Summary
This season marked the end of an era. It was George Mikan's last season, and the last season of the Minneapolis Laker's dominance.
Far beyond that, though, the failure of the Indianapolis franchise, which left just nine teams in the league, was a signal that the NBA had to change its style of play.
That style had largely been set by the Lakers. They brought the ball up slowly, then waited for the 6-10 Mikan to set up before setting their offense in motion. It was effective, but dull.
The league's problems went beyond Mikan and the Lakers, though. Any team with a reasonable lead late in a game went into stall mode, using an outstanding dribbler like Bob Cousy or Andy Phillip to run time off the clock. The defensive answer was to foul the dribbler. But the offensive team then got the ball out of bounds and started the stall process all over again.
The NBA made one small step toward correcting the problem by limiting a player to two fouls per quarter, with the third foul resulting in free throws. That didn't help much. The change that revolutionized the sport, the shot clock, was to come in 1954-55, after Mikan's retirement.
In this final season without a shot clock, the NBA used a round-robin format, involving the three top teams in each division, for the first round of the playoffs. The two teams with the best-round-robin records then met in the semi-finals.
The first-place Lakers from the Western Division met the East's third-place Syracuse Nationals in the championship and had a surprisingly hard time, but they won all the odd-numbered games to take a seven-game victory for their fifth title in six years.
Neil Johnson of Philadelphia won his second straight scoring title and Cousy, of the Boston Celtics, was the assists leader for the second straight year. Harry "the Horse" Gallatin of the Knicks supplanted Mikan as the league's top rebounder.
