National Basketball League (United States)

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Basketball League was a professional basketball organization that lived and died in the shadow of a game still finding itself. On the 6th of October 1937, a league born two years earlier under the name Midwest Basketball Conference officially renamed itself the National Basketball League, weeks before the start of its new season. That small administrative act marked something larger: the moment a collection of company-sponsored teams from Akron, Fort Wayne, Oshkosh, and Indianapolis declared themselves a proper professional league.

  For twelve seasons, the NBL operated out of Great Lakes small-market cities, its teams owned by tire companies, grocery stores, piston manufacturers, and electrical giants. It survived the Great Depression, thrived through World War II on the strength of a single franchise owner, and ultimately lost a three-year war against a rival league that had the bigger arenas and the bigger cities. On the 3rd of August 1949, the NBL merged with the Basketball Association of America to create the National Basketball Association. But the NBA never fully claimed the NBL as its own.

  Why did a league that produced George Mikan, built the first basketball dynasty, and integrated its rosters five years before baseball end up written out of the record books? And what became of the five NBA franchises that carry the NBL's bloodline to this day?

• 2. Rubber, Groceries, and General Electric

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  Frank Kautsky ran a grocery store in Indianapolis. Paul Sheeks was the athletic and recreation director for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Together, they founded the Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935, trying to revive a defunct league both of their teams had played in during the 1932-33 season. Their ambitions, by their own admission, were limited: good competition, community benefit, and only secondarily any kind of profit.

  The league they created was built almost entirely from business-sponsored works teams. Firestone, Goodyear, and General Electric each fielded a squad. Kautsky's Grocery had one. So did the Dayton Metropolitan Clothing Stores, the Columbus Athletic Supply, the Dow Chemical Company, and eventually the Zollner Piston Company. Players often worked for the sponsoring business when the season ended. This arrangement gave owners a reason to keep teams afloat even when profits were thin.

  The Cooper Buses from Windsor, Ontario joined the inaugural season, making the MBC the first international basketball league in existence, ahead of the Basketball Association of America. Games were scheduled on weekends, partly because of blue laws across the United States, and the format changed season to season, with as many as twelve teams and as few as eight competing at a given time.

  Two championship runs under the MBC name defined its brief identity. The Chicago Duffy Florals won the first championship controversially, having joined late and upset more established clubs. The Akron Goodyear Wingfoots swept the Fort Wayne General Electrics 2-0 to claim the second and final MBC title, then carried that momentum into the rebranded NBL. The name change on the 6th of October 1937 was also meant to avoid confusion with the Big Ten Conference, which was regularly called the Midwest Conference at the time.

• 3. Cowboy Edwards and the Oshkosh Dynasty

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  Leroy "Cowboy" Edwards stood 6 feet 4 inches at a time when players of that height were genuinely rare. He had been a consensus NCAA All-American and the Helms Foundation College Player of the Year as a member of the 1934-35 University of Kentucky Wildcats. He left Kentucky after two years to turn professional, a decision considered almost unheard of at the time.

  Edwards joined the Oshkosh All-Stars, a small-city Wisconsin franchise that had won an independent championship over the New York Renaissance before entering the NBL. He led the NBL in scoring for each of the league's first three seasons. He is credited with introducing the three-second rule in basketball, which remains in the game today. He played all twelve NBL seasons with the Oshkosh All-Stars and retired just before the league merged with the BAA.

  The All-Stars appeared in the NBL championship series for five consecutive years from 1938 to 1942, winning only the last two of those appearances, in 1941 and 1942. Those losses, and those wins, were what a dynasty looks like when the competition is equally fierce. Charley Shipp was the only other player besides Edwards to play in all twelve NBL seasons.

  For Akron, the story was different but parallel. The Goodyear Wingfoots won the inaugural NBL championship in 1938, and the Firestone Non-Skids won back-to-back titles in 1939 and 1940. Two franchise rivals from the same Ohio city claimed the NBL's first three championships, a run that would not be matched until a piston manufacturer from Fort Wayne entered the picture.

• 4. Fred Zollner and the Wartime League

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  By December 1941, the United States had entered World War II, and the NBL felt it immediately. The Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and Indianapolis Kautskys both suspended operations. What had been a seven-team league dropped to five teams entering the 1942-43 season, and then to four when the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets folded on the 14th of December 1942 due to poor performance and wartime financial pressure.

  The Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, owned by Fred Zollner whose company manufactured pistons for engines, held the league together. At the worst point, Zollner's team was reportedly the only one turning any kind of profit. He shared his revenue with the other franchises to keep the league alive. Without his willingness to absorb losses that were not his, the NBL might not have survived long enough to reach 1949.

  On the court, the Pistons were led by Bobby McDermott, a guard who was considered a sharpshooter by the standards of 1930s and 1940s basketball. McDermott had left Flushing High School in New York after only one year to play basketball and work. The Pistons finished second in 1942 and 1943 before winning back-to-back league titles in 1944 and 1945. It was not unusual for Fort Wayne to play home games in taverns, armories, junior high gyms, or ballrooms.

