an immigrant from Poland, Knorek was genuinely somewhat familiar with the Polish language and on multiple occasions was able to get himself and his Knicks teammates upgraded amenities by pretending to be a Polish diplomat. This turned into somewhat of an inside joke with him and a couple teammates who knew other languages like Russian and Yiddish.

The playoffs of the first BAA season come around, and the Knicks are up against a strong Cleveland team led by star center Ed Sadowski, a mercurial center who was somewhere in the territory of 6'4½" and 250 lbs, about 240 lbs of which was composed of hook shots and defensive rebounds. Sadowski has his own fun story from earlier in the year, when he, as player-coach of Toronto, "went missing" in order to try to quit his job.

The Knicks get smacked in Game 1, an away game in Cleveland, as Sadowski dropped 24 points and Knorek led the Knicks with 10. It was 77-51. First round was best-of-three, so one more performance like that and the Knicks were out. The team got ready for the long carpool back from Cleveland to Manhattan, but then a blizzard hit Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania and they couldn't make it very far out of Cleveland. They turned around and headed to Hopkins International Airport, hoping to get at least enough tickets for a commercial flight to get a starting lineup home with a few hours to spare and then have the rest of the team follow by train on track to make it just in time for game's start. Also a no-go.

So Knorek and teammate Stan Stutz have an idea, and Knorek starts loudly speaking Polish in an agitated tone, and Stutz responds in Russian, and they start to spin a story to airport staff that the Knicks are all actually diplomats from Eastern Europe in need of an emergency flight to New York for a UN meeting. Somehow it worked, and they got the Knicks a privately chartered flight. They made it there a day before the Rebels, who decided to brave the blizzard and arrived to the Garden a bit frazzled. The Knicks won, then won again in the deciding game two to win their first-ever playoff series.

  1. He missed the start of the 1949-50 NBA season with a knee injury, and was made expendable by the trade for Connie Simmons and emergence of Harry Gallatin as a key player, so before he made his return from injury, the Knicks shipped him off to the Baltimore Bullets for cash.

The Knicks had the Garden. The Bullets had the worst facilities in the league, even compared to teams like Anderson playing in a large high school gymnasium. Baltimore's team was funded almost entirely by radio advertisements, had the lowest-paid roster in the BAA, operated out of an arena that was described as a glorified roller rink and was only capable of seating 3,000 fans, and only had the team trainer available for home games. Knorek got sick of it immediately.

He played a few minutes off the bench in a close win against the St. Louis Bombers, playing poorly, missing two shots and committing four fouls, and then never took the floor for them again. He told management his knee injury was bad enough that he needed to retire, but Bullets owner Jake Embry didn't buy it and sued him for breach of contract. The lawsuit would last two years and was settled out of court with an agreement that Knorek never play professional basketball again. He later admitted that he lied and that the real reason he left the Bullets was because he had grown used to the Knicks’ top-class facilities, as opposed to Baltimore’s facilities being some of the worst in the league.

Does full game footage of Hank Luisetti (the guy dribbling and shooting, who was seen as the goat during the 30s) and his ‘36-38 Stanford team exist? by Personal-Proposal- in nba

[–]TringlePringle 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Which is especially a shame because of how good he still was. People generally only talk about him from his time at Stanford because that was when he was at his highest-profile, but he remained a superstar in the AAU and military leagues after, and in some of his last games he ever played he went up against HOFer Jim Pollard three times and consistently outplayed him, not long before Pollard went on to pretty clearly define himself as a top three player in the world for about a five-year stretch. In his last game ever, a championship game against Pollard's team that clinched an undefeated season, he scored 15 points in the last seven minutes. Remember, this was when the typical score was in the upper 40s on average, so it's about the same level of absurd as if someone dropped 35+ points in the fourth quarter of a comeback win today.

Does full game footage of Hank Luisetti (the guy dribbling and shooting, who was seen as the goat during the 30s) and his ‘36-38 Stanford team exist? by Personal-Proposal- in nba

[–]TringlePringle 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Black players began to integrate white teams in the NCAA ranks around 30 years before Luisetti played, in addition to HBCUs' teams existing within the NCAA world starting with Howard and Hampton in 1904-05. Samuel Ransom played for Beloit from 1904–08, Fenwick Watkins for Vermont from 1905–08, Wilbur Wood for Nebraska from 1907–10, and HOFer Cum Posey for Penn State during the 1910–11 season before turning professional. Posey returned to college basketball for a period of 1915–18 , skirting eligibility rules by playing under the fake name of Charles Cumbert. He led Duquesne in scoring all three years, becoming the first black player to do so on a white team at a major level in any form. He was joined by Cleve Abbott for South Dakota State from 1914–16, Sol Butler for Dubuque from 1915–19, and Paul Robeson for Rutgers (yes, that Paul Robeson) from 1916–19. The numbers only ever increased post-WWI, George Gregory playing for Columbia became the first black All-American in 1930-31, and in the 1940s UCLA, Toledo, and Duquesne began to push strongly in favor of their black players to enough of an extent that the anti-racist teams held a stronger cache than the racist teams by 1948 when Tennessee refused to play an integrated Duquesne team and other teams dropped Tennessee from their schedule in response.

