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5 Stability (1954–57) With the NBA down to eight teams, owners still faced inadequate revenues. They continued to grapple with the unattractive aspect of the league’s end games, where fouling and rough play were still the tactics of choice. How to reduce the primitive aspects of the game remained a difficult problem, but it was one with an elegant solution. The owners also needed to assess whether television would prove to be a friend or a foe. The Tough Times Continue Even in the league’s ninth season, some teams were barely surviving. Ben Kerner, owner of the Hawks, hired Marty Blake as its general manager after the team moved from the Tri-Cities to Milwaukee. Blake later reminisced that the team was $94,000 in debt when he signed on for the 1954–55 season.1 Kerner wanted to sell the team for $75,000 but received an offer of only $50,000 from aninvestorwhowantedtomovetheteamtoIndiana.Kernereventuallymoved the team again, this time to St. Louis (he would later move it to Atlanta, where the team’s wanderings ended). The St. Louis business community apparently assured Kerner that there would be at least 1,000 season ticket holders; Blake claimed there were only 55. “So we scrambled for money. We played a million exhibition games. We promoted before promotion was fashionable. I mean, we had acts such as Count Basie, Guy Lombardo, the Four Freshmen, Tommy Dorsey—all big names and they all played after our games. We gave away prizes.”2 Kerner later boasted that he would sell 3,500 season tickets for the 1960–61 season. He exercised his imagination in offering women patrons a jar of coffee costing $1.08 for each one-dollar ticket purchased. “If you [a woman] hated basketball you could still make an 8-cent profit. And this is a woman’s sport. To see those guys running around in their shorts, that’s really something. I should have thrown in bus fare.”3 The Hawks gained a measure of prosperity when they played in the 1956–57 NBA Championship Series. Kerner estimated he had lost $100,000 since buying the Buffalo NBL franchise in 1945, including $36,000 during his last season in Milwaukee (where his team took second fiddle to the newly arrived baseball Braves). Because the Hawks were his sole source of income, Kerner could not absorb large losses for as long as Walter Brown of the Celtics had.4 Even as late as 1955, a sportswriter could claim, “Profits in the NBA have been almost nonexistent, even for the big-city teams.” The reporter believed the Fort Wayne Pistons might show a profit because of the loyal fans from the city and its neighboring towns who filled the team’s 9,500-seat Coliseum . The team also played games in Elkhart and Kokomo, Indiana, and in Miami, Florida.5 In the wake of the stabilization of teams and the twenty-four-second shot clock, NBA owners began to experience a measure of prosperity. Sportswriter Jeremiah Tax reported that the Boston Celtics’ “gross receipts” rose eightfold between 1946–47 and 1956–57. He also mentioned that the defunct Chicago Stags and St. Louis Bombers teams could not even elicit bids of $30,000 for either franchise in 1950, while surviving teams were turning down offers of $200,000 by 1957.6 In addition to the twenty-four-second shot clock, Tax thought the “TV Game of the Week” on Saturday afternoons was boosting attendance. In an earlier article, Tax discussed baseball player Marty Marion’s efforts to obtain an NBA franchise. Tax listed operating expenses of $215,000, which he thought could be defrayed by charging an average price of $1.50 for 3,500 seats at thirty home games. In addition, a prospective team owner would get some revenues from selling rights to radio broadcasts and shared television money from the league’s sale of telecasting rights.7 In 1957 Sporting News reporter Bill Mokray also heralded rosier prospects. He believed the Boston Celtics were still in the red for their first ten years of operation, but that the team was valued at $350,000. The team averaged about 7,500 attendees per home game.8 Syracuse, too, experienced a transformation from red to black ink after a strong showing in the 1958–59 playoffs.9 Les Harrison was another owner of a team in a small city. He also had a lack of capital. His Rochester Royals...

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