George Mikan

• 1. Introduction

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  George Mikan stood six feet ten inches tall, weighed 245 pounds, and wore thick round spectacles , and he single-handedly forced professional basketball to rewrite its own rules. Born on the 18th of June 1924, in Joliet, Illinois, Mikan went on to win seven championships across three different leagues, prompt rule changes that still govern the game today, and retire as the NBA's all-time leading scorer. But none of that seemed remotely possible when he first arrived at DePaul University in 1942, moving awkwardly because of his frame, shy and uncertain, a boy who had once spent a year and a half bedridden after shattering his knee. How does a clumsy, nearsighted kid with a broken knee become the man who defines what basketball can be? And what does it mean that the NBA had to keep changing its own rulebook just to slow one player down?

• 2. The Making of a Big Man

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  Ray Meyer was 28 years old and a rookie coach at DePaul when he first crossed paths with the young Mikan in high school. Where others saw an oversized, clumsy teenager with no athletic future, Meyer saw something worth investing in. At the time, conventional basketball wisdom held that tall players were simply too awkward to play well at any competitive level. Meyer set out to prove that wrong, one painstaking workout at a time. He made Mikan punch a speed bag. He enrolled him in dancing lessons. He had him jump rope. The goal was not merely to make Mikan bigger and stronger but to give him the footwork and coordination his size had never demanded before. Out of those sessions came the hook shot, perfected with either hand, a technique that would become Mikan's signature weapon and prove almost impossible to defend. The workout routine itself eventually became known as the Mikan drill, and it has been a staple exercise for big men in basketball ever since. Meyer also worked on something subtler: Mikan's confidence. The young man had grown up ashamed of his height, stooping and shrinking to blend in. Meyer insisted he take pride in it instead. Mikan recalled that he "was bright and intelligent but was also clumsy and shy" when they first met. By the time Mikan stepped onto the DePaul court for his college career, that shyness had been replaced by an aggression that would soon alarm the entire NCAA.

• 3. Rewriting the College Game

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  Mikan's ability to goaltend was so extraordinary that it forced a rule change before he even turned professional. Standing near the basket, he swatted shots out of their arc before they could reach the hoop, once explaining: "We would set up a zone defense that had four men around the key and I guarded the basket. When the other team took a shot, I'd just go up and tap it out." The NCAA responded by outlawing the practice entirely, banning any player from touching a ball after it had reached its apex in flight or after it had hit the backboard. Bob Kurland, a tall center at Oklahoma A&M, was one of the very few college opponents who managed any consistent success against him. Mikan led the nation in scoring with 23.9 points per game in the 1944-45 season and 23.1 points per game the following year. In 1945, he guided DePaul to the NIT title, which at that time carried more prestige than the NCAA Tournament. In three games during that NIT run, he scored 120 points total, including 53 in a 97-53 victory over Rhode Island, earning the tournament's Most Valuable Player award. The Associated Press and the Helms Athletic Foundation both named him a collegiate Player of the Year in 1944 and 1945, and he was an All-American selection three times. When Mikan signed his first professional contract after the 1945-46 season, the organizations trying to build professional basketball were acquiring something they barely yet understood.

• 4. Championship After Championship

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  In his very first professional season, playing just 25 games for the Chicago American Gears of the National Basketball League, Mikan averaged 16.5 points per game and was named Most Valuable Player of the 1946 World Professional Basketball Tournament after scoring 100 points across five games. Then the Gears dissolved. Their owner, Maurice White, tried to launch a rival 24-team league in which he owned every franchise; it folded after a month. Mikan was distributed through a dispersal draft, landing with the Minneapolis Lakers, the successor franchise to the Detroit Gems, which had gone 4-40 and therefore held the first pick. After several days of negotiations - Mikan was attending law school at DePaul and wanted to stay in Chicago - he agreed to join coach John Kundla's team. What followed was a dynasty. In his first full season with Minneapolis, Mikan led the NBL in scoring with 1,195 points, becoming the only player in the league's history to surpass 1,000 points in a single season. The Lakers won the NBL title and then captured the World Professional Basketball Tournament, with Mikan setting a tournament record by scoring 40 points against the New York Renaissance in the championship game. When the league landscape shifted again and four NBL teams jumped to the Basketball Association of America, Mikan again led his new league in scoring and the Lakers defeated the Washington Capitols in the 1949 BAA Finals. When the BAA and NBL merged to create the NBA in 1949, Mikan simply kept winning. The Lakers won five championships in six NBA seasons. As Mikan later reflected on his eventual retirement, he cited a family and 10 broken bones and 16 stitches as his reasons for stepping away.

