Schayes remembers day 50 years ago when shot clock was bornSYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Fifty years ago Tuesday, Dolph Schayes and some teammates gathered in a small, stuffy high school gym for a short scrimmage that helped rescue the NBA and transform professional basketball from a chess-like contest into a fast-paced, gravity-defying game.
"I remember we were all huffing and puffing," said the 76-year-old Hall-of-Famer. "It was summer, so we were out of shape anyway. It certainly changed the tempo of play. It was all running. No standing around. It made the game more fun to play," said Schayes. And more exciting to watch. It was Aug. 10, 1954, and the team owners in the fledgling National Basketball Association -- Danny Biasone, Red Auerbach, Ned Irish, Eddie Gottlieb and Clair Bee -- sat in the bleachers at Vocational High School in downtown Syracuse and watched with keen interest as the 20-minute pickup game was played with a 24-second shot clock. "There wasn't really a clock," recalled Schayes, a 12-time NBA All-Star who played from 1949-1964 with the Syracuse Nationals and Philadelphia 76ers and was the NBA's all-time leading scorer when he retired. "There was a guy on the sideline keeping it with his watch and yelling out the time. Twenty. Ten. Five, four, three... "None of us at the time realized the significance of it. Arguably, it can be said it's been the most important rule change in the history of the game," Schayes said. On Tuesday, Schayes will help Syracuse city officials mark the 50th anniversary of that game at a special ceremony at the school, now Blodgett Elementary School. Fittingly, a basketball game involving local high school players will follow. "It changed the game of basketball, and it happened here in Syracuse. It's a fact to be proud of," said Syracuse Parks and Recreation Commissioner Pat Driscoll, who would like to see a permanent memorial built to celebrate the eventful moment in sports history. In Springfield, Mass., at the National Basketball Hall of Fame, a display case explains the clock's history, said Dean O'Keefe, a museum spokesman. The clock's history also is included in the biography for Biasone, a Hall of Famer who owned the Syracuse Nationals and was one of the NBA's founding members. The Hall of Fame has nothing special planned this year for the shot clock's golden anniversary, O'Keefe said. Neither does the NBA, said spokesman Mark Broussard. In those early days, NBA games were low scoring, played at a poke-along pace that was threatening to kill pro basketball as a spectator sport before it even got started. With no shot clock, a team with a lead in the fourth quarter simply stalled until the game clock ran down. The lowest scoring game in NBA history was played on Nov. 22, 1950, when the Fort Wayne Pistons defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, 19-18. Fort Wayne outscored the Lakers 3-1 in the final quarter. At Yale University, coach Howard Hobson was proposing a radical 30-second shot clock. Other colleges scoffed at the idea as a gimmick. In Syracuse, Biasone thought it could be the change needed to make the NBA game more exciting. After years of lobbying, Biasone finally convinced his associates to come to Syracuse to watch an exhibition game. In a May 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Biasone explained that he came up with his magic number through simple arithmetic. At that time, each NBA team was averaging 60 shots a game, which meant that each game featured 120 shots. Since each league game lasts 48 minutes, or 2,880 seconds, that total divided by 120 equals 24.
The 24-second shot clock made its NBA debut on Oct. 30, 1954, in a game in which the Rochester Royals defeated the Boston Celtics, 98-95. The change had its intended effect. According to NBA records, scoring jumped that first year from 79.5 points per game to 93.1 points. © Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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