MrGoat wrote:I have a question. How prominent was recruiting professional players out of college in the pre NBA days, say the 40s and earlier. I do know that some of Mikan's contributions to the game occurred in his college days. I suppose I'm asking how college basketball affected the development of pro basketball in the really early days
Collegians were present in the pro game to some extent from quite early on in the sport's history, but for the first few decades it wa mostly incidental. The first season in which major leagues existed, 1898-99, featured only two college players (both from UPenn), and from there it grew to a little over 10% of the professional population by 1910, nearly 25% by 1920, over a third by 1925, and surpassed half by 1935-36.
That being said, for most of that time these were either regionally or locally acclaimed players for the most part, or guys who tried out for the team who had just happened to play college ball but weren't guaranteed a spot on the team because of it. There was a pipeline from pro players to college coaches, but not much of one from college players to pro players. I don't believe a single Helms All-American signed with a pro team straight out of college until Howard Cann of NYU joined the Paterson Crescents in 1920-21. And there weren't any who made a tangible impact on the pro game until the 1930s.
Enter Eddie Wilde, assistant coach for the Brooklyn Visitation pro team. It wasn't uncommon for some of the best college teams to do a barnstorming tour professionally after their graduation, and the St. John's starting quintet of Mac Kinsbruner and Allie Schuckman at guard, Mac Posnack and Rip Gerson at forward, and Matty Begovich at center, who had just gone 88-8 over the last four years, all graduated together in 1931, did just that, and hired Wilde as their tour manager. The next fall, Wilde convinced them to turn professional permanently together and wrangled them a spot in the new MBL (which would later merge to become part of the ABL) as the Brooklyn Jewels. They were contenders for the next five years, won a league championship and made two others, and all five players played seven years or more, three of them over a decade. Kinsbruner was the best pro player of the 1930s on the white side of the sport, Schuckman and Begovich were both also major stars, and Posnack was one of the decade's best defenders. They were soon joined in the ABL by five other East Coast college stars.
But the expansion of top-level basketball to Midwestern industrial teams just a few years later was far more significant. Johnny Wooden, now known of course as one of the greatest coaches ever but then a National Player of the Year and National Champion with Purdue, opened the floodgates in a major way when he signed to play part-time with the Indianapolis Kautskys before there really even was a league in the area, just a year after the St. John's boys. When the MBC (the forerunner to the NBL) came into existence three years later, he was joined by Leroy Edwards, who skipped his last two years of collegiate eligibility to turn professional right after becoming the first underclassman in the history of the sport to win Player of the Year, as well as eight others of the previous two years' All-Americans, that being a firm majority of the NCAA's All-Americans who hailed from the Midwest and/or Rust Belt. The Pittsburgh team signed as many Duquesne players as they could find, Dayton did the same with Ohio State alums. From the very beginning, eight of the nine original MBC teams had more college players--often high-profile stars--than players without college experience. That right there, the foundation of the league that would two years later become the NBL, was the real beginning of elite-level college ball serving as a feeder for the pro game.
