Cliff Hagan and company
The Boston Celtics won 11 titles from 1957-69. The only years in which they did not win the title were 1967 and 1958. That earlier year, the date closer to the primordial age of the NBA, is the only year in which a team with Bill Russell playing lost in an NBA Finals. He also happened to suffer an ankle injury in the series, and while Red Auerbach refused to make excuses for his team, the injury made what would become impossible possible, if only for a series.
In 1957, the St. Louis Hawks had lost 125-123 in Game 7 to the Celtics.
In that series, Bob Pettit averaged 30.1 points and 18.3 rebounds per game in the series. These are ridiculous numbers. They were ridiculous then and they are ridiculous now. He was the game’s leading scorer in all but Games 2 and 3. His team lost only one of those.
He dropped 39 in the last game of the series, but he couldn’t overcome the opposite side having three players (Tom Heinsohn, Bill Sharman and Bob Cousy) averaging over 20 points a game and another player (Russell) who would far outpace his rebounding numbers.
In 1958, the series was different. St. Louis won in the Garden to start. Russell scored 14 points and grabbed 29 rebounds in the game, but Cliff Hagan and Bob Pettit each went for over 30 to outduel Cousy and Sharman. Game 2 isn’t worth mentioning due to the ease with which Boston won. Then the Hawks stole Game 3 with Russell only playing 30 minutes. The Celtics without Russell then won Game 4 by 21 points.
Game 5 saw Slater Martin and Hagan each go for over 20 to take the swing game in the series by two points. Russell returned in Game 7 to play only 20 minutes. Pettit would eliminate the Celtics’ hopes for a repeat by scoring 50. Okay, so maybe the degree to which Hagan and company are underrated is a highly suspect premise that is murky at best.
What is clear, however, is that this series teetered on the edge of what the NBA had been and what the NBA was fast becoming. The St. Louis Hawks were the last all-white team to win a championship in the league. And, with Russell injured, a largely white basketball competition looked even whiter.
Moreover, efforts to keep basketball in St. Louis white are what shaped these two rosters in the first place.
The two best players in the St. Louis rotation after Pettit were Cliff Hagan and Ed Macauley. The former was a 6-foot-4 small forward from the University of Kentucky. The latter was a 6-foot-8 center from St. Louis University. The two were drafted by the Boston Celtics initially: Hagan in the third round of the 1953 NBA Draft and Macauley in the 1950 dispersal draft.
On April 30, 1956, Red Auerbach traded the pair of Southerners to St. Louis for Bill Russell, whom the Hawks had drafted with the second overall pick that very same day. Auerbach had never seen Russell play, but sometimes seeing isn’t the only route to believing. Everyone knew the players from his successes at the University of San Francisco.
But the trade also wasn’t ever really about basketball. Given the politics of the time and the geography of the two cities, the trade probably works out best for everyone, although elements of Boston are far from being a shining city upon the hill, and St. Louis’ lack of progress even at the time is still depressing. Russell’s winning over the city of St. Louis with the combined force of his humanity and athleticism would have made for a great story, but such a story is probably too much to have asked of one person. After all, the Hawks would lose popularity in St. Louis as they integrated and by 1968, would move to Atlanta.
While St. Louis did win the 1958 title, the fact that Pettit’s Hawks would then lose the 1959 Western Division Finals to Elgin Baylor’s Minneapolis Lakers seems a fitting reprisal of both their owner’s attitudes and the city’s politics at the time. The team would crawl back to the Finals for rematches with the burgeoning Boston Celtics dynasty in 1960 and 1961.
But by 1960, the Celtics would look much more like the Celtics everyone remembers than they had in 1958, as they would each year they added another Hall-of-Famer to the roster and worked themselves into being a well-oiled machine. Meanwhile, the Hawks were now a more balanced team, with Hagan scoring 24.8 points per game in support of Pettit’s 26.1. The two were joined north of the 20-point mark by Clyde Lovellette. They lost the series 4-3. The team added Lenny Wilkens the next season but lost to the Celtics once again in the Finals. This time, the difference was four games to one.
The Hawks were probably as good as George Mikan’s Lakers that won five titles between 1949 and 1954, but they were politicking for the wrong cause in any era, making it difficult to separate character from sport.