• 5. The Rules That Bear His Name

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  On the 20th of January 1952, Mikan scored 61 points in a 91-81 double-overtime victory against the Rochester Royals, a personal best. He also grabbed 36 rebounds in that game, a record at the time. His teammates combined for just 30 points. That kind of dominance made him not just a star but a problem for the league itself, and the NBA responded with structural changes. The most direct was the widening of the foul lane from six feet to twelve feet, a rule championed by New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick, who considered Mikan his nemesis. The change was formally dubbed "The Mikan Rule." Because players could only stand in the lane for three seconds at a time, the wider lane forced big men to position themselves further from the basket on offense, limiting Mikan's ability to park himself directly underneath and simply wait for the ball. Even after the lane widened, Mikan averaged 23.8 points per game that season. The shot clock's origin also traces partly to Mikan. In the 1950-51 season, the Fort Wayne Pistons held the ball for nearly the entire second half of a game rather than risk letting Mikan touch it, finishing with a 19-18 victory over Minneapolis. Mikan had scored 15 of his team's 18 points, accounting for 83.3% of Minneapolis's total, an NBA all-time record. The game remains the lowest-scoring in NBA history. Four years later, the league introduced the shot clock. The goaltending rule that Mikan had forced on the NCAA during his college years was also adopted by the NBA. No other player in the sport's history has had so many specific rules written in response to his individual play.

• 6. Beyond the Court

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  In 1956, Mikan ran as the Republican candidate for Congress in Minnesota's 3rd congressional district, challenging incumbent Representative Roy Wier. The race was close and turnout was high, but Mikan lost 52% to 48%; Wier received 127,356 votes to Mikan's 117,716. Returning to law, Mikan initially struggled to find work, going six months without assignments and falling into financial difficulty severe enough that he cashed in his life insurance. He eventually built a successful practice in corporate and real estate law and purchased and renovated buildings in Minneapolis. Then, in 1967, he returned to basketball as the first commissioner of the upstart American Basketball Association. He invented the league's red-white-and-blue ball, arguing it was more patriotic, better for television, and more exciting for crowds than the brown NBA ball. He instituted the three-point line. He also gave a second chance to players like Doug Moe, Roger Brown, and Connie Hawkins, who had been barred from the NBA after being falsely implicated in gambling scandals. Mikan later said, in the book Loose Balls, that he never regretted those decisions. He resigned from the ABA in 1969; the league survived until 1976. In the mid-1980s, Mikan led a task force to bring professional basketball back to Minneapolis, which resulted in the Minnesota Timberwolves joining the NBA in the 1989-90 season. A statue of Mikan shooting his hook shot has stood at the entrance to the Timberwolves' Target Center since April 2001.

• 7. Legacy and Last Years

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  In November 1996, Mikan appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated alongside Shaquille O'Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the article framed Abdul-Jabbar and Mikan as the "Lakers legends" against whom O'Neal would be measured. The image captured something real about how the game's history runs in a straight line from Mikan forward. O'Neal would later say, simply: "Without number 99, there is no me." In his final years, Mikan fought chronic diabetes that led to the amputation of his right leg below the knee. He waged a prolonged legal battle against the NBA and the NBA Players' Union over the $1,700 per month pensions paid to players who had retired before 1965, when the league's revenues were still modest. Mel Davis of the National Basketball Retired Players Union said the fight kept Mikan going; he hoped to be alive when a collective bargaining agreement finally addressed his generation's situation. He was not. Mikan died on the 1st of June 2005, in Scottsdale, Arizona, of complications from diabetes. His son Terry reported that Mikan had undergone dialysis three times a week, four hours at a time, for the last five years of his life. O'Neal paid for the funeral. Before Game Five of the 2005 Eastern Conference Finals, the league observed a moment of silence in his honor. In October 2022, the Lakers retired Mikan's No. 99 jersey. Two months later, in December 2022, the NBA renamed its Most Improved Player award in his honor , a fitting tribute to a man whose own improvement, from a bedridden teenager in Joliet to the greatest player of the first half of the century, was one of the sport's most unlikely stories.