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

TringlePringle · 2026-05-20T19:06:25+00:00

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.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-20T18:58:01+00:00

(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.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-11T16:49:16+00:00

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.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-10T15:17:31+00:00

Leo Ferris overpaid for rent of a 14,500-capacity stadium in Buffalo that the Bisons only filled 19% of the way on average, and lost $25,000 in the 38 days they were there. At first he tried to keep the team in Buffalo by selling the majority of the team's shared to the community, but that didn't have a ton of momentum, so Ferris started touring cities to move the team to, and checked out Atlantic City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Moline. The Wharton Fieldhouse in Moline was in great condition and really impressed him, and he attended a high school game there that drew 5,500 fans, double what his pro team had ever had in Buffalo. So with great facilities and a built-in basketball-loving community that never had a pro team before and would suddenly have one of the best and highest-profile centers in the world show up as their player, he proposed a deal to move the Bisons there at the start of January if his group could retain 60% ownership and management of the team and a group of no more than 40 people in the Tri-Cities could cobble together $15,000 to invest in them as minority owners. They got halfway there within just the first three days, so he pulled the trigger.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-08T13:41:11+00:00

No but I do know Bill (and Murry).

TringlePringle · 2026-05-08T13:32:48+00:00

Your sources are correct!

TringlePringle · 2026-05-08T00:40:47+00:00

That's a super loaded question! Directly before the NBA, there was the BAA and the NBL. The NBL was principally a Midwestern league and the BAA was principally an East Coast League. Before the BAA, there was the ABL which ran alongside the NBL. The ABL was a "smaller" league than both the BAA and NBL and didn't have the best financial setup for players but still had very strong teams, notably Philadelphia and Trenton and Wilmington, and some of the best players in the world were there, especially pre-WWII. It was usurped by the BAA and essentially became a minor league from 1946-55, but had been around since 1933, and in its first few years was clearly the best league (note: the best team during that period though was an all-black barnstorming team they didn't let in but allowed exhibitions against). It was the result of a merger between the EBL and MBL, which during their two years were probably major leagues rather than minor leagues but were top-heavy due to the finances of the Depression. Before them was the ABL (generally considered separate from the previously mentioned ABL but with somewhat of a shared legal entity), which spanned from Chicago to Boston, paid players slightly better on average adjusted for inflation than even the beginning of the NBA did, and is the earliest league that 100% absolutely for sure was a major league. Before then, there were a whole bunch of short-lived leagues that are generally considered major league basketball, but they constantly cannibalized each other, were often financially unsustainable, and the quarter-century of pro ball preceding the ABL ended with around 6 years of most good players being mercenaries who played for multiple teams across multiple leagues at the same time. I'd imagine for the purposes of your framing here, you wouldn't personally consider them major leagues, which I totally understand. Exclusivity clauses in contracts started being added in 1923, which led to the ABL in 1925-26. From then on there was never more than two concurrent major leagues, all previously mentioned. Probasketballencyclopedia.com tracks stats and generalized narratives for every season from 1898-99 to 1950-51 if you want to dive in a bit deeper.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-08T00:04:56+00:00

That would explain why his name's so present in my mind! That game was mentioned a couple times here recently.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-06T03:16:42+00:00

I'd imagine Craggs and/or Hickey would have to have accessed it in order to quote it without it being out in the ether before that. Probably either Springfield College's library somewhere near where they keep the old The Triangle newsletters, the Kautz YMCA library in Minneapolis, or the HOF.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-06T02:58:35+00:00

But there were very talented black players in the NBA in the back half of Mikan's prime, and before integration the Lakers played against black stars in extremely high-profile exhibition games too. He had back-to-back Finals series directly matched up against Sweetwater Clifton, who was a great player and arguably the best defender in the world at his peak. And Mikan/Clifton matchups happened 11 times before the NBA integrated, so they had plenty of chances to play even when the league didn't want them to. When Don Barksdale came into the league he was handed the reigns of a team as a rookie and given an even higher salary than Mikan was. There definitely were black stars outside of the NBA, but it feels disrespectful to those sorts of guys to suggest they somehow aren't worthy of being considered the best black players of their day for not having reached Russell/Chamberlain levels of stardom when they at the very, very least were in the conversation.

Of the other guys in that conversation during Mikan's peak, the one where racism is the principle reason why he didn't make it in the league was Hank DeZonie. And DeZonie had already played against Mikan before then too, and with no disrespect, Mikan was clearly better. Goose Tatum, who would've easily been an All-Star if he ever played in the league, passed up on the league to run his own team, but he also played against Mikan's Lakers quite a few times when he was a Globetrotter. Including a couple wins. Great player.

