Live Q&A: Basketball Historian and Author of 'The Birth of the Modern NBA'

[hauntedcomputer]

I preordered your book, good luck with it and thanks for your thoughtful replies here. I used to write promo copy for McFarland. I assume the book will have a bibliography but what are some other good early histories of the sport? 24 Seconds to Shoot and Mr. Basketball are all I have on the earliest years.

[maradro]

I'm curious about how the sport developed in a social sense.

Like, what was the profile of the first players, where were the first courts.. I haven't done any research or anything, but I have to assume that it was all mostly upper class given the cost of building a court .. when did public courts start to appear, how/why did schools start incorporating basketball?

I'm from south America, futbol is king here while basketball weve only seen public courts in the last 25 years or so, many schools don't even include it in their phys Ed because they don't have the infrastructure, so it remains a mostly upper class niche sport

[zeebneeb]

I have a question, with two parts. First, I consider myself a history buff when it comes to the NBA, obviously not as in depth as yourself, but one thing that has always seemed nebulous to me, are the exact dates of each teams founding.

As it stands;

Kings-1923
Pistons-1937
Warriors-1946
Sixers-1946
Knicks-1946
Hawks-1946
Celtics-1946
Lakers-1947

Is this actually accurate? I know the Kings Lakers, and Pistons didn't join the NBA until 1948, and a few others until 49'.

In a follow up, how fragile was the league in terms of ownership back then? I know some of these teams moved once or more. Now its a big deal when a pro team moves cities, but how was that treated back then?

[JElias]

I preordered your book, good luck with it and thanks for your thoughtful replies here. I used to write promo copy for McFarland. I assume the book will have a bibliography but what are some other good early histories of the sport? 24 Seconds to Shoot and Mr. Basketball are all I have on the earliest years.

Thank you so much! What a small world.

Some of my favorites other than those two include
Pioneers of the Hardwood: Indiana and the Birth of Professional Basketball,
The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End,
Ball Hawks: The Arrival and Departure of the NBA in Iowa,
They Cleared the Lane: The NBA's Black Pioneers,
and the autobiographies of Red Auerbach, George Mikan, and Bob Cousy.

I also recommend
Nat Holman's Scientific Basketball,
Claude Johnson's The Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Era,
Murry Nelson's The Originals: The New York Celtics Invent Modern Basketball,
and Murry Nelson's The National Basketball League: A History, 1935-1949 for pre-NBA.

[Doctor MJ]

Hello people of RealGM! My name is Josh Elias and I am a sports historian specializing in integration-era and pre-integration-era professional basketball. My book, The Birth of the Modern NBA: Pro Basketball in the Year of the Merger, 1949–50, is slated for publication late this spring and can be pre-ordered right now through the previous link or on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Target.

My work involves formal research into many complex issues both directly and indirectly pertinent to the NBA, its three historic rival leagues, and its many predecessor leagues, and I have been involved in projects centering around archiving, analysis, writing, data, the study of historical trends within the sport, player and team performances, and more.

The Birth of the Modern NBA focuses on both the 1949-50 NBA season and how we arrived at a point in which it was possible for it to play out as it did and lead to the sport's evolution in the way that it did. Significant focuses beyond a play-by-play of the season itself include the BAA-NBL merger, the season's status as the last one before professional basketball's permanent integration, and how the sport navigated WWII, with this being the last season before the U.S. joined the Korean War. As well as, of course, the individual stories of the teams and many key players, coaches, and executives.

Other major projects currently on my docket include research for officially unofficial (Helms-style, for those who know NCAA history) retrospective MVP-equivalent and Champion-equivalent awards for each season prior to the NBA's existence, a series of biographies on pre-NBA players, and a book on the 1950-51 NBA and NPBL seasons which I expect to release in 2026.

I'm here to share my insights and answer any questions you might have about basketball's history, or about basketball in general from the perspective of a basketball historian. My professional experience, as regards what I can speak to as an expert, spans from 1896 until 1961, but I have a well-rounded understanding of later history as well and am happy to answer those questions too, just not to a level of which my perspective is uniquely important as an expert or authority.

Awesome! Love the replies I see from you so far, and I look forward to reading your book.

