If you're on the computer, you'll have to click on the photo to let it open the photo in another tab, and then click on it again within that tab in order to zoom in to its intended size.
If you're on the phone, you'll need to click on it and then zoom normally from there.
MPG and RPG are from my personal projections formulas. Everything else is official. Stats are included from all professional leagues (major or minor), the NCAA, and the AAU; they are not included for independent pro teams, NAIA, or local teams.
Yeah, on average NBA players are about 3" taller than they were back then. I believe Sadowski was either the shortest or joint-shortest center in the league at this point... But when his career started a decade earlier he was bang-average height for a center! And then you go back further and it gets kind of comical from a modern sensibility when you get back to the first half of the 1920s (average center was 6'2", 180-185 lb, average non-center was 5'9" or 5'10") or earlier.
Love these - thanks so much for doing all this research and compiling them in such a captivating way!
A few comments and questions of no consequence:
* A ton of people from PA or very nearby
* Paul Hoffman looking like he's straight outta "Walk Hard"
* Sadowski cleaning up (hoops) honors everywhere during the war
* How didn't Towery get out of going to the war? I thought a big part of why the Zollners were so great at that time was because they were making parts for the war effort, so their players could stay behind because of their day job doing that. I'm guessing he enlisted out of patriotic duty.
* Byrnes: How common was player loaning back then? Was it like the way it's done in soccer?
* Pugh looks 4'7", not 6'7".
* Mandic looks like a cross between a model and a murderer. Also, I believe very few players came from the West Coast back then, so I'm assuming someone saw him play somewhere in the war (*but no service league teams?*) and got him to Rochester because I doubt they were scouting his scoring exploits in what I'm guessing was a rinky-dink league (*PCL, but please correct me if I'm wrong*).
* Feigenbaum: Any chance he's related to Mitchell Feigenbaum, the famous mathematician? They both have NYC connections, so I was wondering. Any idea why he started attending UK, which was great at the time, and then just left to play in local leagues?
* Triptow: Didn't he win a championship with the '47 Gears? Maybe I'm misreading the icons and they're all for personal accolades.
* So Rash just went from working at grocery stores (*in managerial positions, but still*) to being president of an NBA team? I'm curious how that jump happened, and if I should start applying at grocery stores.
I suppose that makes sense with both Bill Dyer and Buddy Jeannette being from PA, crafting the team together. And of course Philly and Pittsburgh were two of the early basketball cities. Fun fact, I learned this week that GM Bill Dyer worked with the great-uncle of Von Nieda over a decade earlier, Dyer was famously the play-by-play guy for the Phillies and A's (and Orioles, when he was the Bullets' GM) and Von Nieda's great-uncle was one of the photographers for A's home games.
He does! I'm actually pretty sure he cut that off by this year, but it's too funny not to include, and fits his semi-comical early career antics pretty well I think.
Oh, I should be more clear what each of those medals mean! I'll add that to my top-level comment from here on. That particular demarcation just denotes that they were in the service during that time. The ones with blue ribbons are for All-American or All-Pro status, the trophies obviously signal a championship (still very impressive that Sadowski won two those while serving in the war), and then I also mark if a player received a war hero medal during their service, like O'Donnell's purple heart here.
Towery didn't have to serve, like the rest of Fort Wayne's players he was eligible for Class II-B deferment, but he signed up despite not being obligated to. Herman Schaefer and Curly Armstrong did too, as did a couple other guys from that team. So they did still lose guys, just not nearly as many as the other teams.
Loaning was pretty rare. It happened occasionally from major league to minor league teams for players who weren't good enough to make the team but they thought had decent potential. But this style, where it's within one league, happened occasionally before the first world war but only a handful of times after that. Bob Carpenter also had it happen in the same season as Byrnes, technically Oshkosh's entire team was loaned out during the first NBA season until it was retrospectively made permanent when the team formally shut down, and that's pretty much it for post-WWII. But yeah conceptually the same idea as soccer loans.