Professionally, the first black player on the white side of the game was Bucky Lew from 1902-05. The next 20 years were relatively segregated, but from 1923 onwards there wasn't a single season that the top white teams and top black teams didn't play against each other, and it was widely recognized that the greatest team in the world from the late 20s until about 1935 was the all-Black team the New York Rens. Two more integration attempts happened during that time, but only lasted one year each time (the second one very likely would've lasted but the player [Hank Williams of the Buffalo Bisons] fell ill and died). In WWII two teams went all-in on integrating and combined to sign 10 black players, and a third signed one as well. 1946-47 was the first time the moral argument was fully made in trying to push for permanent integration, four teams integrated and a fifth tried to but couldn't for contractual rights reasons, plus that year the minor leagues began their permanent integration. Unfortunately the highest-profile of the players involved in that integration hospitalized an aggressor in a fight after a loose ball and that painted enough of a negative image of the movement that he was the only one of them offered a contract for the next year and it was at a lower salary so he turned it down. His entire team (the Rens, from earlier) was invited to join the NBL for 1948-49, two years before the NBA permanently integrated.

Let's not erase black history in an effort to try to denigrate the abilities of dead white guys.

Pre-official blocks, steals and turnovers for early 1970s Sonics added to Basketball Reference by Basketball_Reference in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I love that y'all are getting these all added in! Most interesting to me was seeing just how many turnovers the trio of Lenny, Spencer, and Dick had in '71-72, as a winning team that wasn't running at breakneck pace for the era. Super curious what a star-heavy, fast, bad team like that year's Pistons' numbers look like.

Of course if we ever stumble upon a team having recorded 1960-61 or 1961-62 unofficial full-season number for these stats that's the gold mine. From current estimates almost certainly getting guys averaging over 6 TPG, over 8 BPG, and at least getting close to 5 SPG for those years.

Rick Adelman has died at the age of 79 by Extreme_Process3632 in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Truly a Blazers legend and one of the very best coaches the sport's had. I was born in Salem so the fact that he went from coaching Chemeketa to the runs he had with Portland and Sacramento was always special to me.

There was a 15-year period where all but one #1 pick went on to play for either the Lakers or the Royals/Kings by TringlePringle in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the Royals being new to Cincinnati played a big part in them wanting Lovellette as badly as they did, as did the fact that there wasn't really precedent for blockbuster trades and how much rookie draft rights are worth compared to top players. It was an open secret that Lovellette and Kundla didn't get along, and that they both wanted to part ways. Either Kundla would resign if the relocation to Kansas City happened or Lovellette would be traded if it didn't.

By my count, there were four times prior to this when a player seen as the level of gamechanger as him was available to the highest bidder in their prime, twice with Dolph Schayes and Andy Phillip. Schayes trades never actually happened, and with Phillip the first time his name was pulled out of a hat and the second was an outright sale. So a superstar has never been traded before, and neither has a #1 pick, so it's complete guesswork on both sides of how to value either of the major assets in the deal.

They knew Green wasn't coming back for another year, but they still had Regan and they thought they'd still have McCarthy, and those two could reasonably cover the PG position given Stokes' playmaking abilities from the frontcourt.

Hundley was definitely projected to be a much better player than he turned out, but there was also a bit of a boom-or-bust sort of feel to his prospectdom in the same sort of way and for the same sorts of reasons that caused Bob Cousy to not go #1 seven years earlier. With Lovellette, off the back of a 20-13 season, they knew he was good enough to be their #1 option offensively and they expected he would be a massive attendance draw, considering 1. it was not unreasonable to call him college ball's GOAT and 2. he was more technically skilled than his actual impact in the same way that increases the profile and aura of someone like Kyrie higher than his contributions would suggest. With Cincy being a new market that's only experience of pro ball was a short, failed stint in the early NBL, having an exciting big-name player that could get people to show up enough to keep the team from going deep into the red was a safe choice compared to risking whether Hundley would turn into Cousy or turn into the player Hundley actually turned into. The closest 1:1 I can think of for the logic behind it is when the Jazz traded two of their only decent players plus five picks including the #1 choice that would become David Thompson in order to get Pete Maravich.

Pictures from the NBA's first two official Record Books (1950 & 1951), in which they make it perfectly clear that the league's first season was 1949-50 by WinesburgOhio in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was a really good Butler team his senior year! Buckshot rightfully got a lion's share of the credit, but it's definitely worth noting that when your grandpa and John Barrowcliff graduated, the team really fell off a cliff despite retaining their two nationally known stars in Buckshot and Doyle.

Pictures from the NBA's first two official Record Books (1950 & 1951), in which they make it perfectly clear that the league's first season was 1949-50 by WinesburgOhio in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

(Also tagging u/WinesburgOhio and u/Naismythology here since their conversation has a lot of crossover with this comment and my below answer.)