My immediate thing I want to say is: I hope you check out our almost-done Top 100 career project over on the Player Comparisons board. It's an imperfect thing, but we're definitely interested in the era you speak to even if it does get less love than later eras.

My immediate question for you is an extremely general one:

How did you go about gaining the knowledge the knowledge you gained to be able to write this book?

That might be too vague for you to sink your teeth into in a reasonable amount of time, so let me give something more specific:

Where/how did you find your sources?
As you study your sources, what's your process for using them as effectively as you can?

[Doctor MJ]

Hi Josh, great work on your research and thanks for stopping by. I'm curious do you enjoy the state of the game today ? Do you see any comparisons from historical basketball to today's players ?

Thank you so much! I do enjoy it; it's not quite my favorite era aesthetically and I have some quibbles with just how many games players take off and various other things of that nature, but I think understanding just how much the game has changed over time has given me a bit more patience when it comes to these minor to moderate factors. The pre-WWI version of the professional sport was tactically closer to futsal but while using hands rather than feet than it is to modern basketball, so, considering that, anything differing today's game from what people are nostalgic for is very small in the larger picture.

I definitely do! Now, at the very top level of players, not as many clear direct comparisons as I have in most past eras, I think in large part due to the level of heliocentrism in the game right now, but among role players there are still very clear archetypes that stretch back a long way. Among top-level players, I notice Brunson has a particularly vintage game in a general sense, with quite a lot of influence from West, Cousy, and Guerin in various ways. Fox, while secondary to a lot of modern influences, definitely has a lot of young Jerry West in him offensively. Anthony Davis, when he was younger, reminded me a lot of (a poor man's, compared in impact to his peers) George Mikan whenever he actually embraced the center position, but as he's grown into his game has turned into more of a Duncanian type. Jaylen Brown feels quite specifically to me like a cross between Jack Twyman from the Rochester & Cincinnati Royals with one of the 2000s post-Jordan copycats like Jason Richardson. And I was just working on some prospect analysis last week and my projection of Dalton Knecht had, as top-end potential outcome, Lee Shaffer of the Syracuse Nats as the primary examples of players he could have shades of.

Oh man, it's exciting that you also have a sense for the influences on players from generation to generation. I'd love to see some tree diagrams that go generations into the past!

[JElias]

I'm curious about how the sport developed in a social sense.

Like, what was the profile of the first players, where were the first courts.. I haven't done any research or anything, but I have to assume that it was all mostly upper class given the cost of building a court .. when did public courts start to appear, how/why did schools start incorporating basketball?

I'm from south America, futbol is king here while basketball weve only seen public courts in the last 25 years or so, many schools don't even include it in their phys Ed because they don't have the infrastructure, so it remains a mostly upper class niche sport

Courts in the very, very early days of the sport were much smaller than today, almost always multi-purpose to some extent, and with no real material regulations until the 1920s. Most of the time, they weren't primarily for basketball at all, and that was just one of many things they were used for. Most of the first ones were operated within the YMCA system in pre-existing gymnasiums.

Professional teams popped up beginning only five years later, and they at first used temporary materials to transform the interior of typically places such as public halls, opera houses, and armories into basketball courts. It wasn't until around 1910 that the more modern practices of full-time courts at the recreational and academic levels and large-scale temporary courts to lay on top of ice rinks at the professional level became commonplace.

The typical player at the very start of professional basketball's existence, that is the late 1890s and early 1900s, was a middle class white (generally English or German descent) Christian man located in Philadelphia PA, Trenton NJ, or Millville NJ, with some level of history in the YMCA system as a youth, most commonly the son of a father in the pottery, glassblowing, or milling industries.

In the generations following that, it became largely a second-generation immigrants' game. First those of Irish and German descent, often skilled workers. Then by the 1910s, the lower-class became more involved and Ashkenazi Jews whose parents fled the Russian pogroms a generation earlier. In the 1920s, it became far more widespread among all demographics, that was the first time people from upper-class families got involved and the number of working-class involved skyrocketed as well.

And the first black professional teams came about in this period (before then the highest-level black players were either amateurs or nominally amateurs, because basketball was far more explicitly connected to the church in black communities at first and there was a lot of anti-professionalism moralization that led to boycotts against early black pro teams by other black teams). The first black professional players were relatively well-off, but beginning in the late 1920s, the black working-class became the backbone of the black side of the sport.

