Shot clock ushered in golden era for NBA

Point guard Bob Cousy proved to be the perfect ringleader for the Celtics' high-powered attack in the new shot-clock era. Hy Peskin/SI

By Jack McCallum

As momentous occasions go, this one wasn't very sexy. A room in a New York City Hotel, no doubt smoke-filled, occupied by aging, out-of-shape males. A discussion about a clock. A little basic math.

But it was a meeting that saved the NBA.

Despite the presence of stars such as George Mikan and Bob Cousy, pro hoops was pretty much a minor-league sport through the early '50s. It had only itself to blame. The basic strategy at the time was to get a lead, sit on the ball for minutes at a time, sometimes for almost an entire quarter. With no limit on how long a team could play freezeout, the Fort Wayne Pistons and Minneapolis Lakers had snoozed their way to a 19-18 final score in a 1950 game.

So at the annual owners' meeting after a desultory 1953-'54 season, Danny Biasone, an Italian immigrant who owned the Syracuse Nationals (as well as a Syracuse bowling alley), proposed the idea of a shot clock. He even had a theory on what to put on it -- 24 seconds. Biasone had figured out that teams averaged about 60 shots per 48-minute (or 2,880-second game). He then divided 120 into 2,880 and came up with 24. "The exact number wasn't important," Biasone would say later. "My idea was to keep the game going, to speed it up."

But the exact number turned out to be one of those magic numbers, like 90 feet between the bases and the 100-yard football field. The clock made its debut on Oct. 30, 1954, with the Rochester Royals defeating the Boston Celtics 98-95, an immediate upgrade in scoring. And over the course of the season, teams averaged 93.1 points per game, an increase of 13.6 points from the previous season. The NBA has adopted myriad rule changes over the years, but it never tampered with Biasone's magic number of 24.

April 30, 1956: Auerbach Trades for Bill Russell

Red Auerbach's Boston Celtics weren't always winners. Through the first five years of the 1950s, the Celts, behind a stylish backcourt of Cousy and Bill Sharman, could score (particularly after the shot clock was instituted), but they got battered on the boards and were not able to win a championship.

Auerbach had his sights set on Russell, the lanky left-handed shot-blocker/rebounder from San Francisco, but he needed to move up in the draft to get him. He convinced Ben Kerner, owner of the St. Louis Hawks, to take "Easy" Ed Macauley, who had been a local hero at the University of St. Louis, and a promising rookie named Cliff Hagen, in exchange for the second pick.

It wasn't an entirely dumb trade for the Hawks, who got two good players. It's just that the Celtics got one immortal player and went on to dominate the league for the next decade. And as much as Russell has been hailed as the first great defensive player, the one who turned shot-blocking into a science, his acquisition was the next logical step in the evolution of the shot clock-era NBA.

His defensive rebounding and precision outlet passes triggered a Celtic fast break that revolutionized the game.

May 16, 1980: A Magical Rookie Makes the Finals (and the NBA) Relevant Again

The 1980 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers were on tape-delay; the CBS broadcast began at about 11:30 p.m.. That's how irrelevant the sport had become to the American mainstream.

The budding rivalry of two rookies, the Lakers' Magic Johnson and Boston's Larry Bird, had started to revive interest. But it took Magic's 42-point, 15-rebound, seven-assist performance in a championship-clinching Game 6 against the Philadelphia 76ers to make the public sit up and take notice.

Bird was the Rookie of the Year in 1979-'80. But Magic's seminal Finals performance, accomplished without injured center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, served as the wakeup call for the league as the curtain opened on the golden age of the '80s.

June 19, 1984: Houston and Portland Pass on Michael Jordan

It seems incomprehensible that not one but two teams would've passed on the game's greatest player, who had just finished a three-year career at North Carolina. But in the early '80s conventional league wisdom still held that a talented big man was the No. 1 ingredient for a championship team. So the Rockets went for Akeem (as he was known then) Olajuwon out of the University of Houston and the Trail Blazers took Kentucky's Sam Bowie at No. 2. Bowie was no stiff. He could score, rebound and pass, and, though the pick later came back to haunt them, the Trail Blazers were not widely mocked at the time for going with him.

The Rockets did eventually cash in on their pick when they won back-to-back titles in 1994-'95 behind The Dream. But the star-crossed Bowie was too often injured to make an impact and quietly retired after 1995, by then known only as the guy the Blazers took ahead of Jordan.

This was also the draft, incidentally, in which players like Mel Turpin, Lancaster Gordon, Leon Wood, Tim McCormick and Terence Stansbury were taken before John Stockton at 16.

April 7, 1989: FIBA Allows Pro Players to Compete in Olympics

The United States had dominated Olympic basketball throughout the 20th century, so many observers could hardly believe it when basketball's international governing body opened the door to seeming total dominance by inviting NBA superstars. But those long-range thinkers had a different idea: The whole world would see the game played at its highest level and would adopt that model as its paradigm.

So once the awe-inspiring spectacle of the first (and only) Dream Team had ended with a gold medal in 1992 in Barcelona -- opponents would often snap photos of players such as Jordan, Johnson, Bird and Charles Barkley before tipoff -- the world got around to improving its game. And these days every international competition is wide open. In 2004 the U.S. men had to settle for bronze as Argentina and Italy played for the gold. What's more, almost every team in the league has one or two impact foreign players.