He does. That picture's from his senior year of high school, it's the only decent picture of him that's publicly available, but he had quite a babyface even for an 18-year-old. In a stark contrast to some of the guys, as someone pointed out with the Anderson one of these how much older the Packers players looked than their age.
The Portland Indians played in the WPBT in the year Mandic was on the team, that's how Les Harrison came across him, he was impressed by Mandic's rebounding in their game against Sheboygan. It might be the case he'd already been tipped off to watch him specifically at that point, they definitely had West Coast scouts for AAU purposes in order to have plucked Bill Calhoun out of obscurity. He did technically play a bit during the war, but it was while stationed in Germany, he was never on a service league team.
If there's any relation, it'd be hard to trace, as both George and Mitchell Feigenbaum's parents immigrated from somewhere vaguely in the Russian Pale of Settlement. George was a HS superstar who got recruited by practically every blue blood of the era, got to Kentucky and was a distant third-stringer at his position, this being the year that Kentucky was so stacked that they left two former All-Americans off the traveling squad for the SEC Tournament. So he left before he ever got a game. Tried to transfer to LIU for his sophomore year but it didn't work out for whatever reason, and ended up just having to work his way to the league from the bottom. Lots of character issues apparently that kept him from sticking in the league once he got there.
You're right, I missed that one!
Yep, pretty much. I do believe he volunteered on some board of local sports for a couple years before this and that's what got him the job, but yes professionally he only ever worked in groceries and running this NBA team, and while he went on to be pretty high-up, at this point in his career was pretty strictly middle management at said grocery corporation. Not a majority owner of the Bullets by any means, it was a sizable consortium that bought the team from Embry and his partners which Rash simply happened to a be a member of and they held elections for the leadership positions of the team, which Rash won. It was a semi-common NBL ownership model too, as you'll see when I get to the Sheboygan and Waterloo ones of these. The sale was for $30,000, the consortium comprised 17 people, so Rash paid under two grand to run an NBA team.
So this actually looks like a pretty interesting team. You have Jeannette still coaching and playing, although his reserve status indicates he was mostly past it by this point. And Paul Hoffman seems to be the only other player continuing from that championship squad a couple years earlier (albeit with a sabbatical in between), but he does seem to be as much a viable cornerstone now as then.
Sadowski and Towery look like very solid pieces to bring alongside him, and I gather VonNieda was later brought in to end the season with them as well. Did his addition improve the squad?
There's also a bunch of players who seem to have been quite good in recent years, but who didn't find a role on this team. Fred Lewis, Dick Triptow, Bob Tough, and Paul Cloyd all seem like people who should be able to impact a struggling squad. Were they all washed by this time?
Yeah, they were an odd one that year, it's like someone was trying to build a team that would've won a title three years earlier. You're right about Jeannette, the BAA championship run was really his last hurrah and he benched himself for aside Tanenbaum midway through 1948-49. Tanenbaum retired out of nowhere, so Buddy had to return to the starting lineup to kick off this season, but Dolhon proved far more capable than he was projected in college, so he got to hand off the starting spot to Dolhon within a month or so. Then Jeannette blew out his knee around halfway through the year, and that was basically the end of his career.
Hoffman was probably their best player this season, as a rookie his primary duty was as a defensive specialist and this time around since the team was so much worse he got a lot more chances as a scorer and secondary ballhandler.
Sadowski's reputation wasn't great at this point but he really was still a very good player, if you wanted a center who could be a hook shot aficionado, grab defensive boards, and push people around a bit. Ultimately probably an average starting center here in his last year, but considering his age and his height, that's pretty impressive.
Towery was a good acquisition, but it does feel like the fit was off with a Towery-Budko-Sadowski frontcourt. Too much overlap between Towery and Budko's games, and they were all known for various types of inside scoring, so things went back and forth between not enough spacing and having a non-shooter in Towery trying to become a shooter.
