50 Greatest Basketball Players Ever - 31 to 40 on our Best NBA Players list

#37 George Mikan

The greatest basketball player of the 50s

Career per-game averages: 23.4 points, 13.4 rebounds, 2.8 assists per game

Shooting splits: 40.4% from the field, 78.2% on free throws

Mikan began his basketball career with the Chicago American Gears of the National Basketball League, a predecessor of the modern NBA. He played with them for 25 games at the end of the 1946–47 NBL season, scoring 16.5 points per game as a rookie. Mikan led the Gears to the championship of the World Basketball Tournament, where he was elected Most Valuable Player after scoring 100 points in five games, and also voted into the All-NBL Team.

However, before the start of the 1947–48 NBL season, Maurice White, the president of the American Gear Company and the owner of the American Gears NBL team, pulled the team out of the league. White planned to create a 24-team league called the Professional Basketball League of America, in which he owned all the teams and arenas.

However, the league folded after just a month, and the players of White's teams were equally distributed among the 11 remaining NBL franchises. As a consequence, every team had a 9.09% chance of landing Mikan, who ended up on the Minneapolis Lakers, playing for coach John Kundla.

In his first season with the Lakers, Mikan led the league in scoring with 1,195 points, becoming the only NBL player to score more than 1,000 points in an NBL season.[9] He was named league MVP, and the Lakers won the NBL title.

The following year, the Lakers and three other NBL franchises jumped to the fledgling Basketball Association of America. Mikan led his new league in scoring, and again set a single-season scoring record. The Lakers defeated the Washington Capitols in the 1949 BAA Finals.

In 1949, the BAA and NBL merged to form the NBA. The new league started the inaugural 1949–50 NBA season, featuring 17 teams, with the Lakers in the Central Division. Mikan again was dominant, averaging 27.4 points per game and 2.9 assists per game and taking another scoring title.

Alex Groza of Indianapolis Olympians was the only other player to break the 20-point-barrier that year. After comfortably leading his team to an impressive 51–17 record and storming through the playoffs, Mikan's team played the 1950 NBA Finals against the Syracuse Nationals.

In Game 1, the Lakers beat Syracuse on their home court when Lakers reserve guard Bob Harrison hit a 40-foot buzzer beater to give Minneapolis a two-point win. The team split the next four games, and in Game 6, the Lakers won 110–95 and won the first-ever NBA championship. Mikan scored 31.3 points per game in the playoffs.

In the 1950–51 NBA season, Mikan was dominant again, scoring a career-best 28.4 points per game in the regular season, again taking the scoring crown, and had 3.1 assists per game. In that year, the NBA introduced a new statistic: rebounds. In this category, Mikan also stood out; his 14.1 rebounds per game (rpg) was only second to the 16.4 rpg of Dolph Schayes of Syracuse.

In that year, Mikan participated in one of the most notorious NBA games ever played. When the Fort Wayne Pistons played against his Lakers, the Pistons took a 19–18 lead. Afraid that Mikan would mount a comeback if he got the ball, the Pistons passed the ball around without any attempt to score a basket. With no shot clock invented yet to force them into offense, the score stayed 19–18 to make it the lowest-scoring NBA game of all time.

This game was an important factor in the development of the shot clock, which was introduced four years later. Mikan had scored 15 of the Lakers' 18 points, thus scoring 83.3% of his team's points, setting an NBA all-time record. In the postseason, Mikan fractured his leg before the 1951 Western Division Finals against the Rochester Royals.

With Mikan hardly able to move all series long, the Royals won 3–1. Decades later, in 1990, Mikan recalled that his leg was taped with a plate; however, despite effectively hopping around the court on one foot, he said he still averaged 20-odd points per game.In the 1951–52 NBA season, the NBA decided to widen the paint area under the basket from 6 feet to 12 feet.

As players could stay in the lane for only three seconds at a time, it forced big men like Mikan to post-up from double the distance. A main proponent of this rule was New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick, who regarded Mikan as his nemesis, and it was dubbed "The Mikan Rule".

While Mikan still scored an impressive 23.8 points per game, it was a serious reduction from his 27.4 points per game the previous season, and his field goal percentage came down from 42.8% to 38.5%. He still pulled down 13.5 rebounds per game, asserting himself as a top rebounder, and logged 3.0 assists per game.

Mikan also had a truly dominating game that season, in which he scored a personal-best 61 points in a double overtime victory against the Rochester Royals. At the time, it was the second-best performance in league history behind Joe Fulks' 63-point score in 1949, and Mikan's output more than doubled that of his teammates, whose output that game totaled 30 points.

In the 1952 NBA All-Star Game, Mikan had a strong performance with 26 points and 15 rebounds in a West loss. Later that season, the Lakers reached the 1952 NBA Finals and were pitted against the New York Knicks. This qualified as one of the strangest Finals series in NBA history, as neither team could play on their home court in the first six games.

The Lakers' Minneapolis Auditorium was already booked, and the Knicks' Madison Square Garden was occupied by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Instead, the Lakers played in St. Paul and the Knicks in the damp, dimly lit 69th Regiment Armory. Constantly doubled by the Knicks' Nat Clifton and Harry Gallatin, Mikan was unable to assert himself. It was more to Vern Mikkelsen's credit that the first six games were split. In the only true home game, Game 7 in the Auditorium, the Lakers won 82–65 and edged the Knicks 4–3, winning the NBA title and earning themselves $7,500 to split among the team.

During the 1952–53 NBA season, Mikan averaged 20.6 points and a career-high 14.4 rebounds per game, the highest in the league, as well as 2.9 assists per game. In the 1953 NBA All-Star Game, Mikan was dominant again with 22 points and 16 rebounds, winning that game's MVP Award. The Lakers made the 1953 NBA Finals, and again defeated the Knicks 4–1.

In the 1953–54 NBA season, the now 29-year-old Mikan slowly declined, averaging 18.1 points, 14.3 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. Under his leadership, the Lakers won another NBA title in the 1954 NBA Finals, making it their third-straight championship and fifth in six years; the only time they lost had been when Mikan fractured his leg.

From an NBA perspective, the Minneapolis Lakers dynasty has only been convincingly surpassed by the eleven-title Boston Celtics dynasty of 1957–69. At the end of the season, Mikan announced his retirement, citing family issues. He later said: "I had a family growing, and I decided to be with them. I felt it was time to get started with the professional world outside of basketball." Injuries also were a factor, as Mikan had sustained 10 broken bones and 16 stitches in his career, often having to play through these injuries.

Without Mikan, the Lakers made the playoffs, but were unable to reach the 1955 NBA Finals. In the middle of the 1955–56 NBA season, Mikan returned to the Lakers lineup. He played in 37 games, but his long absence had affected his play. He averaged only 10.5 points, 8.3 rebounds and 1.3 assists, and the Lakers lost in the first round of the playoffs.

At the end of the season, Mikan retired for good. His 10,156 points were a record at the time; he was the first NBA player to score 10,000 points in a career. He was inducted into the inaugural Basketball Hall of Fame class of 1959 and was declared the greatest player of the first half of the century by the Associated Press.