Collision Course

by William Cook

  The finals were not without controversy, both warranted and irrelevant. To begin with, games one, two, and five of the finals had to be played at St. Paul Auditorium as the Lakers home arena, Minneapolis Arena had been booked. It was a circumstance that would be repeated time and time again in the NBA into the 1960s with teams being pre-empted by circuses and ice shows.

  It could be argued that playing in St. Paul might have cost the Lakers the home-court advantage. If any NBA team ever had a bigger home-court advantage it was the Lakers. Minneapolis Arena (Auditorium), the 10,000-seat facility where the Lakers played their home games, was narrower by a few feet than the other arenas where NBA games were played at that time. The saying among a lot of the players was that 6′10″ George Mikan, 6′7″ Vern Mikkelsen, and 6′4″ Jim Pollard would stretch their arms across the narrow court and nobody could get through.

  In the first quarter of game one, played at Minneapolis, Knicks guard Al McGuire drove inside for a basket and was fouled. But neither referee, Stan Stutz nor Sid Borgia, had seen the ball go in the basket and McGuire was given two free throws. There was, of course, no video at that time for refs to check. While Knicks coach Joe Lapchick pleaded emphatically with commissioner Maurice Podoloff seated at courtside the call was allowed to stay.

  The game wound up in overtime and the Lakers won 82–77. Of course, had the extra two points been on the scoreboard at the end of regulation time from McGuire’s shot the Knicks would have won. The Knicks All-Star forward Harry Gallatin later remarked, “If they had counted that shot, it would have made a big difference in the series.”6

  The Knicks won game two sending the series to New York, tied at one game each. Games three and four, scheduled to be played in New York, took place at the 69th Regiment Armory located on Lexington Avenue between East 25th and 26th Streets. Madison Square Garden had been booked by the Barnum & Bailey Circus for those dates. The Armory is a 5,000-seat facility that actually served as the Knicks primary home venue between 1946 and 1960.

  The Lakers won game three 82–77 by forcing a slower game that disrupted the Knicks fast-break offense as George Mikan scored 26 points and had 17 rebounds. Two days later, in game four at the Armory, the Knicks rebounded to win 90–89 while limiting George Mikan to just 11 points to even up the series 2 games each.

  Over the years, much speculation and ballyhoo have been made that the Knicks lost the home-court advantage by being trumped by a circus at Madison Square Garden. But the facts are that both games were close. Furthermore, the 1952 playoffs would not be the last year that an important NBA playoff game would have to vacate its home arena to permit a circus to take place. Another memorable displacement of an NBA playoff game by elephants and clowns would take place in 1963 at Cincinnati during the Eastern Division Playoffs between the Royals with Oscar Robertson and Boston Celtics with Bob Cousy. In that series, the Cincinnati Royals lost a hard-fought series 4 games to 3 to Cousy and the Celtics.

  Game five of the 1952 championship series was played again in St. Paul as the Lakers downed the Knicks 102–89. For Minneapolis, both George Mikan and Vern Milkkelson scored 32 points each.

  The series returned to New York for game six and only 3,000 fans showed up at the Armory to witness Max Zaslofsky score 23 points and sink the Lakers 76–68.

  The Minneapolis Lakers won the 1952 NBA Championship in game seven on April 25, defeating the New York Knicks 82–65 at the Minneapolis Auditorium in front of 8,600 delirious fans. Game seven was the only game in the finals that was played on either team’s home court. The win gave the Minneapolis Lakers their fourth title in five years as they became the NBA’s first dynasty.

  In the 1952–53 Bob Cousy began to demonstrate dominance in his play. For the first time, he would lead the NBA in assists, then proceed to lead the league in that category every year going forward through 1960 while also always finishing near the top in scoring and free-throw percentage. At the conclusion of the season, when the writers and broadcasters picked their NBA All-Star Team, Bob Cousy led the balloting and just missed being a unanimous choice by one vote.

  Joining Cousy on the All-Star Team were Celtics teammate Ed Macauley, George Mikan of Minneapolis, Dolph Schayes of Syracuse, and Neil Johnston of Philadelphia.