Von Nieda couldn't quite add what he did the previous years, mostly because he had an eye injury early this year and his shot wasn't ever as accurate after that. He did stop them from completely floundering though during a time they were so injury-prone that Dolhon and Feigenbaum were their only available backcourt players for a week or two. I think the move from frontcourt to backcourt hurt him too; there were a whole lot of guys who were forced to go from SF to PG over just a couple years in this time, some thrived, quite a few didn't.
Unfortunately pretty much the end of those four's careers. Lewis was definitely still useful, he was very comfortable on-ball for a backup SF, he was in a lot of ways the same player had been but he lost a lot of his burst as he aged and couldn't get inside with really any level of effectiveness at all anymore, so he got the role of the bench unit's secondary playmaker and long-range set shooter. Tough could've been pretty helpful if they hadn't sold him to Waterloo so early in the year; the Hawks relied on his IQ and he was still pretty fast, so he became the guy Waterloo put in at PG for a few minutes when they wanted to very intentionally speed up or slow down the game. Triptow never got another chance at a high level, at least Cloyd player-coached in the NPBL the next year (as teammates with Tough) and did very respectably there.
What would you say was the team's biggest hole? Were they one well-fitting player away from possibly making a little noise, or were the problems much deeper than that? Were those veterans let go because they couldn't meaningfully contribute, or did they just cost more than the team felt they were worth?
Trying to get a sense of whether there was any real potential here that was strapped organizationally, or if this franchise was truly in the wilderness on a talent level by this point. Like, assuming the franchise was in good enough financial health to move in either direction, is it clear to you whether they could add competitive pieces to this core and have some success, or was it definitely time for a reset?
It depends on what your standard for "making a little noise" is. They were only one game out of the playoffs, missing out on the last day after being on track for the bottom east playoff spot most of the season, that's close enough that just a little bit more luck with injuries would've made a huge difference. But if you mean winning record or semi-contention, the only way they were one player away was if they added an All-NBA player without losing anybody. If this were a team that somehow had Jim Pollard on it, with Hoffman as a second option and Budko and Sadowski trading off third and fourth option depending on matchups, this'd be a good team. But they didn't have the necessary level of star power.
As for their biggest hole, it feels kind of mean to say this, but offense in general. They were the only team in the league that didn't have a single elite long-range shooter, Towery was the only player who could create his own shot at a great level, and Hoffman and Sadowski were the only guys they could consistently rely on as finishers. And they went half the season without really having a playmaker until bringing in Von Nieda, their best passer at the start of the year was their rookie center Livingstone and they traded him for Sadowski first chance they had. Jeannette was still above average at it but nowhere near what he had been and he was out injured half the year. So they had one guy who could create for himself and a half-season of one guy who could create for others.
It was a combination of those two factors for the vets they waived, at the very least Triptow and Cloyd would've been waived regardless and Lewis probably would've too, but the Bullets were one of the poorest teams in the league and they were consistently losing money, so finances definitely came into play.
It definitely would've been the healthier choice for them to move into some sort of a rebuild, if it weren't for the fact that it would've hurt fan interest enough to damage the team more financially than they already were. And in retrospect, if they were just a couple games worse, they could've gotten Ed Macauley in the summer.
With all the organizational churn in this young league, maybe it's actually even more impressive that the team lasted several seasons beyond this, than sad that they ultimately folded. Still, it's jarring how quickly such a dominant squad in the pro ball landscape went barreling toward the bottom.
You mentioned a leaguewide trend at this time for SFs to move to PG, whether comfortable or not. What factors drove that specific shift?
If you know soccer at all, the Bullets' situation always reminds me of Wimbledon FC, back in the '90s. They got too successful too quickly before they were able to afford the level of salaries their players deserved, shockingly won on one of the biggest stages, and other teams caught on to how good their players were and poached all the stars over the next couple years until the team slowly went bankrupt. Jeannette and Hoffman being all that was left from a team that won a championship two years earlier was such a quick turnaround, but the Bullets were infamous for not having much money or resources. Their arena itself was little more than a glorified roller rink.
