Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete)

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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete) 

Post#141 » by mopper8 » Mon Sep 13, 2010 9:41 pm

I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what happened with the Warriors that year.


I know voting is complete, but I thought I would address this some by referencing a book I just read on this time in the league.

I was thinking I would transcribe the section of The Rivalry on this season for you guys cause its not available on Google Books, but it's just way too long. The gist of the story:

Wilt stayed in great shape in the offseason. Working out, playing with the Globetrotters, etc. He started getting stomach pains when he came back to NY, tried to get his diet right (cut out hot dogs, which he apparently loved lol), but nothing. Before an exhibition game, the team Dr told him he needed to come to the hospital because of an irregularity on his EKG, and that the stomach pains might be related. He spent 3 weeks bed-ridden in the St. Mary's hospital, the doctors unable to figure out his condition.
Frustrated, he calls his Dr Stanley Lorber, who'd treated him before, and Lorber says its common for black athletes to have irregularities on their EKG and that Lorber had found the same issue in the past, its not big deal, white doctors had trouble with it. Wilt checks out of the hospital and flies to Philly to see him. Transcribed from the book about the impromptu press conference upon his departure from the hospital:

The team physician admitted that he and the other doctors had been unable to find any signs of a tumor, ulcer, or gallbladder problem that might explain Chamberlain's stomach pains. "It's a little strange," he said.
Chamberlain, who had lost weight, was weak, irritable, and depressed, with no sign of the humor he had shown when he'd first entered the hospital.
"How long will it take you to get into shape once you've been given permission to play?" a reporter asked.
"I have no idea," he said.


Goes on to say both Hannum and Mieuli were legitimately concerned about Chamberlain, for all his fauls he'd never shown signs of malingering before, especially considering the punishment he'd take in games. Hannum moved Thurmond back to C (where he played in college) from F to adjust during the preseason. Wilt gets diagnosed with pancreatitis in Philly, gets put on some meds and cleared to play. Again, The Rivalry:

Even before leaving the hospital, Chamberlain started working out, but he flew back to San Francisco in a terrible mood. After his four-week stay in two different hospitals, he was thirty-five pounds underweight and his muscle tone had deteriorated. He had missed training camp and the exhibition games, and he felt weak. He was irritated at the San Francisco doctors who had failed to diagnose his condition, and he was irritated at the Warriors management for failing to find a doctor who could make the diagnosis.


Mieuli makes a gesture to Wilt to make up for it, got him a diamond stickpin (something Wilt had suggested in lieu of rings for a championship), but Wilt, pissed, told him essentially to shove it. At this point, basically Hannum and Mieuli agree that Wilt and the Warriors are done. He's not into doing the publicity things they need to do to make money, they don't like him for it, he blames them for his extended hospitalization...they just don't get along.

They start the season without him:

In addition to Chamberlain, a number of the other Warriors were ill or injured. Tom Meschery had a broken hand and a sore ankle. Gary Phillips was recovering from an ankle operation. Guy Rogers came down with the flu. Al Attles had been playing with an excruciating charley horse. "At times," Stu Herman wrote in the Chronicle, "the Warriors look like out-clinic patients at St. Mary's Hospital."


Wilt comes back probably too early cause they're losing. Only scores 16 in his first game, only able to play 33 minutes, legs look shaky. Still plays the full 48 the next game, drops 37, and seems to get into shape fairly quickly, drops 50+ 6 times in his first 6 weeks back. Still, the Warriors don't win; they're out of sorts in large part because they'd been playing with the defensive-minded, offensively-limited Thurmond at C for almost 2 months at this point. The chemistry is all off. Then, there's this (referenced in the 63-64 thread):

Another troublesome fact was that the other teams had responded to Hannum's slow-paced offense by speeding up their own game. What worked against San Francisco, opposing coaches had discovered, was the fast break. The Warriors, with their injuries, and their ragged defense, and their unrehearsed offense, could neither counter nor contain it.


Also, San Fran seemed to win on the road with ease: they'd sell out crowds of people who came to boo and heckle Wilt ("nobody roots for Goliath"), but in San Fran, the stands were empty, the raucous road crowd firing up San Fran and the empty seats at home depressing them. Bizarrely, at one point in the season, they were undefeated on the road and winless at home. Then, Dec 4, after SF opens up a 30-point lead on Boston, Red sends in the reserves, and a rookie John Thompson elbows Wilt in the face and shatters his nose. He misses time and then has to play in a mask, as does Hightower with a similar injury that happened in the same week.