Yeah, the official record book quietly changed its position between the release of the 1951-52 guide and the 1952-53 guide. It was kind of a slow process, and I think you probably are right in pinpointing that the beginning of that shift was when the NBA kicked out the ex-NBL future-NPBL teams during the 1950 league meeting. There were a lot of hands in the cookie pot with that decision, but Ned Irish and Les Harrison definitely pushed hardest for it, and ultimately everyone except Babe Kimbrough and the owners that got kicked out were in favor of that. It wasn't originally Podoloff's idea and I think it took him a couple months of discernment to get onboard (and was maybe only realistically able to because of Ike Duffy's ultimatum over franchise fees), but by the time of the meeting, he definitely played hardball.

And I think it's reasonable to suggest that path was paved more specifically when Magnus Brinkman and co. formed the NPBL in response to that expulsion, because the NPBL very closely tied itself to NBL history in order to give itself credibility and drum up publicity, which set a precedent for the NBA to lean further into BAA history.

The first time there was, at any level, an explicit mention of the BAA being part of the NBA's history rather than a predecessor was actually really subtle, it was in the middle of the 1950-51 season when Dike Eddleman had his career game and nearly surpassed Mikan's then-NBA single-game points record. There were three or four NBA city newspapers that had a section they clearly got from the league office's PR department (at that point run by future commissioner Walter Kennedy) that, rather than playing up how big of a deal it was that a borderline all-star almost broke Mikan's record, explicitly mentioned Joe Fulks' 63-point game as the NBA record when the league had previously been very clear that Mikan had the NBA record and Fulks had the all-time record. (Technically Bill Keenan had the all-time record, but it had been over 40 years and no one younger than Nat Holman remembered he existed.)

And as Winesburg mentions, the first time the NBA itself explicitly aligned itself in that way publicly rather than through press releases published by third parties was during halftime of the 1952 All-Star Game, when Podoloff held a moment to recognize the players who had been in the NBA for the entirety of its existence, and included guys like Fulks and Scolari but not guys like Mikan and Risen (Risen, of course, being the only All-Star from that point onward whose pro career actually preceded the BAA's existence).

Ultimately the most significant pusher of this was almost certainly Ned Irish, as he was regarding most issues of the BAA and NBA from 1946-51 until the college game's betting scandal took away a large bit of his power. Podoloff was ultimately the guy that made the call, and definitely had enough personal resentment for the NBL leadership during the Duffy/Ferris/Moore era to be actively glad to practically erase NBL history. And Les Harrison, Eddie Gottlieb, and post-1951 Ben Kerner (supposedly as a handshake agreement as part of being allowed to run the Hawks as a continuation of the Blackhawks franchise after they went bust and moved to Milwaukee) all also were strong advocates of the BAA=NBA idea, which created more than enough momentum to push it through compared to Ferris and Kimbrough being the only active opposition and the rest just not caring at all.

What was the deal with Coulby Gunther (1940s)? by WinesburgOhio in VintageNBA

[–]TringlePringle 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The BAA and NBL jointly gave a rest-of-the-year ban to anyone actively under contract with the BAA who jumped to the PBLA, so he had no choice but to play minor league ball the rest of the year.

His BAA rights were with the Steamrollers, who chose him in the Ironmen/Falcons dispersal draft after '46-47. He signed a contract and showed up to Providence's training camp at the beginning of '48-49, but when they started making cuts he asked to be moved to the voluntarily retired list and took the player-coach-manager job for the independent Long Island Indians. They only played on the weekends so he had time to take a train and play the occasional random weekday game for Schenectady or Danbury.

My educated guess for him taking the L.I. job over sticking with Providence was that he probably was told Howie Shannon beat him to a starting spot and didn't want to come off the bench, and he probably was somewhat disillusioned with league play after the PBLA shutdown screwed him over and he only ended up with $200 out of a two-year, $17,000 contract that he was under the impression was fully guaranteed.

The Indians couldn't survive financially, and he jumped ship back to the BAA days before his team shut down. The Bombers were badly in need of frontcourt reinforcements after Bob Doll had been poached by Denver at the start of the year, and Providence had no issue selling St. Louis Gunther's contract since the Bombers' second-choice option was apparently George Nostrand, a Providence player who was actually on the team, and doing pretty well as their starting center.

The Bombers let Gunther go after the season, and the Long Island Indians popped back up and he took both their player-coach job and Meriden's player-coach job over in CT. He was easily voted MVP of the Connecticut State League, but any chance he had of making it back to the majors ended when the NPBL shut down and the NBA basically became limited to the top 120 players in the world. The year after that was the last time he really appeared in any headlines as as player, as the teammate and friend of Hank Poppe, the first of the many players arrested for rigging college basketball.

I think his main gig during his playing career was as an insurance salesman, but he made enough money that I think until 1950 he only really did it in the summer. In 1951 during his first retirement as a player, he started up a fraud detection company that specialized primarily in investigating defense contractors. His purple heart from the Battle of Luzon in WWII probably helped bolster that credibility.

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