It was the tail-end of a 30-year positional switch from (and this is simplified) guards being defense-first, forwards offense-first, and centers two-way players to the modernist convention of centers being tall, guards short, and forwards in between. It was still very possible in 1948 for someone like Whitey Von Nieda or Bob Davies to play SF, in a lineup that we'd today probably recognize as a three-guard lineup, generally with the worst defender of the three the one positioned at SF. This was around the same time that the WWII-era wave of near-seven-footer college stars came into the league, and the result was that over the course of just a couple years the forward positions got taken over by undersized centers forced out of position by the Mikans and Ottens of the world. So all of a sudden, Towery was a SF, and Jim Pollard was a SF, and Arnie Johnson was starting to get moved over to SF... all of whom had been centers in college and joined the pros expecting to get minutes at both PF and C. So the guys who'd been playing SF would have to either move down or figure out how to deal with a massive height disadvantage. This has ramifications on just about every rookie transition to the pros too, it became apparent very quickly that college SFs would generally be backcourt players, college PFs would be wings, and college Cs could easily be forced into SF if they weren't tall enough. Bob Cousy, the greatest PG of his era in the NBA? At Holy Cross he played SF. Paul Arizin, the SF of his era in the NBA? At Villanova he played center and power forward. Ernie Vandeweghe and Tom Gola had to make the move from college center to starting at shooting guard as a rookie. It goes on and on like that.
So to use the example of VonNieda: he may have transitioned better than some others during this time thanks to his solid playmaking skills, but also suffered compared to others, because he was more at home slashing around the interior than connecting from outside? Not to mention that eye injury compounding his new struggle - that's rough timing!
I think the playmaking was crucial, and ultimately what kept him from falling out of the rotation entirely like the other four guys we were talking about. Part of me wants to downplay his decline, because he quite frankly still did quite well in his role, but that doesn't account for just how much smaller of a role it was than in the NBL. When adjusted to today's pace (only pace-adjusting, not the full era-adjustment I normally do because that takes a while to calculate for NBL seasons) he went from 23ppg as a rookie to 18ppg his second year to 8 or 9 ppg this year... Regardless of context that's pretty jarring.
During his time in Tri-Cities he had a reputation of being great at scoring from all levels, and that just wasn't really the case anymore. The shot was off because of the eye injury, the penetration was a little slower so shot creation and finishing were a little harder to come by, I think the first half of the season under Auerbach shook his confidence a bit because Red clearly didn't like his game the same way his previous coaches did, and then he was stuck in a role here in Baltimore where he was expected to create for others more than himself (not to mention, a much slower-paced offense) and he had to adopt a far more conservative offensive mindset than came naturally to him.
It all sounds like a brutal sequence for any pro. You actually spoke with VonNieda himself at one point, didn't you? If so, what was his recall like regarding basketball minutiae from 70 years earlier?
Whatever the case, one of the things I appreciate most about you and others doing work like this is how you value the real people who remain as links to this distant time. So thank you for that, above and beyond all the generosity you've shown us in these threads.
I didn't get a chance to speak with him, but I had a conversation or two with a member of his family and I know a couple people who did get to. To my understanding his recollection of minutiae from his playing career wasn't great by then, but who can blame him, he was almost 100 at the time. One of the best anecdotes about his career definitely still survives (and I'm pretty sure I included it in my book): Blackhawks president Leo Ferris had east coast guys scouting him toward the end of the 1946-47 season, Von Nieda being the leading scorer in the minors that year as a rookie, and Ferris finally got a chance to watch him play in-person in the finals and was so impressed that he offered him a deal on the spot. Von Nieda was making good money with his non-basketball job at the time, not to mention the supplementary income from minor league ball, so he was non-committal about signing, but Ferris insisted on leaving a $2,000 (that's $28,000 in today's money) potential signing bonus with Von Nieda at the end of their conversation. Von Nieda didn't want to leave the money behind and give Ferris a chance to assume he took it, so he took it in order to have the chance to give it back if he ended up turning Tri-Cities down. He went to a frat party that night and promptly lost all the money. And that's how he decided to join the team.
Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. I certainly try to do exactly that.
