Maurice Podoloff
From Hoopedia
| Maurice Podoloff |
|---|
 |
| ________________________ |
| President and Commissioner of the National Basketball Association |
| Term Began 1946 |
| Term Ended 1963 |
| Successor Walter Kennedy |
| _______________________ |
| Born August 18,1890 in Elizebethgrad, Russia |
| Died November 24,1985 (age 95) |
| College Yale |
Maurice Podoloff (August 18,1890-November 24,1985) was thea lawyer and first president of the NBA. His negotiating skills and remarkable savvy to help set the league on a path from its rocky origins in the 1940s to its eventual success as a fast-paced, modern game.
Podoloff was born in Russia in 1890, but because of poor record-keeping in that country at the time, he could only guess that the date might have been either August 18 or August 31, and that his birthplace was Odessa. Soon after he was born, his impoverished parents emigrated to the United States.
Upon arriving in New York the family barely had enough money to pay their first month's rent in a cold-water flat. Sometimes the money left over after paying the rent was used to buy stale loaves of pumpernickel bread. But his father eventually became a successful real estate broker, and by the time Podoloff was ready to attend college, the family had become wealthy enough to send him to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1913. He decided to acquire a law degree and returned to Yale for another two years.
Podoloff's father owned a suite of offices at the corner of Chapel and Church Streets in New Haven, Connecticut. Podoloff took his first law job with an attorney named Sam Mason, who rented one of those offices. But after a few years Podoloff decided that law didn't appeal to him, so he joined his father in the real estate business. Soon Podoloff's brother, Jake, an expert in the insurance rating of commercial buildings, joined them, and "A. Podoloff and Sons, Inc., Real Estate and Insurance" was born. The Podoloffs ran 22 apartment buildings in New Haven and did very well financially.
They bought a run-down, old ice rink in New Haven, refurbished it, and then tried to figure out ways to make it earn money. First Podoloff secured a seven-year lease from the Yale hockey team, which used the facility for daily practices and games. But that still left Sunday nights open, so Podoloff decided to acquire a professional hockey franchise to fill that opening. The New Haven team competed against clubs from Providence, Springfield, Boston, and Philadelphia in what was then known as the Canadian-American Hockey League.
Podoloff's association with basketball, another sport he knew little about, developed as a result of his friendship with Al Sutphin, who owned the Cleveland Arena. Sutphin was instrumental in getting Podoloff elected to the presidency of the American Hockey League. In 1946 Sutphin and other hockey team owners were trying to think of ways to make their arenas profitable during the fall and winter. Sutphin came up with the idea of a new professional basketball league.
On June 6, 1946 (the second anniversary of D-Day), more than a dozen men gathered at the Commodore Hotel in New York and founded the Basketball Association of America. Since many members of the group already owned hockey franchises, they all knew Podoloff, and they chose him to serve as the league's first president. Podoloff thus became the first person ever to preside simultaneously over two professional sports leagues.
For its inaugural 1946-47 season, the BAA fielded teams in 11 cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Since most franchises had some hockey connection, the new league modeled itself in many ways after hockey, especially in scheduling and playoff formatting.
The first few years of the new BAA were difficult, as it competed with the older, more established National Basketball League. "The first game of the new league was held in Toronto on November 1 [1946]," Podoloff wrote. "It was not an absolute success. Then other games were played, and they were much less successful."
Sutphin let Podoloff know, in strong terms, that the future of the BAA was in jeopardy and that unless something was done to bolster the game's popularity, it would probably fold. Podoloff at first believed that the league simply needed more teams and an infusion of dynamic new players. To test his theory he helped bring about the merger of the BAA and NBL for the 1949-50 season, which resulted in a new name, the National Basketball Association, and a league of 17 teams. But two years later Podoloff realized that the game's lack of popularity had nothing to do with the quantity of teams or players. In fact, the greater number of teams meant that more teams were on shaky financial ground, barely able to meet their expenses.