Why was Wilt traded for pennies on the dollar talent-wise?

The fact of the matter was that, less than three months into the season, Mieuli had become desperate to get rid of Chamberlain. His main concern was money. Chamberlain was making $85,000 a year, an astronomical sum at the time. When the team had drawn big crowds during its run at the championship the previous year, the additional revenue Chamberlain had been able to generate for the club had more than offset the cost of paying for hiim to play. But now, with the team in last place, attendance had slumped down below even what it had been during the team's first year in San Francisco. Some nights barely a thousand people bothered to show up, giving the Warriors the worst attendance in the league. As a result, almost one-third of the team's gate revenue was going to pay Chamberlain's salary. Chamberlain was a big draw on the road, but the NBA stipulated that all the gate revenue went to the home team, so Mieuli got nothing from his star player's out-of-town appeal


Minority owners were antsy, wanted to move the team to Oakland. Mieuli thought he could move Chamberlain to lower over-head and survive until the team built up a reliable fan base (he had weathered a similar storm with his 49ers football team). Some owners were skeptical of acquiring him, but others thought if you were smart you could probably generate an extra ~300,000 at the home gate from his presence. Knicks, Sixers, Hawks, and Lakers were all in serious talks.

With the team losing, and trade rumors very public, the team basically fell apart. The wheels came off. Player became convinced within a month they'd be playing on basically a different team. Wilt made matters worse; when he stopped trying, that meant shooting a lot, not getting anyone else involved, which only compounded the problem. They go into a tailspin. Nate Thurmond, tired of playing forward, demands a trade. Last quote and then I'll leave it at that:

As teh all-star game and mid-season break approached, Hannum felt the Warriors had 3 options. One was to stand pat, keeping both Chamberlain and Thurmond, but that made no sense with so much money going out and so little coming in. Either Chamberlain or Thurmond should go. The question was whether the Warriors should trade Thurmond for a top-notch shooter and hope that once the team's injuries healed, they could recover their fire and bring home a championship this year, jump-starting ticket sales for the following year. Otherwise, the Warriors could accept the fact that Chamberlain was simply not drawing a large enough gate to justify his salary, trade him, and rebuild the team around Thurmond, who was earning approximately $13,000, less than one-quarter of Chamberlain's salary. That was the financially prudent move, but it meant accepting as well that it would be a few years before the Warriors were championship contenders again.
Hannum personally felt the team should not trade Chamberlain, who was, after all, the leading scorer in the history of the game and the man who had gotten his team to the finals the year before. But the decision was not his to make. It was up to Franklin Mieuli, the man Chamberlain had publicly insulted at the beginning of the season.
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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (ends Mon morning) 

Post#142 » by TrueLAfan » Tue Sep 14, 2010 1:10 am

bastillon wrote:
TLAF wrote:Same issues with the Royals and Oscar, except more so. Oscar had Jerry Lucas, Wayne Embry, Jack Twyman, and Adrian Smith starting alongside him, with Tom Hawkins and Happy Hairston coming off the bench. That actually seems like a very good team, with a nice mix of scorers (Lucas, Smith), veterans (Embry, Twyman), defenders (Embry, Hawkins), and frontcourt players (Embry, Lucas) to go with Oscar. It’s not a perfect team; the bench didn't shoot well and there’s not a lot of depth beyond the #7 or #8 rotation player(s), but you could do a lot worse than a team that started Oscar, Adrian Smith, Jack Twyman, Jerry Lucas, and Wayne Embry. Three of those starters are HOF players…and the other two are pretty capable.


you're looking only at offense. they were #1 offense in the league. defensively this team was atrocious and that's why they weren't great overall. Lucas and Embry provide no shotblocking, no help defense and Lucas is a big liability as a man defender too.


I have to ask...why do you think they're atrocious? Shotblocking isn't a be-all for defense...and Wayne Embry was a tough physical defender. Tom Hawkins was a good defender. Happy Hairston was a good defender. The Royals didn't play at an especially fast pace, to the extent that we can tell (FGA and FTA are pretty much dead on the league average), and they didn't give up an extraordinary amount of points (they were exactly in the middle of the league--5th out of 9 teams—and gave up 1.3 ppg over the league average). They had some less than stellar defenders to go with those good ones, but that agrees with the conclusion that they're “fair” or “average” on defense...but far from “atrocious.”

btw...Jerry Lucas was actually a good shot blocker when he was younger and his knees were good, and was rated pretty highly on D. If you check out the google news archives for 1964 and 1965 about Lucas and “blocked shots,” you're going to get a whole lot of hits including mentions of 4, 5, and 6 block games. It helped that this year he was able to play at PF, with Embry guarding physical low post Cs (which meant, interestingly, that Lucas guarded Russell).
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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete) 

Post#143 » by Dipper 13 » Fri Mar 4, 2011 4:12 am

Wilt had no impact in the RS


Sixers went 11-3 in the first 14 games Wilt played. Don't know exactly how games Greer, Costello, & Jackson missed in the 2nd half of the season due to injury.


