Godfathers of the Modern Game

As N.B.A. Godfathers go, Danny Biasone was by reputation, compared to Red Auerbach, more of the whacky uncle. Auerbach, the Celtics' imperious smoker of victory cigars, was indisputably the dominant coach and team architect of the league's early decades. But Biasone was its most inventive visionary.

Biasone ran the old Syracuse Nationals out of a bowling alley in that frosty upstate New York outpost and inspired the adoption of a 24-second shot clock that became — according to Maurice Podoloff — the "salvation of professional basketball."

A Russian-born and Yale-educated lawyer, Podoloff was the league's first president (now commissioner). In a New York Times story by Louis Effrat on Dec. 11, 1955, he claimed no credit for the rule change that, when implemented for the 1954–55 season, increased scoring by 13.6 points per game. Biasone, Podoloff said, had passionately advocated for the shot clock during owners' meetings.

Auerbach had actually been one of the more aggressive manipulators of the pre–shot clock game, as Bob Cousy dribbled figure eights around dazed opponents, putting games to bed and fans to sleep. In one 1953 playoff snoozer against Syracuse, an incensed Biasone watched as 106 fouls were called, 128 free throws were taken, and Cousy alone scored 30 points from the line.

"There was danger that the fans, disgusted by the continual stalling and intentional fouling throughout the final four minutes of a game, were losing interest," Podoloff told Effrat.

Life, unfortunately, doesn't always reward the most deserving. Nobody benefited more from the shot clock than Auerbach, whose Bill Russell–led Celtics would soon embark on a run of 11 titles in 13 years.

Brilliant a tactician as he was, Auerbach was certainly no prophet. Much later, sizing up the shift in leverage between owners and players following pro-labor decisions in federal courts, he forecast difficult times for the sport in a 1977 story that he wrote for TheTimes. Then Larry Bird happened. So much for Auerbach's career as a columnist.

MAY 28, 1992 Biasone as Visionary Is N.B.A. Loss by Harvey Araton

The last call Dolph Schayes would make to the old man was not unlike countless others over four decades. The subject, as always, was basketball, a game invented by James Naismith and reinvented into its current popular form by an irascible fellow named Daniel Biasone.

"They won't give me a television," Biasone complained to Schayes last Sunday from the intensive care unit of University Hospital in Syracuse.

His 83-year-old body having surrendered to cancer, his life into its final 24 hours, Biasone wanted only to watch the Portland Trail Blazers play the Utah Jazz and the Cleveland Cavaliers play the Chicago Bulls.

"Oh, Danny never stopped following the game," said Schayes, the longtime star of Biasone's great love, the Syracuse Nationals, whom Biasone outlived by 29 years.

Just a couple of weeks before Biasone's death on Memorial Day, in fact, Schayes and Paul Seymour, another former Nat, visited Biasone at his bowling alley, the Eastwood Sports Center. This was the very building in which Biasone's players would drink and be merry, or melancholy, long into the night after their games at the State Fair Coliseum and later the Syracuse War Memorial.

It was there, in 1951, that Biasone began to complain, to anyone who would listen, that professional basketball needed a clock to limit time of possession. It took three years before the rest of the National Basketball Association's owners acknowledged Biasone, saving their sport until Magic Johnson and Larry Bird could carry it prime time two and a half decades later.

Time stood still inside the Eastwood Sports Center, especially on the picture-filled walls and trophy-laden shelves of Biasone's tiny office. History reached a dead end there in 1963, when Biasone sold the Nationals and they were moved to Philadelphia. Over lunch, three basketball guys who never left Syracuse — Biasone, Schayes and Seymour — talked of the league that left them and their central New York city far behind.

"We were talking about how big and successful the league has gotten," said Schayes. "Danny had these favorite expressions, and one of them was: 'The bubble's going to burst.' He always felt that the league shouldn't grow on the back of the average fan, but that's exactly what happened. Danny was saying that the average guy can't even afford to go to a game anymore. That really bothered him. Danny was always for the little guy."

That is understandable, as Biasone, an Italian immigrant to the United States at the age of 10, stood about 5 feet 6 inches, although perhaps more important to the shaping of his conviction was the manner in which he and his Nationals were treated by the rest of the N.B.A.

Nobody liked going to Syracuse, a cold winter outpost, the last of the league's small markets, like Fort Wayne, Ind., and Rochester. When the Lakers moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in 1961, teams like Boston and New York pushed Biasone to move west, to San Francisco, the way baseball's Giants followed its Dodgers. Biasone burned when Ned Irish of the Knicks would say: "What does Syracuse versus New York look like on the Madison Square Garden marquee?"

From his office in the bowling alley, Biasone turned a deaf ear on all pleas to surrender Syracuse. He held on as long as he could. He continued to sit on the bench at home games, appointing himself assistant coach when the league ruled it off limits to owners, while suffering the sport's nightly highs and lows.

Johnny Kerr, the onetime Nationals center and now a broadcaster for the Bulls, remembers returning to Syracuse in the wee hours by plane in a snowstorm from a losing road game. As the players descended the stairs, they came upon Biasone, his face frosted, his hat and coat covered with snow.

"Can't we beat anybody?" the owner mumbled as the players trudged...