Podoloff kept the league afloat through deft management. No less an authority than Philadelphia's Eddie Gottlieb credited Podoloff as the man responsible for ensuring the NBA's continued existence. "He was a brilliant administrator," Gottlieb said. "He knew when to get tough, and he knew when to walk softly. Without him we never would have made it through the early days. By the very force of his genius he kept the outfit going." Podoloff saved the NBA by his willingness to defer payments that weaker teams owed the league, and even by lending those teams money from time to time. "His genius," Gottlieb added, "was in the fact he knew which teams had to stay healthy to make it a viable business."
It became apparent that a few key rules of the old game prevented basketball from gaining greater popularity. The lack of a shot clock, for instance, allowed a team to slow down the tempo and stall as long as it liked to preserve a lead. Podoloff was horrified to observe that on November 22, 1950, a good team humbled a superior team by a score of 19-18.
Although some published reports credit Podoloff with the idea for the 24-second shot clock, Podoloff himself readily conceded that the originator was soft-spoken Italian immigrant Danny Biasone, who resided in Syracuse and owned the Nationals, the NBA franchise there. While there had been discussion from time to time about adopting rules that would limit the time a team could possess the ball, nobody had envisioned a limit on the time a team had to shoot the ball. Biasone presented his idea at the April 22, 1954, annual meeting of the NBA.
Biasone did not arbitrarily choose 24 seconds as the limit, according to Podoloff. Instead, in 1953 and 1954 he went to games equipped with a stopwatch and timed how long it took for teams to score. Biasone discovered that each team had taken 75 to 80 shots per contest, an average of one shot every 18 seconds. He reasoned that a limit of 24 seconds would allow enough time to score without stalling, so that was the figure he selected.
A special owners meeting was called in Syracuse, during which Biasone demonstrated how his system would work. He split his Nationals squad into two groups, and they played a practice game governed by Biasone's stopwatch. The owners liked what they saw and agreed to try the idea the following season. At the time, however, Podoloff expressed his doubts about the scheme, fearing that it would ruin the game as people had come to know it.
Instead, it was an instant success. In 1954-55 attendance at NBA games was up 57 percent over the previous year, and the game's popularity took off. "If it wasn't for Danny," Podoloff told The New York Times in 1977, "the NBA would not have lasted five or six more years. We had other guys who knew basketball-Eddie Gottlieb, Red Auerbach, John Kundla-but Danny, he did it." With the arrival of a faster-paced, higher-scoring game, the NBA was finally able to sell television rights to its games. "I remember our first TV contract [in 1954]," Podoloff said in 1976. "We got $3,000 a game, and $5,000 for a playoff game."
Podoloff had a hand in other refinements of the game that helped bolster its appeal. During Podoloff's reign the first NBA All-Star Game was played in 1951, an idea borrowed from Major League Baseball. He was also at least partly responsible for bonus free throws, the widening of the foul lane, and more standardized officiating.
During Podoloff's 17-year stint as head of the NBA, his most famous feud with a coach was with the Boston Celtics' Red Auerbach. "He fined me many, many times," Auerbach recalled in the Springfield Union shortly after Podoloff's death in 1985. Auerbach had a habit of lighting up a "victory cigar" in the closing minutes of a game when he sensed that his team was going to win. "When I started to light up the cigar," Auerbach recalled, "he said, 'You can't smoke on the bench.' I said, '(New York Knicks Coach Joe) Lapchick smoked cigarettes on the bench.' He said, 'You can't smoke cigars.' I said, 'What is this, an airplane?'" Surprisingly, Auerbach said he had enjoyed a respectful, almost loving relationship with Podoloff, whom he described as a bright, eloquent man.
Diminutive in stature at only 5-foot-2, Podoloff had never played basketball as a boy-or ice hockey either, for that matter. After stepping down as league president in 1963, he was always amused by references to him as a "basketball wizard." In 1976 he debunked that idea in The New York Times when he said, "I was a businessman, plain and simple. It may shock you, but before I took over as president of the pro league, I had seen exactly one basketball game in my life."
Podoloff was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1973. The NBA also honored him by naming its Most Valuable Player Award after him: the Maurice Podoloff Trophy. He died on November 24, 1985, at age 95.