Throughout the 1930s, the East Coast that the sport was established in began to really become something of which no particular demographic was associated, but at that same time it spread into other regions of the country to a far more mainstream extent than it ever had before, and in all those other parts of the country it was a working-class farmboy sport more than anything at first. Then came the NBA, and permanent integration, and the path toward the demographics we see now.

[Doctor MJ]

Thank you! I'll make sure to post to the player comparisons at some point too, thank you for the recommendation.

I'll put them in three categories:

Two-way stars whose impact was far bigger than their box score: Jim Pollard, Paul Seymour, Tom Gola, Nathaniel Clifton, Mel Hutchins. With Pollard it's especially weird because he should be remember as an all-time great but just seems to get lost in the pack of Mikan's supporting cast. The Lakers' GM at the time actually said he believed Pollard was the better player between the two... that's going a decent bit too far though. Seymour was the generation's top Cousy defender and most versatile perimeter defender in general, while always locking in to play larger roles in the postseason and developing toward a relatively short peak as the second-best guard in the league. Particularly a shame with Clifton, because it feels like people go out of their way a bit to ignore how good and valuable he actually was in order to make a point about the integration era limiting his impact. His impact really wasn't limited as much as redirected in a way that makes it less obvious statistically.

Non-Cousy point guards: Bob Davies, Slater Martin, Dick McGuire, Andy Phillip. Although I'm not entirely sure if Davies isn't more just forgotten than underrated in the same way as the others. But as a role in general, even very knowledgeable people tend not to understand just how important the point guards of the day were for dictating pace of play and conducting the entire offense.

Neil Johnston: Neil Johnston. He's the opposite of much of the first category, where people quickly dismiss his career as empty stats, or as a dinosaur who was irrelevant as soon as Russell came around. His stats were definitely somewhat inflated, and he definitely had some underwhelming playoff performances including in his one Finals appearance, but he was genuinely in competition with Cousy for best player in the league for a while there, and his fall-off had nothing to do with Russellian centers emerging and everything to do with an ultimately career-ending injury.

Going to jump in here and put some more questions forward along with my current thinking on the matter.

I think Jim Pollard is a canary-in-the-coal-mind case of our modern box score expectations not giving us a good look at what was actually going on in games of the deep past. Everything I've read about Pollard suggests that if he were the offensive focus of the Lakers, he'd have put up big numbers on big efficiency (relative to his time), but in the Mikan-dominated offense, he really didn't, and yet still was held in the highest regard for what he was doing for the Lakers. Sometimes contemporary observers are wrong, but they were also, definitionally seeing important things we miss looking back from the future. I'm inclined to think they weren't wrong about Pollard.

Thoughts on any of that?

Re: Gola. I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on what you see here. Big-time college star who comes to the pros and takes on lower scoring primacy roles that rely more on his all-aroundness to fill in the gaps. Seems to have an absolutely massive impact when he first joins the Warriors, but fades from there.

Sweetwater! Glad you discuss him. I see him as a guy whose impact in the NBA mostly came on defense, but despite the uninspiring offensive numbers, I really think he could have thrived as the playmaking pivot at the heart of a scheme. I'm not sure I'd say that was impact re-directed - because I wonder if he could have done it all at the same time - but I could see how that may have been the case, if you're seeing that as shifting focus.

Re: Johnston undone by injury not Russell. I'm curious if you have thoughts as to how the false Russell narrative began, because people really do talk about this as a first-hand live-game observation. Were they overreacting to what they saw in the moment and falsely attributing it explanatory power? Were they taking "poetic license" trying to craft a Casey-at-the-Bat narrative?

[Doctor MJ]

It's far more extreme for pre-NBA players, because the NBA and HOF often like to pretend the NBA is the be-all and end-all of the pro sport. There was over half a century of professional basketball before them!

Preach!

To say nothing of the fact that the pro version of a sport like this is just the icing on top of the cake. People often seem to think that no one played serious basketball until the NBA existed, when it was the seriousness of basketball that led to the formation of big budget pro basketball.

[Doctor MJ]

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.