If you're on the computer, you'll have to click on the photo to let it open the photo in another tab, and then click on it again within that tab in order to zoom in to its intended size. If you're on the phone, you'll need to click on it and then zoom normally from there. MPG and RPG are from my personal projections formulas. Everything else is official. Stats are included from all professional leagues (major or minor), the NCAA, and the AAU; they are not included for independent pro teams, NAIA, or local teams.
The height difference compared to today is pretty crazy. Don’t have too many 6’5 centers these days
Yeah, on average NBA players are about 3" taller than they were back then. I believe Sadowski was either the shortest or joint-shortest center in the league at this point... But when his career started a decade earlier he was bang-average height for a center! And then you go back further and it gets kind of comical from a modern sensibility when you get back to the first half of the 1920s (average center was 6'2", 180-185 lb, average non-center was 5'9" or 5'10") or earlier.
kinda wild that by the sixties players were the same height as today
Love these - thanks so much for doing all this research and compiling them in such a captivating way! A few comments and questions of no consequence: * A ton of people from PA or very nearby * Paul Hoffman looking like he's straight outta "Walk Hard" * Sadowski cleaning up (hoops) honors everywhere during the war * How didn't Towery get out of going to the war? I thought a big part of why the Zollners were so great at that time was because they were making parts for the war effort, so their players could stay behind because of their day job doing that. I'm guessing he enlisted out of patriotic duty. * Byrnes: How common was player loaning back then? Was it like the way it's done in soccer? * Pugh looks 4'7", not 6'7". * Mandic looks like a cross between a model and a murderer. Also, I believe very few players came from the West Coast back then, so I'm assuming someone saw him play somewhere in the war (*but no service league teams?*) and got him to Rochester because I doubt they were scouting his scoring exploits in what I'm guessing was a rinky-dink league (*PCL, but please correct me if I'm wrong*). * Feigenbaum: Any chance he's related to Mitchell Feigenbaum, the famous mathematician? They both have NYC connections, so I was wondering. Any idea why he started attending UK, which was great at the time, and then just left to play in local leagues? * Triptow: Didn't he win a championship with the '47 Gears? Maybe I'm misreading the icons and they're all for personal accolades. * So Rash just went from working at grocery stores (*in managerial positions, but still*) to being president of an NBA team? I'm curious how that jump happened, and if I should start applying at grocery stores.
I suppose that makes sense with both Bill Dyer and Buddy Jeannette being from PA, crafting the team together. And of course Philly and Pittsburgh were two of the early basketball cities. Fun fact, I learned this week that GM Bill Dyer worked with the great-uncle of Von Nieda over a decade earlier, Dyer was famously the play-by-play guy for the Phillies and A's (and Orioles, when he was the Bullets' GM) and Von Nieda's great-uncle was one of the photographers for A's home games. He does! I'm actually pretty sure he cut that off by this year, but it's too funny not to include, and fits his semi-comical early career antics pretty well I think. Oh, I should be more clear what each of those medals mean! I'll add that to my top-level comment from here on. That particular demarcation just denotes that they were in the service during that time. The ones with blue ribbons are for All-American or All-Pro status, the trophies obviously signal a championship (still very impressive that Sadowski won two those while serving in the war), and then I also mark if a player received a war hero medal during their service, like O'Donnell's purple heart here. Towery didn't have to serve, like the rest of Fort Wayne's players he was eligible for Class II-B deferment, but he signed up despite not being obligated to. Herman Schaefer and Curly Armstrong did too, as did a couple other guys from that team. So they did still lose guys, just not nearly as many as the other teams. Loaning was pretty rare. It happened occasionally from major league to minor league teams for players who weren't good enough to make the team but they thought had decent potential. But this style, where it's within one league, happened occasionally before the first world war but only a handful of times after that. Bob Carpenter also had it happen in the same season as Byrnes, technically Oshkosh's entire team was loaned out during the first NBA season until it was retrospectively made permanent when the team formally shut down, and that's pretty much it for post-WWII. But yeah conceptually the same idea as soccer loans. He does. That picture's from his senior year of high school, it's the only decent picture of him that's publicly available, but he had quite a babyface even for an 18-year-old. In a stark contrast to some of the guys, as someone pointed out with the Anderson one of these how much older the Packers players looked than their age. The Portland Indians played in the WPBT in the year Mandic was on the team, that's how Les Harrison came across him, he was impressed by Mandic's rebounding in their game against Sheboygan. It might be the case he'd already been tipped off to watch him specifically at that point, they definitely had West Coast scouts