  The addition of Bob Cousy on the Celtics had transformed the team into competitors. In 1952–53, the Boston Celtics finished third in the Eastern Division with a record of 46–25 behind division champion New York Knicks 47–23 and second place Syracuse Nationals 47–24. Therefore, Boston was scheduled to play Syracuse in the best of three games in the Eastern Division Semi-Finals. At that point in their history, the Celtics had never won a playoff series. Bob Cousy’s emerging brilliance would be personified by his performance in game two of the 1953 Eastern Division Semi-Finals.

  The Celtics won game one by a score of 87–81 led by Bob Cousy with 20 points and Bill Sharman with 15, while Dolph Schayes had 10 points for the Nationals.

  Game two of the series, witnessed by 11,658 delirious fans at Boston Garden, turned out to be a four-overtime affair and is arguably Bob Cousy’s greatest game in the NBA, although he had only 2 assists and was playing on a bad leg.

  With less than a minute to play in regulation time, Cousy uncharacteristically missed an open man under the basket. Luckily, the Celtics got the ball back; Cousy was fouled and sank two free throws to tie the game at 77–77 and send it into overtime. At that point in the game, Cousy had 25 points.

  In the first overtime, Bob Cousy had six of the Celtics nine points including another game-tying free throw. With the score tied 86–86, the game entered the second overtime. At the four-minute mark, Syracuse lost Dolph Schayes, the team’s top scorer, when he was tossed out of the game for fighting with the Celtics’ Bob Brannum. The Nationals and Celtics scored just 4 points each in the period, but once again it was a basket by Cousy that kept the Celtics in the game.

  The Celtics and Nationals proceeded into the third overtime with the score knotted at 90–90. The Nationals had only five men who had not fouled out. Then, Paul Seymour, the Nationals 6′1″ guard, sprained his ankle. Now Syracuse coach, Al Cervi, was confronted with the dilemma of choosing between sending an ineligible man back in and giving the Celtics a technical or leaving Seymour in the game. The decision was to leave Seymour in the game stationed under the basket. So, in effect, the Celtics were playing against four men on the court but found themselves in trouble and trailing by two points with 18 seconds left to go.

  Then, Bob Cousy tied it again with two foul shots. Syracuse then hit a basket with five seconds to regain the lead at 99–97. Once again, it was the Cooz to the rescue as he raced up court and sank a 25-foot one-handed push shot as the gun sounded to tie the score 99–99.

  The game entered the fourth overtime and in the first 2½ minutes of play, Syracuse used its four mobile players to take a five-point lead, 104–99. Then Cousy got hot and scored nine of the Celtics’ 12 points, and in the end, Boston won the game 111–105 as Cousy finished with 50 points.*

  A total of 107 fouls had been called in the epic contest, 55 against Syracuse and 52 against Boston and in the end, despite Cousy’s heroic effort, it would be fouls that caught up with the Nationals, as seven men reached the limit of six, resulting in a technical every time they committed a foul.

  Unfortunately, the success of the Boston Celtics would be short-lived, as they would fall to the New York Knicks 3 games to 1 in the Eastern Division Finals.

  Despite the dominance of George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers, the Syracuse Nationals had been the most popular team in the early 1950s, but having a solid team in New York, the nation’s largest media center, did much to increase interest in professional basketball.

  The New York Knicks and Minneapolis Lakers would once again meet in the 1953 NBA Finals. But after winning game one, the Knicks would lose four straight to the Lakers. For the third year in a row, the Knicks had reached the finals only to lose having been defeated by the Royals in 1951 and the
Lakers in 1952 and 1953.

  It was anticipated that 1953–54 would be a banner year for the NBA. George Mikan announced that he intended to retire at the end of the season and everyone was anticipating a repeat in the finals of Lakers vs. Knicks. Unfortunately, just as the NBA was legitimizing its game and building a larger following, problems began to occur.

  First, fourteen games into the season the Baltimore Bullets went bankrupt. Then, scandal would enter into the picture. Although the NBA had dodged a bullet in the college point-shaving scandals, it was almost inevitable. The skullduggery had been so widespread that somehow an undetected part of it would leak into the league through a crack in the wall.