Yeah, this is a thing that I wasn't expecting about race in basketball compared to baseball: When the big money is in barnstorming, it's hard for leagues as we know them to compete, and this leaves the continued development of advanced talent in a fragile state.

I think it's important to recognize that when leagues really start taking control of the pros for good in the 1940s, it's on the back of wealthy ownership that's prepared to lose money for a while because they see potential.

This then to say that while it's naturally for people who know about Negro League baseball to assume that racial integration should have happened in a clear, dramatic, world-breaking way, I would say it was more gradual than that not just because of the explicit racism in play - which obviously affected baseball too - but because of how economic and political events had disrupted the pipeline of Black talent relative to what hade been earlier (1920s).

[Doctor MJ]

Please explain as best you can the impact that Bill Russell had on the Celtics and the league. Modern fans look at the box score stats and tend to dismiss him as just a great defender who played on a great team.

Russell was an overwhelming defensive anchor to an extent that we haven't seen before or since. No one comes close, in comparison to their peers, to the impact he had in comparison to his peers on that side of the floor. The only player in the sport's history who was better at blocking shots was Chamberlain, and Chamberlain liked to overcommit to blocks for that explicit purpose in a way that made Russell a significantly more effectively shot-blocker despite slightly lesser numbers. Russell, of course, was also one of the most skilled rebounders that the game has ever seen (the stats actually somewhat exaggerate that particular aspect due simply to era, but certainly well within the top ten ever), and at that point in time, defensive rebounds were more explicitly a part of defense than it's often considered today.

He had a better sense of timing, whether it regard blocks, contests, helping close down on the perimeter, or being selective and taking a play to primarily be a psychological deterrent, than any other player in the history of the sport. He was incredible at recovery when necessary, had an advanced understanding that meant said recovery was rarely necessary, was a borderline Olympic-level athlete in both a vertical and lateral sensibility, and was the ultimately help-D contester. Every HOF center he played against declined significantly in efficiency against him, and all but Thurmond in pure PPG as well. The Celtics were one of the worst defensive teams in the league before he joined, and again very average in their first year without him--during his career they were second in Drtg once and first every single other year, often by very large margins.

It's hard to get particularly deep into it without turning this into an essay, but hopefully that at least touches, on a superficial level, how he had a greater impact defensively than any other player ever has. I rarely speak in such definitive terms regarding who was the best at something in an objective sense, but regarding this, it's not close.

So my maybe not-so-hot take here: I believe Bill Russell was the most consequential basketball player of all time.

If people were going to go back and research just one player from the past to understand the evolution of the game, I believe it's Russell that's most informative to learn about.

A little bit of a cheat here because learning about Russell also means learning about Wilt, but truly Russell's combination of

a) Competitive success in NCAA, Olympic, and NBA basketball
b) Russell's great spearhead status as the first Black man to be able to demonstrate such clear cut interracial dominance
c) Russell's innovative and influential style of play

[JElias]

I have a question, with two parts. First, I consider myself a history buff when it comes to the NBA, obviously not as in depth as yourself, but one thing that has always seemed nebulous to me, are the exact dates of each teams founding.

As it stands;

Kings-1923
Pistons-1937
Warriors-1946
Sixers-1946
Knicks-1946
Hawks-1946
Celtics-1946
Lakers-1947

Is this actually accurate? I know the Kings Lakers, and Pistons didn't join the NBA until 1948, and a few others until 49'.

In a follow up, how fragile was the league in terms of ownership back then? I know some of these teams moved once or more. Now its a big deal when a pro team moves cities, but how was that treated back then?

I'll work backwards because the earliest ones are the ones of which it's not quite as clear.

The Lakers were indeed created in 1947 as a member of the NBL, one year before joining the BAA. They were technically not founded as a franchise at this time, as the owners bought the franchise slot from the Detroit Gems team that had existed in the NBL the previous season rather than applying for an expansion team, but literally zero assets of the Detroit Gems were ever utilized as Lakers property, so it would be a little dumb to consider the Gems as being part of the Lakers' existence in any meaningful way.

The Celtics were indeed founded in 1946 as a member of the BAA. This is an open and shut case, they were a founding member of the league with no prior existence of the sort, aside from purchasing the rights to use the name "Celtics" from a former owner of the New York-based Original Celtics from the 1920s.