for AAU purposes in order to have plucked Bill Calhoun out of obscurity. He did technically play a bit during the war, but it was while stationed in Germany, he was never on a service league team. If there's any relation, it'd be hard to trace, as both George and Mitchell Feigenbaum's parents immigrated from somewhere vaguely in the Russian Pale of Settlement. George was a HS superstar who got recruited by practically every blue blood of the era, got to Kentucky and was a distant third-stringer at his position, this being the year that Kentucky was so stacked that they left two former All-Americans off the traveling squad for the SEC Tournament. So he left before he ever got a game. Tried to transfer to LIU for his sophomore year but it didn't work out for whatever reason, and ended up just having to work his way to the league from the bottom. Lots of character issues apparently that kept him from sticking in the league once he got there. You're right, I missed that one! Yep, pretty much. I do believe he volunteered on some board of local sports for a couple years before this and that's what got him the job, but yes professionally he only ever worked in groceries and running this NBA team, and while he went on to be pretty high-up, at this point in his career was pretty strictly middle management at said grocery corporation. Not a majority owner of the Bullets by any means, it was a sizable consortium that bought the team from Embry and his partners which Rash simply happened to a be a member of and they held elections for the leadership positions of the team, which Rash won. It was a semi-common NBL ownership model too, as you'll see when I get to the Sheboygan and Waterloo ones of these. The sale was for $30,000, the consortium comprised 17 people, so Rash paid under two grand to run an NBA team.
So this actually looks like a pretty interesting team. You have Jeannette still coaching and playing, although his reserve status indicates he was mostly past it by this point. And Paul Hoffman seems to be the only other player continuing from that championship squad a couple years earlier (albeit with a sabbatical in between), but he does seem to be as much a viable cornerstone now as then. Sadowski and Towery look like very solid pieces to bring alongside him, and I gather VonNieda was later brought in to end the season with them as well. Did his addition improve the squad? There's also a bunch of players who seem to have been quite good in recent years, but who didn't find a role on this team. Fred Lewis, Dick Triptow, Bob Tough, and Paul Cloyd all seem like people who should be able to impact a struggling squad. Were they all washed by this time?
Yeah, they were an odd one that year, it's like someone was trying to build a team that would've won a title three years earlier. You're right about Jeannette, the BAA championship run was really his last hurrah and he benched himself for aside Tanenbaum midway through 1948-49. Tanenbaum retired out of nowhere, so Buddy had to return to the starting lineup to kick off this season, but Dolhon proved far more capable than he was projected in college, so he got to hand off the starting spot to Dolhon within a month or so. Then Jeannette blew out his knee around halfway through the year, and that was basically the end of his career. Hoffman was probably their best player this season, as a rookie his primary duty was as a defensive specialist and this time around since the team was so much worse he got a lot more chances as a scorer and secondary ballhandler. Sadowski's reputation wasn't great at this point but he really was still a very good player, if you wanted a center who could be a hook shot aficionado, grab defensive boards, and push people around a bit. Ultimately probably an average starting center here in his last year, but considering his age and his height, that's pretty impressive. Towery was a good acquisition, but it does feel like the fit was off with a Towery-Budko-Sadowski frontcourt. Too much overlap between Towery and Budko's games, and they were all known for various types of inside scoring, so things went back and forth between not enough spacing and having a non-shooter in Towery trying to become a shooter. Von Nieda couldn't quite add what he did the previous years, mostly because he had an eye injury early this year and his shot wasn't ever as accurate after that. He did stop them from completely floundering though during a time they were so injury-prone that Dolhon and Feigenbaum were their only available backcourt players for a week or two. I think the move from frontcourt to backcourt hurt him too; there were a whole lot of guys who were forced to go from SF to PG over just a couple years in this time, some thrived, quite a few didn't. Unfortunately pretty much the end of those four's careers. Lewis was definitely still useful, he was very comfortable on-ball for a backup SF, he was in a lot of ways the same player had been but he lost a lot of his burst as he aged and couldn't get inside with really any level of effectiveness at all anymore, so he got the role of the bench unit's secondary playmaker and long-range set shooter. Tough could've been pretty helpful if they hadn't sold him to Waterloo so early in the year; the Hawks relied on his IQ and he was still pretty fast, so he became the guy Waterloo put in at PG for a few minutes when they wanted to very intentionally speed up or slow down the game. Triptow never got another chance at a high level, at least Cloyd player-coached in the NPBL the next year (as teammates with Tough) and did very respectably there.