  That occurred on September 16, 1953, when Jack Molinas, a former Columbia University star, signed an NBA contract with Frank Zollner’s Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons for $8,500 and a $1,500 signing bonus. But Molinas wouldn’t last half a season in the league. Jack Molinas played his last NBA game on January 7, 1954, as Ft. Wayne lost to Syracuse 79–67. The following day, NBA Commissioner Maurice Podoloff suspended Molinas indefinitely. In addition, he was declared ineligible to play in the NBA All-Star Game for which he had been chosen. At the time, Molinas was playing well, averaging 12 points and 8.2 rebounds per game, playing an average of 32 minutes per game.

  George Yardley was Molinas’ Ft. Wayne teammate in 1953, both were rookies. Yardley was to state that, while Molinas was on the telephone a lot, he never saw him dealing with bookies nor did his roommate.

  After being arrested by the Ft. Wayne police, Jack Molinas signed a statement that he had bet on his team, the Ft. Wayne Pistons, to win games. In Indiana, it was not unlawful for an athlete to bet on himself. But due to legislation enacted in New York in the wake of the 1951 collegiate scandals, Molinas was declared culpable because he had made calls to Stanley Ratensky in New York to bet on NBA games which were in violation of anti-bribery codes. The Bronx Assistant District Attorney announced that he intended to take Jack Molinas to a grand jury in an effort to determine whether a widespread gambling ring was operating in the NBA.

  NBA president Maurice Podoloff, in his official statement on the matter, said that Jack Molinas had bet on a total of ten games and won six of the bets netting a total of $400 profit.

  Following the shocking revelation of Jack Molinas’ connections to gamblers, Ft. Wayne owner Fred Zollner obsessed over the character of his players. He was convinced that a couple of other players, Mel Hutchins and Monk Meinke, were also on the take because they were friends of Molinas. So, he hired a detective and followed them both at home and on the road while checking their telephone records. When they came up clean, Zollner told Pistons coach Charley Eckman to trade both players.

  The exile of Jack Molinas from the NBA hardly stopped gambling in professional basketball, there was widespread gambling by fans on almost every game played. Syracuse Nationals center Johnny Kerr stated that fans at Boston Gardens would shout, “Hey, we doubled our bets on you shmucks, so you better beat the spread.”7 Some fans with wagers placed were so brazen that they were of the opinion they could influence the outcome of the game by yelling at and intimidating the refs and by littering the court with debris. Some zealous bookies even set up shop under the stands at half-time.

  The NBA players were warned to avoid hanging out with gamblers or face being banned from the league, but when it came to the fans, especially in New York City, it was a different matter. At Madison Square Garden it was estimated that about half the fans at any given game were more concerned about the point spread than the actual outcome of the game.

  Alex Hannum, a 6′7″ power forward, who played for seven NBA teams between 1949 and 1957, was of the opinion that player’s salaries were being paid indirectly by gamblers due to the fact that a lot of the fans buying tickets were there to bet on the games. “In my first game at Madison Square Garden,” stated Hannum, “we were up by eight points over the Knicks and the fans yelled like hell. Then the score was tied and the place was quiet. We later learned the point spread was eight.”8

  A few years later, Jack Molinas would surface again at the center of another college basketball scandal. Legal authorities would allege that Molinas was involved with paying over $70,000 to fix forty-three college games throughout the country between 1957 and 1961. It would be revealed that in the chicanery, forty-seven players were believed to have been approached and thirty-three admitted to taking bribes from twenty-two schools that amounted to between $75 and $4,500.

  Jack Molinas would be convicted and sentenced to 10–15 years in prison for attempting to fix the outcome of a game between North Carolina State and Wake Forrest in 1959. Several others would receive prison sentences and six former players received suspended sentences.

  On August 5, 1975, in Los Angeles, Jack Molinas was shot in the back of the head by a sniper and killed while standing on the patio of his luxurious Hollywood Hills home. He was 43 years old and his murder remains unsolved.

