The Mikan Delta

Date: 1944–1954 | Location: DePaul University, Chicago; Minneapolis Auditorium

Stakes: The physical shape of professional basketball

The Glitch: The Rulebook Never Imagined a Player Built Like This

THE SET UP

One of the world's best basketball players, George Mikan, should not have been a basketball player at all; at least that was the consensus of nearly everyone who watched him try.

Even though by fifteen he was already six-foot-eight, he was gangly and lanky; angular and graceless. His eyesight was quite poor, he could not see without his thick glasses, so he had to play while wearing them. The glasses were so thick and heavy his high-school coach called them a hazard.

The coach gave young George an ultimatum: ditch the glasses, or turn in the uniform. Nearly blind without them, Mikan handed back the uniform. But he never let go of his dream to play basketball.

During a tryout for the University of Notre Dame squad, the coach ordered his players to fire every pass at Mikan's feet, testing whether the big kid could bend and move. He couldn't, not that day, and was sent home as hopelessly awkward. "I guess they just didn't think I had it," Mikan told a reporter years later. "It just about broke my heart."

In 1942 the conventional wisdom was that too-tall players were awkward and lacking grace. It was hard to picture that they could ever be any good. Height wasn't an advantage. It was a disqualifier. Anyone over six-foot-six was treated as a novelty, and were often called, out loud, "freaks."

Two years before Mikan even put on a DePaul uniform, the 1940 national champions, Kansas, started a lineup that averaged just over six feet tall.

DePaul University took him anyway, right as the school handed its program to a twenty-eight-year-old rookie coach named Ray Meyer. Meyer's premise ran against nearly everyone in the sport. Where most coaches saw Mikan's clumsiness as proof that big men couldn't play, Meyer saw a coaching problem, not a verdict.

Meyer set aside time to work with Mikan one-on-one for six weeks. There were boxing drills and jump rope exercises to help George find his balance. George took dance lessons and was often paired up with the smallest girls at campus, to sharpen his footwork and teach his enormous body where it was in space. He also built him a simple drill: under the rim, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, repeat, and repeat again. Basketball coaches still call it the Mikan Drill.

By his reckoning, Meyer wasn't fixing a bad player. He was building an athlete the sport didn't believe could exist. It worked. By 1945, Mikan had led DePaul to the NIT title (as big as a championship got in that era). In that year's tournament semifinal against Rhode Island, DePaul won 97 to 53. Mikan scored 53 points for the DePaul Blue Demons by himself, matching the entire Rhode Island team. The kid who'd been told to turn in his uniform ended up becoming the reason college basketball had to start rewriting its rules.

THE GLITCH

Every file in this chapter asks whether a sport got better once people started copying the upgrade. Mikan's file has to ask that question three times, because one fix was never going to be enough for him.

Mikan was a menace on both ends of the court. He caused the game of basketball to glitch a number of times in a number of ways. Most of the subjects of our files lead to a single glitch remedied by a single fix. But not George.

His height made scoring easy for George, but on defense he had found something no one had thought to outlaw. He would plant himself beside the basket, and as an opponent's shot dropped toward the rim, he would reach up and slap it away, after it was already falling, sometimes inches from going in. Nothing in the rulebook forbade it. Nobody had written that rule, because nobody had ever been tall enough to need it.

In 1944, the NCAA wrote it. Defensive goaltending became illegal because of him.

But a rulebook can only ban what a player does, not what a player is.

Mikan turned pro in 1946, and the problem walked into the professional game with him: same height, same reach, a new rulebook that hadn't planned for him either. He won championship after championship and led the league in scoring year after year. A player THAT dominant presents a kind of profound imbalance, and sooner or later, someone comes looking to even the equation.

On November 22, 1950, Fort Wayne Pistons coach Murray Mendenhall found a way to cancel Mikan out. Nothing in the rules forced a team to shoot. So Mendenhall told his players simply not to.

Fort Wayne held the ball for minutes at a stretch, passing it in slow loops near half court. The logic was pure subtraction. Goaltending was already illegal, which muted Mikan on defense, and if he never touched the ball, his height barely changed the math on offense either. Erase him from both ends, and a lesser team could win.

It worked. The final score was 19 to 18. More than seventy years later it is still the lowest-scoring game in NBA history. Mikan scored fifteen of his team's eighteen points and still lost, beaten on a basket with six seconds to play.

Commissioner Maurice Podoloff was reportedly furious the next morning, calling the spectacle an insult to fans who'd paid for basketball and gotten keep-away instead. He sent every team a warning: never again. A game like that could kill the league.

THE FIX

The trouble was that the Commissioner's warning didn't come with a rule attached, and the loophole underneath the stall stayed wide open.

The league tried a narrower fix first, aimed squarely at Mikan. Basketball already had a three-second rule: an offensive player couldn't camp inside the painted lane for more than three seconds at a time. But in 1950 that lane was only six feet wide. Mikan would set up right at its edge, perfectly legal, close enough that his reach did the rest. The rule meant to keep players off the rim didn't stretch far enough to bother a man his size.

So the league didn't write a new rule. It stretched an old one. Before the 1951 season, the NBA doubled the width of the lane, from six feet to twelve, dragging Mikan's legal standing-spot twice as far from the basket. Reporters named it the Mikan Rule before the season started. And it worked, partway. His scoring fell from 27.4 points a game to 23.8. But Mikan adjusted, extended his range, and stayed dominant. He'd been moved, not stopped.

The stalling was the deeper problem, and it festered for years. Teams protecting a lead kept holding the ball, and attendance kept falling. Not until the spring of 1954 did the real fix arrive, and it came not from the league office but from Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals. Biasone believed basketball was at its best when it struck a balance: neither a stalling contest nor a wild shootout. He found where that balance lived with simple arithmetic. Two competitive teams took about 120 shots between them in a 2,880-second game. Divide one by the other, and you get 24. A team would have 24 seconds to shoot, or lose the ball.

League scoring leapt by nearly fourteen points a game in a single season. George Mikan retired three days before that season began. He was thirty years old. The fix that finally answered him arrived the year he left, and remade the sport he'd spent a decade bending.

Mikan didn't just force three rule changes. He changed what a roster was supposed to look like. Before him, a coach who found a gangly six-foot-ten kid usually tried to talk him into another sport. After him, that same coach went looking for one on purpose.

The average pro player stood about six-foot-two when the NBA's first season tipped off in 1947. Within Mikan's own decade in the league, that average had already jumped to about six-foot-five. It kept rising for another thirty years, cresting at six-foot-seven by the mid-1980s, and never really came back down. One kid in thick glasses had shown the league what a "freak" could become, and now every team wanted one.

Mikan never cheated the game. He simply outgrew it, over and over, and every time he did, the game grew with him. That is what an Upgrade looks like when it works. Not one clever move that gets banned, not one loophole quietly closed, but a player who forces a sport to become a version of itself it hadn't yet imagined. The lane got wider. The clock started counting. The rosters got taller. And basketball, at every level, has been playing the game Mikan made ever since.

RULEMAKER'S DILEMMA: When one player exposes the limits of a sport, the caretakers face a choice: cage the exception, or expand the game to hold it. Basketball chose to expand.