The Hawks were indeed founded in 1946 as a member of the NBL, later joining the NBA through the BAA-NBL merger in 1949. They were the Buffalo Bisons at the point of founding but relocated and rebranded in the middle of their first season to become the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. They were the first majority-white team in history to begin their existence as an integrated organization, with Pop Gates one of their key players in their first season.

The Knicks were indeed founded in 1946 as a member of the BAA. Like the Celtics an open and shut case. This was the only one of the BAA franchises in which there was an argument over who would operate the city's franchise, as two different potential owners wanted to run the team that would become the Knicks. The guy who lost and ended up not ever playing a role in the league was actually the person who first conceptualized the BAA in the first place.

The Philadelphia 76ers, at the time the Syracuse Nationals, were indeed created in 1946 as a member of the NBL, like the Hawks not joining the NBA until the 1949 merger. Like the Lakers, they purchased the franchise spot of a team already in existence, the Cleveland Transfers, but did not use any of their assets, so similarly it would take quite a stretch to count the Transfers as part of their history.

The Warriors were indeed founded in 1946 as a member of the BAA. Like the other BAA teams, founding team, open and shut case. Their manager-coach (and later manager-coach-owner) had run a previous team in Philadelphia since 1917-18, the all-Jewish Philadelphia Sphas, which was somewhat of a spiritual forerunner but had no connection to the team in any material sense.

The Pistons, at the time the Fort Wayne Zollners, were probably started in 1937. I haven't seen any primary sources of the team existing until 1938, but Zollner himself said 1937, and I see no reason not to believe him. That was as an amateur team operated within the confines of his company and playing local games against other industrial teams in the area. They began to operate as a serious organization in 1939, became semi-professional in 1940, and then became fully professional in 1941 when they joined the NBL. In a purely technical sense, they then became semi-professional again during wartime because players could dodge the draft by signing a highly inflated contract to work for Zollner's company and then "volunteer" to play basketball, sometimes without ever actually doing any job for him other than basketball. They joined the BAA in 1948 at the same time as the Lakers.

The Kings were not created in 1923. When exactly they were created, though, is a matter of debate. The semi-pro Eber Brothers team of Rochester NY was organized on Dec 6, 1928. It's often considered the case that the Ebers became the Rochester Seagrams in 1936, but both teams operated simultaneously during the 1935-36 season, so that clearly cannot be true in a technical sense. Most of the Ebers players joined the Seagrams when the Ebers discontinued, though, so the lines blur a little. It then becomes a lot weirder when the Ebers picked up part of Seagram's sponsorship in 1942-43 and the team became known interchangeably as either the Seagrams or the Eber-Seagrams. Then the Ebers pulled their sponsorship again the next year and some basketball higher-ups didn't want them to return to the Seagrams name because of the explicit support of alcohol consumption inherent to the name, so beginning in 1943, they played as simply the Rochester Pros. There's an argument to be made that was also a separate organization, because it also happened to be when they officially went from semi-professional to professional, but I personally would disagree with that assessment. Then in 1945 they became the Royals and joined the NBL, and in 1948 made the switch to the BAA like the Lakers and Zollners (Pistons) did. So the answer's either 1928, 1935, 1936, or 1943. I'd personally say 1935.

[Doctor MJ]

That's really interesting because I certainly thought the marketing thing came from league office hiring a marketing or branding executive or consultant from business world. And amazing that a small city like Troy had a pro basketball team.

I'm sure there were consultants involved in how exactly that ultimately ended up being ramped up once the league had say over television coverage to some extent, but yeah it's well-rooted within the grassroots of the sport.

Small-market and mid-market teams were par for the course until the late 1950s. Anderson IN, Waterloo IA, Moline IL, and Sheboygan WI all had teams within the actual NBA at the start. Pre-NBA, some of the best players and teams at various times represented places like Millville NJ, South Framingham MA, East Liverpool OH, McKeesport PA, Johnstown PA, Pittston PA, and Oshkosh WI.

To chime in with a bit more storytelling (and please correct me where I'm possibly mistaken):

It helps to see basketball as something "bubbling up" from local enthusiasm, first taking hold on the East Coast, then in the Midwest, and then spreading from those and other epicenters.

