1958 Overview

From Hoopedia

1957-58 NBA Season

He had the fire down below. That sums up the drive of St. Louis Hawks’ star Bob Pettit. The 6-9, 215-pound forward from LSU never seemed satisfied with his play.

“When I fall below what I know I can do, my belly growls and growls,” Pettit once said. He led the Hawks to the NBA Finals four times but found his only reward in 1958, a victory over Boston after Bill Russell was injured. That avenged a seven-game loss to the Celtics in the Finals the year before and gave the Hawks the only championship in franchise history.

Before the season, the Fort Wayne Pistons moved to Detroit and the Rochester Royals moved to Cincinnati. Just three years earlier, half the NBA’s teams had been based in metropolitan areas with less than a million people; now only Syracuse was in that category.

Fans in Detroit were treated to the league’s leading scorer. The Pistons’ George Yardley became the first player to score 2,000 points in a season, leading the NBA in scoring at 27.8 points per game. Boston in the East and St. Louis in the West were clearly the class of the league. Each won its division by eight games over a 72-game schedule. Boston took Philadelphia in five games to win what was now a best-of-seven Division Finals, while St. Louis bested Detroit in five games.

St. Louis and Boston split the first two games in Boston, and it seemed another classic championship series was in the Hawks’ favor. Boston showed gritty determination with a win in Game 4 without Russell (who had injured his ankle in the Celtics’ Game 3 defeat), but St. Louis won Game 5 in Boston by two points.

Then Pettit exploded for 50 points in Game 6 to give St. Louis a 110-109 victory and the club’s only title. When Pettit retired at the end of the 1964-65 season, he was the NBA’s all-time leading scorer with 20,880 points in his 11 seasons.