The Minneapolis Lakers — as the would-be purple-and-gold team from Los Angeles was known until 1960 — entered the 1950-51 season as defending NBA champions, and much of it was thanks to 6-foot-10-inch, 245-pound superstar George Mikan (pictured above, extreme right), the NBA's first great center and a behemoth in a league where the average player was about six inches shorter. This was a man so dominant in the middle that the New York Knicks once advertised a December 1949 home game as "Geo. Mikan vs. Knicks," as noted by The New York Times.
Just how good was Mikan on paper? According to the 1949-50 Lakers' Basketball-Reference page, the former DePaul star averaged 27.4 points on a team that scored 84.1 points per game — that's nearly a third of his entire team's average. He also shot 40.7% from the field and 77.9% from the free-throw line, with the former figure being much better than the Lakers' team shooting percentage of 36.7%.
On November 22, 1950, the Fort Wayne (later Detroit) Pistons headed to Minneapolis to play the mighty Lakers, and head coach Murray Mendenhall came up with a novel idea to counter the Lakers' high-powered (at least for that era) offense. And that was to stall, stall, stall; hold on to the ball for as long as possible in hopes of denying the Lakers a chance to dump it down low to the big guy for the easy home win — potentially their 30th straight, per ESPN.
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