So when the "bubbles" are small, what you're talking about are local rivalries that gradually get bigger. Intro-town, town vs town, etc. As there's demand to watch better and better players, the bubbles merge, and sometimes this means that a team that's attached to a small town can keep handing around against teams that claim larger markets as home. Especially when the larger markets remain divided between multiple teams.

It's also worth noting how barnstorming can help teams that represent small markets survive. Back in their NBL heyday, the Rochester Royals played considerably more barnstorming games than NBL games, and that allowed them to have a revenue stream that wasn't tied to the wallets of Rochesterians. The BAA's financial might compelled Rochester to leave the NBL for the BAA, but (if memory serves), that meant giving up barnstorming.

So, the Royals probably did what they needed to to survive the 1940s, but in doing so made it a given that they would have to move to a larger city to keep up with the NBA's basketball Joneses. And so they moved to Cincinnati, to Kansas City, and now to Sacramento...which they've nearly left already.

[JElias]

In a follow up, how fragile was the league in terms of ownership back then? I know some of these teams moved once or more. Now its a big deal when a pro team moves cities, but how was that treated back then?

Very. It was incredibly rare before the NBA for a team to last longer than a decade, I would hazard a guess that the average was around 3-4 years. The number of NBA teams in 1949-50 that had been in operation in 1940 was just three of 17, and only one of those three had been fully professional for that length of time. One of them was owned by a multi-millionaire and the other two were supported by the community rather than by a singular owner. That was a big advancement of the NBL, these community-organized teams, because singular owners could just drop a franchise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The NBA did a very good job at having a high enough bar for entry to discourage those sorts of owners though, particularly when Podoloff put in place the standards with which he tried to force out the smallest-market ex-NBL teams in 1950. The cities that lost relocated teams they'd had more than a couple years were just as upset as teams that lose them today, but the relocations in the 1950s weren't often an ownership decision, rather heavily encouraged by the league office in order to make it a large-market sport.

[Doctor MJ]

I'm curious about how the sport developed in a social sense.

Like, what was the profile of the first players, where were the first courts.. I haven't done any research or anything, but I have to assume that it was all mostly upper class given the cost of building a court .. when did public courts start to appear, how/why did schools start incorporating basketball?

I'm from south America, futbol is king here while basketball weve only seen public courts in the last 25 years or so, many schools don't even include it in their phys Ed because they don't have the infrastructure, so it remains a mostly upper class niche sport

I'll try to chime in here:

They key organization to understand here is the Young Men's Christian Association, better known as the YMCA, which was founded in England in 1844, and spread from there.

On the most basic level, the game of basketball was invented in 1891 at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., and it was spread from there.

More broadly, the YMCA was a driving force of the Masculine Christianity movement, which believed physical fitness and discipline were virtues that needed to be actively cultivated among young men, and was looking to develop games that could be played inside a gymnasium (or similar structure), particularly during the winter. Note that they develop volleyball at about the same time, which itself has been a huge hit.

Then beyond the gym, what you first start getting are people just putting up baskets outside, which then beget outdoor courts which are compact - both size and rectangular shape - to fit easily as you're developing city block...and think young men need to have something to physically engage with handy or they'll cause trouble. Here's a fun article about the history of New York City's basketball courts.

[JElias]

Hello people of RealGM! My name is Josh Elias and I am a sports historian specializing in integration-era and pre-integration-era professional basketball. My book, The Birth of the Modern NBA: Pro Basketball in the Year of the Merger, 1949–50, is slated for publication late this spring and can be pre-ordered right now through the previous link or on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Target.

My work involves formal research into many complex issues both directly and indirectly pertinent to the NBA, its three historic rival leagues, and its many predecessor leagues, and I have been involved in projects centering around archiving, analysis, writing, data, the study of historical trends within the sport, player and team performances, and more.

The Birth of the Modern NBA focuses on both the 1949-50 NBA season and how we arrived at a point in which it was possible for it to play out as it did and lead to the sport's evolution in the way that it did. Significant focuses beyond a play-by-play of the season itself include the BAA-NBL merger, the season's status as the last one before professional basketball's permanent integration, and how the sport navigated WWII, with this being the last season before the U.S. joined the Korean War. As well as, of course, the individual stories of the teams and many key players, coaches, and executives.