  Despite the shenanigans of Jack Molinas, the NBA had an exciting season in 1953–54. Fans in Boston were accustomed to seeing the Bruins engage in hockey fights at Boston Garden. But on November 11, a capacity crowd of 13,909 fans at the Garden witnessed a huge round-ball donnybrook between the Celtics and Philadelphia Warriors. The fight started between Bob Cousy and Neil Johnston of the Warriors when the two collided chasing a loose ball in the first half. Cousy still went after loose balls with the same fervor that he had chasing balls rolled out the door by coach Buster Sheary at the end of practices at Holy Cross. Cousy was no pansy, he had grown-up on some tough streets and playgrounds in lower Manhattan and Queens and gallantly held his own with Johnston. The scuffle quickly escalated into a full-fledged, free-swinging brawl between all the members of both teams. It took two minutes and twenty policemen to stop the fight. While it was hard to tell who won the fight, Boston ultimately won the game 78–72.

  As was anticipated, the Minneapolis Lakers made sure that George Mikan hung up his gym shoes in a grand finale at the end of the season. The Lakers reached the NBA Finals by defeating the Rochester Royals in the Western Division Finals.

  The Rochester Royals were still a good team and had one of the best records in the league, finishing the 1953–54 campaign in second place in the Western Division with a record of 44–28. But the Royals were an aging team with the oldest roster in the league, averaging 29.1 years old. Bobby Wanzer was 33, Bob Davies was 34, and both Arnie Risen and Jack Coleman were 30.

  The Lakers won their fifth NBA championship in seven years defeating the Syracuse Nationals in the finals 4 games to 3.

  The New York Knicks had won the Eastern Division and were expected to meet the Lakers again in the finals, but were swept by Syracuse Nationals in the Eastern Semi-Finals.

  The NBA was then seven years old and George Mikan left the league as the career leader in points scored and points per game. Mikan then became general manager of Lakers and opened a law practice in Minneapolis.

  Although they failed to reach the finals, it had been quite a year for the Boston Celtics and Bob Cousy. The Cooz finished as the second highest scorer in the league with an average of 19.2 points per game and had been named the All-Star Game MVP.

  The Celtics finished as the league leader in points per game (87.7), assists (1,773), and total rebounds (3,867), while finishing in a second-place tie in the East with Syracuse. But once again, the Celtics were swept by those nagging Nationals in the Eastern Division playoffs.

  ———

  * Playing the game on that bad leg, Bob Cousy had scored 50 points, 10 out of 18 from the field and 30 out of 32 foul shots. Cousy’s 50 points set a new record for a playoff game surpassing the old record of 47 set by George Mikan in the 1952 playoffs.

  4

  The Shot Clock Ushers in the Modern NBA & Bill Russell Joins the Celtics

  Throughout the early years of the NBA, the games were, for the most part, a battle for position, lots of shoving, pushing, and blocking. It allowed a big slow man like
George Mikan to control play and slow the game down. As a result, it had become a common strategy for teams with a substantial lead to freeze the ball in the closing minutes of the game. This, of course, would lead to constant fouling in order to get the ball back, low scoring, and depriving the fans of exciting endings to the games. One of the most ridiculous incidents of this type of play occurred on November 22, 1950, when the Minneapolis Lakers defeated the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons 19–18. Pistons coach Murray Mendenhall had decided that rather than attempt to contain George Mikan, his team would hold the ball, not run it, and wait until the end of the game to score the winning basket. Many fans, infuriated with this strategy, demanded their money back.

  The stall game did have its supporters, including Red Auerbach, who felt it benefited the Boston Celtics. On many occasions toward the end of the game, to slow the pace, Auerbach would pull Bob Cousy out and replace him with Sonny Hertzberg whose job it would be to just hold on to the ball. The Rochester Royals also benefited from the stall game as they played a slow defensive posting game. But by 1953, it was apparent that such a molasses strategy as stalling the ball was killing the professional game. Play needed to be sped up and made more exciting.

  So, in 1954, the NBA adopted the idea of Syracuse owner Danny Biasone to implement a 24-second shot clock to speed up the game by eliminating stalling. The shot clock was adopted and the intervention was an instant success with fans as it increased scoring and the pace of the game. Immediately, in the 1954–55 season, scoring in the NBA increased from 79.5 points per game to 93.1. But most importantly, the shot clock ensured that the excitement in the game never lessened. In essence, the modern NBA game had been born.