The National Industrial Basketball League was founded in 1947, to enable mill workers a chance to compete in basketball. The league was founded by the industrial teams (teams sponsored by the large companies and made up of their employees) belonging to the National Basketball League (NBL) that did not join the National Basketball Association when the NBL merged with the Basketball Association of America.
The league first year, 1947–48, featured five teams in an eight-game schedule—the Milwaukee Harnischfegers (which won the round robin schedule with an 8-0 record), Peoria Cats, Milwaukee Allen-Bradleys, Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, and Fort Wayne General Electrics. The following season, with a 16-game schedule, the new lineup was league champion Bartlesville Phillips 66ers (15-1 record), Denver Chevies, Peoria Cats, Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, and Milwaukee Allen-Bradleys.
In the 1949-50 season, with the addition of the Dayton Industrialists making the league a six-team circuit, the Phillips 66ers repeated as champions. The league expanded again in the 1950-51 season to eight teams, adding the Oakland Blue 'n Gold Atlas and San Francisco Stewart Chevolets. The Dayton team became the Dayton Air Gems, and the Phillips 66ers repeated for their third consecutive title.
Read more about National Industrial Basketball League: High Point of League Expansion, End of The Phillips 66ers Winning Streak, Teams, Trivia, Standings, League Champions
Famous quotes containing the words national, industrial, basketball and/or league:
“Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice.”
—Paul West (b. 1930)
“The industrial world would be a more peaceful place if workers were called in as collaborators in the process of establishing standards and defining shop practices, matters which surely affect their interests and well-being fully as much as they affect those of employers and consumers.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)