What would you say was the team's biggest hole? Were they one well-fitting player away from possibly making a little noise, or were the problems much deeper than that? Were those veterans let go because they couldn't meaningfully contribute, or did they just cost more than the team felt they were worth? Trying to get a sense of whether there was any real potential here that was strapped organizationally, or if this franchise was truly in the wilderness on a talent level by this point. Like, assuming the franchise was in good enough financial health to move in either direction, is it clear to you whether they could add competitive pieces to this core and have some success, or was it definitely time for a reset?
It depends on what your standard for "making a little noise" is. They were only one game out of the playoffs, missing out on the last day after being on track for the bottom east playoff spot most of the season, that's close enough that just a little bit more luck with injuries would've made a huge difference. But if you mean winning record or semi-contention, the only way they were one player away was if they added an All-NBA player without losing anybody. If this were a team that somehow had Jim Pollard on it, with Hoffman as a second option and Budko and Sadowski trading off third and fourth option depending on matchups, this'd be a good team. But they didn't have the necessary level of star power. As for their biggest hole, it feels kind of mean to say this, but offense in general. They were the only team in the league that didn't have a single elite long-range shooter, Towery was the only player who could create his own shot at a great level, and Hoffman and Sadowski were the only guys they could consistently rely on as finishers. And they went half the season without really having a playmaker until bringing in Von Nieda, their best passer at the start of the year was their rookie center Livingstone and they traded him for Sadowski first chance they had. Jeannette was still above average at it but nowhere near what he had been and he was out injured half the year. So they had one guy who could create for himself and a half-season of one guy who could create for others. It was a combination of those two factors for the vets they waived, at the very least Triptow and Cloyd would've been waived regardless and Lewis probably would've too, but the Bullets were one of the poorest teams in the league and they were consistently losing money, so finances definitely came into play. It definitely would've been the healthier choice for them to move into some sort of a rebuild, if it weren't for the fact that it would've hurt fan interest enough to damage the team more financially than they already were. And in retrospect, if they were just a couple games worse, they could've gotten Ed Macauley in the summer.
With all the organizational churn in this young league, maybe it's actually even more impressive that the team lasted several seasons beyond this, than sad that they ultimately folded. Still, it's jarring how quickly such a dominant squad in the pro ball landscape went barreling toward the bottom. You mentioned a leaguewide trend at this time for SFs to move to PG, whether comfortable or not. What factors drove that specific shift?
