hauntedcomputer wrote:How much was Mikan the real engine of driving the league at that point? Would there have been other stars who could have carried the mantle toward legitimacy, or was "teams/owners/administrative organization" more important than the talent on the court?
Mikan definitely helped a lot, not just in being as big of an individual star as he was, but being one who lent the league and the sport at large a significant level of respectability. Just before he came to the pros, there was a player named Bobby McDermott who was, in his own right, very clearly the best player to have played the game thus far. He won five straight MVPs in the NBL. The way I like to describe him is if you crossed Stephen Curry with Kobe Bryant, sent him back in time, and gave him an alcohol problem, you''d get Bobby McDermott. He was massive for the game, and it's only moderately hyperbolic to describe him as having turned basketball from a 2D sport along the baseline to a 3D sport. He had one game where he made 11 shots from beyond half-court (this was in the ABL where the court was shorter, so logo range by today's standards).
But he only attended one year of high school before dropping out, made a living for a couple years before going pro by gambling on street ball, got in constant fights on the court, knocked out a teammate while player-coach in a fight over a craps game, punched a referee in the face in the playoffs, and ended his career banned from basketball. Everyone in charge of the sport essentially tried to intentionally forget him until around 30 years after he died. So Mikan, being a well-spoken law school graduate whose career decision before basketball worked out was whether he wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a priest, while being an even bigger star than McDermott and one who had started that ascent in college, was a gold mine for the league.
I think that if Mikan had not existed, there would have very likely been a more explicit focus on teams over players at first, yes. Bob Davies and one of Fulks (pre-merger) or Schayes (post-merger) would have been the faces of the league without him, and while Davies was an incredibly entertaining player in many of the same ways Cousy would be and would thrive in that spotlight, Fulks' drinking problems would've been even more in the spotlight and given people the same view of basketball as during the McDermott era, and Schayes just had a weird game and wasn't a natural face-of-the-league type of guy.
hauntedcomputer wrote:Also, from the description of the book, there was some anti-Semitism at play, which is interesting because Jews seem to have played a large role in integrating Northeastern basketball for black players before the larger organizational structures and wealthier owners came in. Is there much history on the written or unwritten rules that kept basketball segregated for so long, and then resulting in the informal "no more than two blacks per team" policy until Red Auerbach decided he'd rather have a dynasty?
The most explicit anti-Semitism was in the BAA era, particularly toward the first season of the New York Knicks and particularly from markets like Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Pittsburgh's coach, Paul Birch, was particularly bad in that regard (and in many other regards).
Jews played a large part in pre-integration black basketball, particularly notable in the form of Abe Saperstein as the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters and Abe Lichtman as the owner of the Washington Bears. Two of the three black teams that reached a status of having, at the very least, a good argument at one point in time for being the best team in the world. (The other one though, the black-owned New York Renaissance, were by far the most successful of the three. I'd put them on par with the Original Celtics as the two pre-NBA teams far and away better than any other.)
However, there was actually, unfortunately, quite a bit of Jewish influence on the anti-integration arguments at the time of integration. Saperstein put a lot of pressure on the NBA (and the BAA before it) not to integrate so that he could continue to sign the vast majority of the best black players for less than they were worth. Eddie Gottlieb, owner of the Warriors, was his strongest ally in that regard and infamously responded to Carl Bennett casting the vote to break the tie in favor of integrating the NBA with:
Carl, you son of a bitch, you just ruined the league! In five years, 75% of the league is going to be black. We won’t draw crowds. People won’t come out to see them.
There had been quite a number of temporary integrations prior to that though, the first being Bucky Lew beginning in 1902. The NBL had four different integrated seasons (five if one counts the MBC as the same thing as the NBL), and most of those integrations were indeed precipitated by Jewish owner-managers. I believe the 1946-47 integration of Pop Gates, Dolly King, Bill Farrow, and Willie King was intended to be permanent at the time, but that those in charge of the league discouraged the continuation of it following the Pop Gates-Chick Meehan fight toward the end of the season that resulted in a lengthy hospital stay for Meehan and so much bad publicity that some sports journalists began to fear it would impact whether Jackie Robinson would be allowed to play in the MLB.
Once NBA permanent integration happened is when it becomes a little tricky. It's common knowledge that there were only three integrators at first in 1950-51 (with a fourth, forgotten one, Hank DeZonie, briefly joining midseason before quitting after a couple weeks due to racism). But less known is that there were actually nine originally signed, those three were just the only ones who made their team. The technical first black player in the NBA based on contract legality was Harold Hunter, who never played a game in the league.
Now, the Warriors, Olympians, and Lakers held out on integrating for years. The league did indeed have unofficial caps on black players, first at two, then at four, then at four on the court at the same time, which were intended to suppress the number of black players in the league. But at the same time, black basketball had already been struggling for talent since the start of WWII, between the war itself, the Washington Bears basically stealing the NY Renaissance's entire roster, and most importantly, the Great Depression's decimation of second-tier black teams that had become de facto developmental teams for the Rens and the Trotters. The Rens went out of business the same summer as the merger, the Trotters switched to semi-rigged games around the same time. It was a point in which the number of black basketball players who could compete at the highest level was at its lowest since WWI anyway, even without the artificial caps that NBA execs put in place. And for that reason, it's very difficult to figure out exactly how much the slow trickle of integration was natural vs unofficially enforced by the league, both definitely played a part. And then Goose Tatum, Marques Haynes, and Bill Garrett turned the league down, and Sherman White, Ed Warner, and Floyd Layne all got banned in the college matchfixing scandal, when they would've collectively formed the backbone of the rest of the early integrators along with Don Barksdale and co.