Sports Illustrated - April 19, 1965

I Love The Game, Baby...but It Can't Go On This Way

Because of his pride in the sport and his own contributions to it, Chamberlain proposes remedies for the flaws he feels are ruining pro basketball and answers the critics who say he has always been a loser


Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Ottum

Sorry if I've sounded like a know-it-all. But this comes from a guy who loves the game, despite his gripes. It used to make me mad—mad, hell, I mean it really burned me—to hear someone say I was a born loser. That I've never played on a winning team. But I've calmed down a lot lately. It all depends on what you call a winner. If you mean it one way, you're on a winner if you're playing .500 ball. Also it can mean that you win the number of games you should with the players you have on hand. Take the 76ers. We had a real winning look. Then Hal Greer got hurt. Then Costello. Then Greer and Costello. Then Lucious Jackson. On other teams I've been on, let's face it, all the personnel did not always measure up. Thus one high-scoring center can only do so much, right? Don't forget—I can dunk baskets all night long if they'll get the ball in there to me.




Hartford Courant - Mar 3, 1965

Hal Greer scored 24 for the losers, who played without Larry Costello in going down to their fourth straight defeat. Costello suffered a pulled hamstring muscle Sunday.



The Telegraph - Mar 6, 1965

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The Sun - Mar 7, 1965

76ers Tumble Celtics, 103-98

With its two regular guards Larry Costello and Hal Greer benched with injuries, Larry Jones, a rookie from Toledo, and the veteran Al Bianchi, teamed with Chamberlain to keep the 76ers in front.



Mar 24, 1965

The 76ers have always depended heavily on Costello to direct their running game and Costello is out for the remainder of the season with a leg injury.



Christian Science Monitor - Mar 30, 1965

The 76ers also have some injuries and particularly miss the playmaking and defense of Larry Costello.



The Sun - Mar 15, 1965

WILT SCORES 51 POINTS IN LOSING CAUSE

Coach Dolph Schayes was even more handicapped since his two starting guards Hal Greer and Larry Costello were sidelined with leg injuries.



his boxscore stats were epic in the RS too, but it didn't help his team win any more games.


Sports Illustrated - January 25, 1965

In 1963, when Alex Hannum took over as coach at San Francisco, he persuaded Wilt and the team that they could play together, still depending a great deal on Wilt but working with him. It worked. Chamberlain scored the least and assisted the most of his career, and the Warriors won the Western Division title. But this year the system has collapsed, and the Warriors are the worst in the league. True, they were hit hard by injuries—but not that hard. "Last year," an NBA official says, "they were all cutting off Wilt and working together. This year nobody moved. Wilt was forced to shoot most of the time, whether he wanted to or not. The whole team has just lost heart. These guys are pros, all right, but their attitude became 'What if we do win a few? Who can make money with this guy on the team? Who gets any kick out of playing with him?



Baltimore Afro-American - Jan 26, 1965

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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete) 

Post#144 » by Dipper 13 » Fri Mar 4, 2011 7:01 pm

On top of that we just moved from Syracuse to Philly and we are still trying to win fans and Wilt whos coming in is already a fan fav because he played here before we did and this is his hometown.

The Syracuse Nationals and there players were the most disliked players in Philly (The Oakland Raiders/Riley Knicks of there era) and now they are trying to win over philly fans. Now Wilt is returning to Philly. The Cities savior and golden child. Ill bet theres friction and alot of resentment.



Season of the 76ers: the story of Wilt Chamberlain and the 1967 NBA champion Philadelphia 76ers - Wayne Lynch

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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete) 

Post#145 » by Optimism Prime » Fri Mar 4, 2011 7:29 pm

Dipper 13 makes some excellent points! I demand a recount.
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Re: Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete) 

Post#146 » by Doctor MJ » Fri Mar 4, 2011 10:58 pm

Optimism Prime wrote:Dipper 13 makes some excellent points! I demand a recount.


Oh, I don't think you need green font on the first sentence. Dipper with another strong post there.
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