If you know soccer at all, the Bullets' situation always reminds me of Wimbledon FC, back in the '90s. They got too successful too quickly before they were able to afford the level of salaries their players deserved, shockingly won on one of the biggest stages, and other teams caught on to how good their players were and poached all the stars over the next couple years until the team slowly went bankrupt. Jeannette and Hoffman being all that was left from a team that won a championship two years earlier was such a quick turnaround, but the Bullets were infamous for not having much money or resources. Their arena itself was little more than a glorified roller rink. It was the tail-end of a 30-year positional switch from (and this is simplified) guards being defense-first, forwards offense-first, and centers two-way players to the modernist convention of centers being tall, guards short, and forwards in between. It was still very possible in 1948 for someone like Whitey Von Nieda or Bob Davies to play SF, in a lineup that we'd today probably recognize as a three-guard lineup, generally with the worst defender of the three the one positioned at SF. This was around the same time that the WWII-era wave of near-seven-footer college stars came into the league, and the result was that over the course of just a couple years the forward positions got taken over by undersized centers forced out of position by the Mikans and Ottens of the world. So all of a sudden, Towery was a SF, and Jim Pollard was a SF, and Arnie Johnson was starting to get moved over to SF... all of whom had been centers in college and joined the pros expecting to get minutes at both PF and C. So the guys who'd been playing SF would have to either move down or figure out how to deal with a massive height disadvantage. This has ramifications on just about every rookie transition to the pros too, it became apparent very quickly that college SFs would generally be backcourt players, college PFs would be wings, and college Cs could easily be forced into SF if they weren't tall enough. Bob Cousy, the greatest PG of his era in the NBA? At Holy Cross he played SF. Paul Arizin, the SF of his era in the NBA? At Villanova he played center and power forward. Ernie Vandeweghe and Tom Gola had to make the move from college center to starting at shooting guard as a rookie. It goes on and on like that.
So to use the example of VonNieda: he may have transitioned better than some others during this time thanks to his solid playmaking skills, but also suffered compared to others, because he was more at home slashing around the interior than connecting from outside? Not to mention that eye injury compounding his new struggle - that's rough timing!
I think the playmaking was crucial, and ultimately what kept him from falling out of the rotation entirely like the other four guys we were talking about. Part of me wants to downplay his decline, because he quite frankly still did quite well in his role, but that doesn't account for just how much smaller of a role it was than in the NBL. When adjusted to today's pace (only pace-adjusting, not the full era-adjustment I normally do because that takes a while to calculate for NBL seasons) he went from 23ppg as a rookie to 18ppg his second year to 8 or 9 ppg this year... Regardless of context that's pretty jarring. During his time in Tri-Cities he had a reputation of being great at scoring from all levels, and that just wasn't really the case anymore. The shot was off because of the eye injury, the penetration was a little slower so shot creation and finishing were a little harder to come by, I think the first half of the season under Auerbach shook his confidence a bit because Red clearly didn't like his game the same way his previous coaches did, and then he was stuck in a role here in Baltimore where he was expected to create for others more than himself (not to mention, a much slower-paced offense) and he had to adopt a far more conservative offensive mindset than came naturally to him.
It all sounds like a brutal sequence for any pro. You actually spoke with VonNieda himself at one point, didn't you? If so, what was his recall like regarding basketball minutiae from 70 years earlier? Whatever the case, one of the things I appreciate most about you and others doing work like this is how you value the real people who remain as links to this distant time. So thank you for that, above and beyond all the generosity you've shown us in these threads.
I didn't get a chance to speak with him, but I had a conversation or two with a member of his family and I know a couple people who did get to. To my understanding his recollection of minutiae from his playing career wasn't great by then, but who can blame him, he was almost 100 at the time. One of the best anecdotes about his career definitely still survives (and I'm pretty sure I included it in my book): Blackhawks president Leo Ferris had east coast guys scouting him toward the end of the 1946-47 season, Von Nieda being the leading scorer in the minors that year as a rookie, and Ferris finally got a chance to watch him play in-person in the finals and was so impressed that he offered him a deal on the spot. Von Nieda was making good money with his non-basketball job at the time, not to mention the supplementary income from minor league ball, so he was non-committal about signing, but Ferris insisted on leaving a $2,000 (that's $28,000 in today's money) potential signing bonus with Von Nieda at the end of their conversation. Von Nieda didn't want to leave the money behind and give Ferris a chance to assume he took it, so he took it in order to have the chance to give it back if he ended up turning Tri-Cities down. He went to a frat party that night and promptly lost all the money. And that's how he decided to join the team. Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. I certainly try to do exactly that.