Other major projects currently on my docket include research for officially unofficial (Helms-style, for those who know NCAA history) retrospective MVP-equivalent and Champion-equivalent awards for each season prior to the NBA's existence, a series of biographies on pre-NBA players, and a book on the 1950-51 NBA and NPBL seasons which I expect to release in 2026.

I'm here to share my insights and answer any questions you might have about basketball's history, or about basketball in general from the perspective of a basketball historian. My professional experience, as regards what I can speak to as an expert, spans from 1896 until 1961, but I have a well-rounded understanding of later history as well and am happy to answer those questions too, just not to a level of which my perspective is uniquely important as an expert or authority.

Awesome! Love the replies I see from you so far, and I look forward to reading your book.

My immediate thing I want to say is: I hope you check out our almost-done Top 100 career project over on the Player Comparisons board. It's an imperfect thing, but we're definitely interested in the era you speak to even if it does get less love than later eras.

My immediate question for you is an extremely general one:

How did you go about gaining the knowledge the knowledge you gained to be able to write this book?

That might be too vague for you to sink your teeth into in a reasonable amount of time, so let me give something more specific:

Where/how did you find your sources?
As you study your sources, what's your process for using them as effectively as you can?

Thank you! As there are very limited books that cover more than very specific aspects of the sport from the eras I study, primary sources are my go-to 99% of the time. Newspaper archives are the biggest aspect of my sourcing by far, and go far more in-depth for far farther back than you'd probably expect.

[zeebneeb]

Thank you for the in-depth reply to my questions, especially taking the time to answer both separately.

The history of the Kings, and Pistons have always been of great interest to me, as they are the two oldest teams still playing.

Thanks again!

[JElias]

Thank you! I'll make sure to post to the player comparisons at some point too, thank you for the recommendation.

I'll put them in three categories:

Two-way stars whose impact was far bigger than their box score: Jim Pollard, Paul Seymour, Tom Gola, Nathaniel Clifton, Mel Hutchins. With Pollard it's especially weird because he should be remember as an all-time great but just seems to get lost in the pack of Mikan's supporting cast. The Lakers' GM at the time actually said he believed Pollard was the better player between the two... that's going a decent bit too far though. Seymour was the generation's top Cousy defender and most versatile perimeter defender in general, while always locking in to play larger roles in the postseason and developing toward a relatively short peak as the second-best guard in the league. Particularly a shame with Clifton, because it feels like people go out of their way a bit to ignore how good and valuable he actually was in order to make a point about the integration era limiting his impact. His impact really wasn't limited as much as redirected in a way that makes it less obvious statistically.

Non-Cousy point guards: Bob Davies, Slater Martin, Dick McGuire, Andy Phillip. Although I'm not entirely sure if Davies isn't more just forgotten than underrated in the same way as the others. But as a role in general, even very knowledgeable people tend not to understand just how important the point guards of the day were for dictating pace of play and conducting the entire offense.

Neil Johnston: Neil Johnston. He's the opposite of much of the first category, where people quickly dismiss his career as empty stats, or as a dinosaur who was irrelevant as soon as Russell came around. His stats were definitely somewhat inflated, and he definitely had some underwhelming playoff performances including in his one Finals appearance, but he was genuinely in competition with Cousy for best player in the league for a while there, and his fall-off had nothing to do with Russellian centers emerging and everything to do with an ultimately career-ending injury.

Going to jump in here and put some more questions forward along with my current thinking on the matter.

I think Jim Pollard is a canary-in-the-coal-mind case of our modern box score expectations not giving us a good look at what was actually going on in games of the deep past. Everything I've read about Pollard suggests that if he were the offensive focus of the Lakers, he'd have put up big numbers on big efficiency (relative to his time), but in the Mikan-dominated offense, he really didn't, and yet still was held in the highest regard for what he was doing for the Lakers. Sometimes contemporary observers are wrong, but they were also, definitionally seeing important things we miss looking back from the future. I'm inclined to think they weren't wrong about Pollard.

Thoughts on any of that?

Re: Gola. I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on what you see here. Big-time college star who comes to the pros and takes on lower scoring primacy roles that rely more on his all-aroundness to fill in the gaps. Seems to have an absolutely massive impact when he first joins the Warriors, but fades from there.

