1947 BAA Finals

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The 1947 BAA Finals decided the first champion in the history of the Basketball Association of America, the league that would later become the NBA. The Philadelphia Warriors of the Eastern Division met the Chicago Stags of the West, with Philadelphia holding home-court advantage for the series. Joe Fulks, who would later join the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, took the floor for the Warriors. Getting to that series was not simple for either team, and the path taken by Philadelphia has puzzled people who study the era's early standings. Home-court advantage itself would become a point of contention, one that later writers have picked apart in detail. The referees who worked that postseason would not escape scrutiny either, according to accounts gathered years afterward. Before any of that gets sorted out, the season's championship still has to be settled, one game at a time.

• 2. Through The Back Door

  ›

  Philadelphia never won the Eastern Division that season, yet a four-team playoff among each conference's runners-up carried the Warriors into the championship round anyway. Philadelphia and New York were the two runners-up from the East. Each side knocked out a Western opponent, St. Louis and Cleveland, before the two runners-up met each other for the final Eastern spot. Every one of those series was best-of-three. On the other side of the bracket, the division champions faced off: Washington Capitols against Chicago Stags in a best-of-seven series that Chicago won 4-2. A runner-up, not a division winner, would represent the East in the Finals that year, and that arrangement was no one-time quirk. The league repeated the same format in 1948, and once again a runners-up team came out as that season's champion.

• 3. Twenty Days, No Rest

  ›

  The division champions' semifinal series ran six games, played from the 2nd to the 13th of April 1947. Both clubs played straight through whenever consecutive games landed in the same city, taking no rest days on two separate occasions. The championship series that followed ran on an even tighter clock: five games packed into seven days. Just as in the semifinals, the two Finals teams played back-to-back games in the same city twice, without a single day off between them. Counting every round from start to finish, the whole playoff tournament spanned 20 days. That same overloaded schedule is part of what later drew scrutiny toward the officials working those games.

• 4. Whispers Of Tampering

  ›

  Charley Rosen examined this exact series decades later in his book The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA. He gave the 1947 Finals a short chapter of its own, working through business decisions that never made the box score. Rosen's account lays out why Philadelphia, not Chicago, carried home-court advantage into the series, even though the Stags had posted the better regular season mark. It also covers why Philadelphia stood to keep that same home-court edge had the series gone to a sixth or seventh game. To build that picture, Rosen later interviewed players and personnel from both the Warriors and the Stags about that season. Those conversations surfaced something else too: lingering suspicion, never confirmed, that the officiating had been compromised at some point across that postseason. None of that changed what actually happened on the court, starting with a packed house for Game 1.

• 5. Fulks Ignites The Warriors

  ›

  About 7,900 fans turned out on the 16th of April 1947 for Game 1, where Philadelphia built a 34-20 lead by halftime. Joe Fulks took over from there, scoring 29 points in the second half alone, 21 of them in the fourth quarter. Guard Angelo Musi, out of Temple University, added 19 points of his own for the Warriors. Chicago, meanwhile, could not find the basket: the Stags launched 129 shots and made only 26 of them, a 20.2 percent clip. Philadelphia closed out the opener, 84-71. Five other Warriors reached double figures on the 17th of April in Game 2, even with Fulks quieter than he had been in the opener. Forward Howie Dallmar led that group with 18 points, and guard Jerry Fleishman added 16. Chicago briefly grabbed a 69-68 lead in the fourth quarter, before Philadelphia center Art Hillhouse took over. Hillhouse scored 7 of the Warriors' last 10 points, enough to close out an 85-74 win and put Philadelphia ahead 2-0 in the series.

• 6. Chicago Refuses To Fold

  ›

  Philadelphia carried its momentum onto the road on the 19th of April, winning Game 3 by 75-72 at Chicago to push the series to 3-0. One more win would finish the Stags off entirely. Game 4, on the 20th of April, played out differently: the Stags staved off elimination and avoided a sweep, grinding out a one-point victory, 74-73, to cut Philadelphia's lead to 3-1. That single point kept Chicago's season alive for at least one more game.

• 7. A Champion, A Long Wait

  ›

  On the 22nd of April 1947, Game 5 came down to the final minute. Philadelphia and Chicago were tied at 80-80 when Howie Dallmar rose for a jump shot. It fell, breaking the tie and sealing an 83-80 win, the Warriors' first championship in franchise history. The final series score read 4-1. For Chicago, that loss in Game 5 marked the only Finals appearance the Stags would ever make. The franchise folded just three years later. Chicago would not see another team play for a professional basketball championship until the Chicago Bulls won the 1991 NBA Finals, 44 years on.