George Mikan died today at the age of 80. You may not know who George Mikan is, but if you watch basketball, then you're familiar with the thing he personally invented as NBA Commissioner in 1967: the three-point line. But there's something else he was indirectly responsible for: the shot clock. The following comes from David Feldman, Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life (New York: Quill, 1987), 29-31:

During the 1953-1954 season, the National Basketball League was beset by difficulties. Attendance was low; many franchises were in financial trouble.

Professional basketball's problem was not a trivial one: Fans found the game boring. Hoop fans like to see plenty of shooting and scoring, but the rules did absolutely nothing to encourage teams with a lead to shoot the ball. If a team led in the late stages of the game, the custom was to have its best ball handler dribble in the backcourt, forcing opponents to foul intentionally, resulting in tedious but profitable free throws for the stalling team. There was also no incentive for teams in the lead to run cross court and set up their offense quickly, further dragging the pace of the game.

The owners knew they had a problem, but the solution was the branchild of an unlikely savior named Danny Biasone. Biasone, a bowling alley proprietor, bought the Syracuse Nationals franchise for the princely sum of $1000. Biasone might not have held the clout within the league to comete with the Knicks or Celtics owners, but he concluded that a clock was necessary to force players to shoot at regular intervals and speed up the game.

How did Biasone arrive at 24 seconds? He figured that the average game contains about 120 shots between the two teams. Since there are 48 minutes, or 2880 seconds, in an NBA game, teams averaged exactly one shot every 24 seconds. Figuring that players would be be forced to shoot before the 24 seconds expired, a shot clock would compel teams to shoot more often and, presumably, score more often.

Biasone invited club owners to watch a demonstration of how a game would be played with a clock. All could see that the shot clock would add excitement to the game, and it was instituted in regular play at the beginning of the 1954-1955 season.

The shot clock changed basketball immediately. Scoring did increase, an average of 14 points per game in one season. Most importantly, attendance rose quickly. NBA historian Charles Paikert quoted former league president Maurice Podoloff as saying that the adoption of the clock "was the most important event in the NBA and Danny Biasone was the most important man in the NBA."

Biasone's shot clock had another effect that perhaps he did not forsee -- it changed the type of player needed to build a championship team. The Minneapolis Lakers dominated the NBA before the shot clock, led by the physically bruising but slow and lumbering George Mikan. The Lakers, with the shot clock, could no longer afford to loiter downcourt while Mikan hauled down a rebound and casually jogged down the halfcourt line. Mikan retired the year the shot clock was instituted. He returned for the 1955-1956 season, but averaged only 10 points [per game] versus a career average of 22 points, and he quit after half a season.

The shot clock was tailor-made for the team Red Auerbach was fashioning in Boston. In Bill Russell, the Celtics found a tall center who was exceptionally quick and could spark a fast break offense.

Players like Mikan could not survive in the new NBA; the AP reports that he "retir[ed] because of injuries in 1956," but Feldman provides convincing evidence that the gigantic (6'10", 250-pound) Mikan was the perfect player for the old kind of basketball, and that his retirement coincided with the introduction of the shot clock is probably no coincidence. Nonetheless, as contemporary basketball players like Shaquille O'Neal point out, he was the original basketball superstar. And, in some degree thanks to him, we now have a shot clock that makes basketball the faced-past, 100-point-scoring game that it is today.

Just in case you're curious, in the 1984-1985 season -- thirty years later -- the average number of shots increased from 120 shots in 1955 to 178 shots.