Sweetwater! Glad you discuss him. I see him as a guy whose impact in the NBA mostly came on defense, but despite the uninspiring offensive numbers, I really think he could have thrived as the playmaking pivot at the heart of a scheme. I'm not sure I'd say that was impact re-directed - because I wonder if he could have done it all at the same time - but I could see how that may have been the case, if you're seeing that as shifting focus.

Re: Johnston undone by injury not Russell. I'm curious if you have thoughts as to how the false Russell narrative began, because people really do talk about this as a first-hand live-game observation. Were they overreacting to what they saw in the moment and falsely attributing it explanatory power? Were they taking "poetic license" trying to craft a Casey-at-the-Bat narrative?

I do think that's largely the case regarding Pollard, yes (my only quibble is I don't think there's a world in which he would have been exceptionally efficient). While Mikan was undoubtedly the most impactful player the game had seen, he was the sort of star where his best teammates had to alter their games significantly to work well alongside his. That was the case with Martin and Mikkelsen too (and the reason Paul Walther was gone almost immediately), but Pollard is the poster boy for that, and I imagine he would have been a vastly different player in his prime had Mikan not ended up in Minneapolis. Beyond that, the game was at one of its more significant periods of change, particularly regarding pace and height, and Pollard had to learn how to play on the wing in his late 20s. Those first four games as a Laker, when Mikan was still on the Gears? Pollard was Minneapolis' starting center. And then Mikan shows up and he has to move to a face-up PF style, and then Mikkelsen shows up and he's out on the wing all of a sudden. This is a guy whose most natural playstyle, from what we saw of him with the Dons and Bittners in the AAU and in the limited amount of time in his first three years as a Laker that Mikan wasn't on the floor, was pretty similar to Dave Cowens, and here he is having to play a role that more befits Greg Ballard.

Gola is one of those players who is especially hard to contextualize because he's not only one of those players who maximizes their impact on every aspect of the game to the detriment of their box score stats and especially their point totals (a la Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, Bobby Jones, peak Rodney McCray), but happens to not have particularly played like any of them. In short, he was the defining perimeter defender of the late 1950s (and switchable to the forward positions at that), the best-rebounding guard prior to the merger with the ABA, an incredible passer (not just regarding assists but also precipitating ball movement), a hard worker, and the quintessential once-in-a-generation glue guy team player who knows how to get the best out of every teammate.

With Sweets' "re-directing," I meant mostly in the sense of how he never got a chance in the NBA to be treated as a star pivot by his team. That's mostly just because Lapchick ran a college-style system that didn't allow anyone those sorts of opportunities, but Clifton actually came into the league as a pretty awful defender in most ways other than physical tools. He had to work exceptionally hard his first two years to go from a significant net-negative on that side of the floor to one of the very best in the league. Before integration, he had been a heavily-offensive-oriented center, and we never saw, aside from in rare late-game situations, him allowed that sort of freedom in the NBA. That being said, it was almost certainly the right decision even though Clifton himself seemed a little unhappy about it, he had far more potential as a defender than he did as a pivot in either the Mikan tradition or the Risen tradition of early '50s centers.

I think the Johnston narrative started as one regarding white centers of the previous era in general, and became particularly popular as a combination of his incredibly high counting stats directly previous, his sudden downturn, and that one particular game in which Russell outrebounded Johnston 34-5.

[maradro]

Thanks JElias and Doctor MJ for your replies!

Amazed to see some of those old gym photos, what a trip

I was going to guess that clubs like the YMCA had some big influence, but in the modern US it seems like those places no longer exist so it's harder to fathom them having such a big influence- I haven't been living in the us for a couple decades so this is a very external opinion and might be entirely wrong.. It's interesting that indoor, safer competition were explicit positives for basketball.

Here the oldest court I know of, my dad went to high school in Argentina in the 1940s, they put up rims in their gym in his last years of school, he told me their games would usually finish 4-2 with maybe 5 shot attempts per team

[MrGoat]

I have a question. How prominent was recruiting professional players out of college in the pre NBA days, say the 40s and earlier. I do know that some of Mikan's contributions to the game occurred in his college days. I suppose I'm asking how college basketball affected the development of pro basketball in the really early days