Basketball: The Pros

BASKETBALL: THE PROS

Professional Basketball Expansion

The National Basketball Association (NBA) began the decade with eight teams. By the end of the decade the league had expanded to seventeen teams, had a fat television contract, and had seen attendance jump from under two million in 1965 to over five million. Throughout much of the 1950s professional basketball was being played in the shadow of the college game and was searching for an identity; toward the end of that decade the sport saw its future in Bill Russell—the big man with grace and speed. But professional basketball did not catch up with Russell until the 1960s, when men emerged who along with Russell defined the modern game. Most notable among the new breed of athletes was Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt the Stilt, as he was called, combined imposing size, intelligence, and legendary strength in challenging Russell for basketball supremacy. The rivalry between the two superstars gave professional basketball much-needed drama. Despite the influx of great basketball talent from the college ranks into the pros during the 1960s, there remained only one true super team, the Boston Celtics.

The Celtics

No professional sports team—neither the 1950s Yankees nor the 1960s Green Bay Packers—dominated its sport in the same way the Celtics ruled basketball during the decade. Led by their cigar-smoking coach Red Auerbach, the Celtics won ten of eleven NBA championships between 1959 and 1969, only four of them requiring the maximum seven games. The combination of the masterful guard Bob Cousy and the best center to that time, Bill Russell, with such supporting players as Bill Sharman, John Havlicek, Tommy Heinsohn, K. C. Jones, and Sam Jones was all but un-beatable. Only the Philadelphia 76ers, led by Chamberlain, were able to challenge the Celtics' supremacy by winning the title in 1967, the year Auerbach turned over coaching duties to Bill Russell, who continued to play for another year. The thirty-two-year-old Russell was the first black ever to coach a professional major league sports team.

The ABA

In 1962 the American Basketball League (ABL) was created to take the professional game into cities without hope of an NBA franchise. The ABL instituted the three-point shot, giving an extra point for shots made beyond twenty-five feet from the goal, but the incentive to shooters was insufficient to attract the audience the league needed to survive, and the ABL died in December 1963. In 1967 another attempt was made to organize an alternative league. The American Basketball Association (ABA) was better funded and better organized than the ABL. By the end of the decade the ABA was able to attract some star prospects from the college draft, providing it the credibility among fans it needed to survive. Even so, the ABA was considered second-rank basketball. Commissioner George Mikan instituted a red, white, and blue ball for league play. Critics suggested that the ABA ball looked as if it had bounced off the nose of a seal.

Black Man's Game

Outside of Boston basketball was by the middle of the decade considered a black man's game, and in an era of racial strife, that perception inhibited the marketability of the game. Nonetheless, the play was so good, the rivalries so intense, and the promotion so expert that the NBA managed to overcome spectators' racism.