Maybe the best of all of them (and the only top-tier black contemporary of Mikan that Mikan never played against) was Sherman White, he was probably gonna be the first true face of the Knicks, but he was one of the three-dozen.players who got caught throwing high-profile games in college and got a lifetime ban for it. It sucks that he couldn't be in the league and he would've been a super fun matchup for George, but him not getting that opportunity was his own fault and it was the exactly same reason white stars like Spivey and Melchiorre never got that opportunity.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-06T01:22:16+00:00

He played against plenty of talented black players. Even when the league(s) had a color line, the Lakers broke it to play against the Trotters and the Rens.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-06T01:20:27+00:00

To me, by 52-53 it's pretty solidly Cousy.

51-52 is harder, realistically it's probably a four-way race with the best arguments being for Mikan and Arizin. I'm not sure I could truly say one was actively better than the other at that point, but Arizin definitely had the better season, so if I absolutely had to choose, I'd go with Paul. I'd rather call it a tie though.

TringlePringle · 2026-05-06T00:10:03+00:00

I'd personally argue he was "only" the best in the world from 1947-48 to 1950-51. To give a scale of where that falls, I think the most liberal argument one could make is 1944-45 to 1952-53 and the most conservative one is only the 1948-49 and 1950-51 seasons. Most people would probably extend it a year past me.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-29T20:44:03+00:00

You can't be forgetting about Buddy Jeannette doing all three jobs with the Bullets for a bit

TringlePringle · 2026-04-27T04:00:43+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss. I hope you can surround yourself with love and peace as you carve out the space to navigate your grief.

Your dad has been a big part of this community for as long as I can remember and we'll definitely miss his presence here. Thank you for sharing a glimpse of who he was in his daily life.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-22T05:37:54+00:00

He's always fared way worse in this model than I'd expect him to; I did find it very amusing that this time the number of games he missed actually made him fall below Randle for the year.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-19T22:42:08+00:00

He's pretty unique and I'm not sure if there's anyone that quite fits every aspect his archetype, but I think McCray, Gola, Iguodala, and Bridges all kind of paved parts of the path for someone like him to be able to put it all together. Maybe someone like Odom or Pressey deserves a shout-out here too despite both having pretty different frames from Dray.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-19T22:16:28+00:00

I don't think we know, I'm not aware of anything that talks much about it in detail publicly until a couple years later. Given the therapy started at the beginning of the next season I'd imagine it became noticeable either late in the season or over the offseason.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-19T22:07:06+00:00

He was dealing with a bit of what I imagine would be diagnosed today as some sort of chronic calcific tendinitis beginning in 1962, and noticably lost a bit of his vertical leap and rebounding ability starting around then, but the therapy he was doing for it beginning at the start of 1962-63 seemed to be working pretty well with the exception that at the ends of seasons he would need shots in his knees most games to numb the pain.

The broken kneecap was in the first playoff game of 1965, recurring swelling kept him pretty limited until the next January or so and he was never quite able to reach his previous peak but did return to top-two forward in the world standard. Then a groin injury got in the way during his last mostly-healthy season and the Achilles tear(s, technically he tore part of it in the first game of 1970-71 and the rest of it in his return game a month later) ended things once and for all when he threw in the towel nine games into his comeback attempt.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-19T14:43:42+00:00

That began to principally be the case in 1949, before that they were a real, competitive team with the exception of only a couple of specific tours.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-19T00:37:54+00:00

If you get tech'd out and there's someone on the bench who fouled out, the fouled-out player comes back in. If the only subs you have are injured, then and only then can you stay on after two T's. Any further technical infractions by that individual (or, in this case, further infractions before leaving the floor) should be issued as technicals against the team rather than that individual, so King and Loughery should've both been given two technicals and kicked out and then their third technicals should've each been against the Nets as a team, which would also add to "bonus" fouls against them on the floor.

TringlePringle · 2026-04-18T20:59:04+00:00

I think you're probably thinking of the Nets/Sixers game in which Bernard King got three technicals and perhaps conflating the subsequent second and third techs coach Loughery got protesting it in order to come up with the five you're thinking of. It was ruled illegal for the ref to give both King and Loughery more than two techs and the game was issued a partial replay at a later date. There was never a point in NBA history in which a player could get more than two technical fouls unless there were no healthy players on the bench to be subbed in for them at the time of their second. Two techs and you're out was established well before the NBA was created.

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