  The Sheboygan Red Skins pushed Fort Wayne hardest during this period. Beginning in 1941, Sheboygan appeared in five of six championship series. They beat Fort Wayne for the title in 1943 despite barely finishing above .500 that year. Then came the Rochester Royals in 1945-46, who swept Sheboygan in the championship finals and brought Hall of Famers Al Cervi, Bob Davies, and Red Holzman into the conversation.

• 5. Integration Before Jackie Robinson

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  Hank Williams of the Buffalo Bisons was the first known African-American player to join the league, doing so during the MBC era. Williams had previously starred for the Buffalo Colored Giants, and his entry into an established professional league was the first such event since the early 1900s, when the New York State League and New England League had briefly allowed black players.

  In the 1942-43 season, with roster depletion from the war draft forcing teams to find players wherever they could, two NBL clubs did something no major American professional sports league had done: they signed African-American players five years before Jackie Robinson would break baseball's color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The Toledo Jim White Chevrolets signed several black players, including Bill Jones from the University of Toledo. Toledo lost its first four games and folded operations that season for financial reasons unrelated to the roster move. The Chicago Studebaker Flyers stocked their team with Harlem Globetrotters who worked at the Studebaker plant during the week, paid through the United Auto Workers Association. Chicago compiled an 8-15 record before being eliminated by Fort Wayne in the playoffs and then folding.

  None of the integration attempts survived the season, but they happened. Other teams would sign African-American players in later years. And in December 1948, during the NBL's final season, when the Detroit Vagabond Kings folded after winning only two games, the league awarded their spot to the New York Renaissance, a famous barnstorming team composed entirely of African-Americans. They played out the rest of the season in Dayton, Ohio, as the Dayton Rens, becoming the first all-black team to compete in a formerly all-white professional basketball league. When the NBL merged with the BAA in 1949, the Dayton Rens were cut from the new league for reasons of racial segregation.

• 6. George Mikan and the Final Chapter

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  George Mikan was 6 feet 10 inches tall and had been a three-time NCAA All-American center at DePaul University in Chicago. As a rookie, he led the Chicago American Gears to the 1947 NBL championship. Then his owner, Maurice White, pulled the team out of the league to form a 24-team circuit called the Professional Basketball League of America. That venture failed quickly. The American Gears were blocked from returning, but the players were dispersed back into the NBL. Mikan landed with the Minneapolis Lakers.

  The Lakers had the previous season played as the Detroit Gems and finished with a 4-40 record. Mikan joined them alongside the versatile Jim Pollard, and the combination was enough to win the 1948 NBL championship. The BAA had been watching. After the 1947-48 season, the Lakers, the Rochester Royals, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, and the Indianapolis Kautskys all crossed over to the BAA. The Kautskys had to drop Zollner-style sponsorship branding and became the Indianapolis Jets because the BAA prohibited sponsor names in team names. Two other NBL teams, the Oshkosh All-Stars and Toledo Jeeps, applied to join the BAA and were both rejected.

  The NBL scrambled to fill the holes left behind with new franchises. It added the original Denver Nuggets from the Amateur Athletic Union and the Waterloo Hawks from Iowa, among others. These were small operations trying to compete in a league that was already negotiating its own end. On the 3rd of August 1949, representatives from both leagues met at the BAA offices in New York's Empire State Building. Maurice Podoloff, president of the BAA, became president of the new NBA. Ike Duffey, who had owned the Anderson Duffey Packers and served as president of the NBL, became chairman. Six of the NBL's nine remaining teams joined the new league alongside the Indianapolis Olympians, an expansion franchise that had never played a single NBL game.

• 7. The Erasure and the Inheritance

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  The NBA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1996, announcing its 50 Greatest Players as part of the milestone. Its official season recaps begin at the 1946-47 BAA season, with no acknowledgment of the NBL. The NBA claims the merger of 1949 was an expansion, not a combination of equals. As of 2025, the league does not recognize NBL records and statistics in its official history except in cases where a player, coach, or team participated in the NBA after 1949.

  Five current NBA franchises trace their direct lineage to the NBL. The Minneapolis Lakers, who became the Los Angeles Lakers, were built from the ruins of the Detroit Gems. The Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons became the Detroit Pistons. The Rochester Royals became the Sacramento Kings, with their earliest roots going back to 1923 as the Rochester Seagrams. The Buffalo Bisons and Tri-Cities Blackhawks became the Atlanta Hawks. The Syracuse Nationals became the Philadelphia 76ers.

  The Indianapolis Olympians joined the NBA without playing a game in the NBL and survived four seasons before folding in 1953. Their collapse followed the revelation that players Ralph Beard and Alex Groza had been involved in the 1951 college basketball point-shaving scandal during their time at the University of Kentucky. Both were forced to sell their ownership stakes in the team at a significant loss.

  One NBL franchise outlasted all of them in a different form. The Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, who won both the final MBC championship in 1937 and the inaugural NBL championship in 1938, sat out the war and never returned to the NBL. They moved instead into the National Industrial Basketball League, which in 1961 became the National AAU Basketball League. The Wingfoots are still an AAU Elite club today, the last living institution from the league that built the ground the NBA stands on.