1953 NBA All-Star Game

Result

MVP: George Mikan

Box score

Bench (10+ points): Neil Johnston (11)

Bench (10+ points): Larry Foust (10)

Game context

The third All-Star Game, played January 13, 1953, at Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, marked two firsts that mattered far more to NBA history than the final score. It was the first time the West beat the East in the series, breaking a streak of two straight Eastern wins, and it featured Boston Celtics forward Don Barksdale becoming the first African American player ever to appear in an NBA All-Star Game, a milestone in the league's slow integration only a few years removed from Chuck Cooper, Nat Clifton, and Earl Lloyd breaking the NBA's color line in 1950. The game itself was a defensive, low-scoring slog even by the standards of the pre-shot-clock era: the two teams combined for just 154 points, a total that stood for decades as the lowest combined scoring output in All-Star Game history, with the East shooting only 37.9 percent and the West 35.4 percent from the field. The contest stayed tight through three quarters with repeated lead changes before the West finally pulled away in the fourth, outscoring the East 22-20 in the period, sparked by Rochester's Bob Davies reeling off eight consecutive points down the stretch to help seal a 79-75 win. George Mikan anchored the West's win from the post, finishing with 22 points and 16 rebounds on 9-of-26 shooting while playing all 40 minutes, workhorse numbers typical of Mikan's stat lines that season, and was named the game's Most Valuable Player, the formally-established award's first true presentation (retroactively applied to the two prior seasons' winners as well). Boston's Ed Macauley led all Eastern scorers with 18 points, while Syracuse's Dolph Schayes again did the dirty work on the boards with 13 rebounds; the East's offense was more balanced overall, with four players reaching double figures, while the West leaned heavily on Mikan and Fort Wayne's Larry Foust, who added 10. The choice of Fort Wayne — a small-market, blue-collar host by the standards of the league's marquee cities — reflected the still-unsettled geography of the early-1950s NBA, in which teams from Fort Wayne, Syracuse, Rochester, and Sheboygan coexisted with the bigger markets of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, several years before a wave of relocations reshaped the league's map. As with the prior two games, rosters were chosen entirely by sportswriters, who selected ten players per division without regard to position and excluded voters from picking players from their own home cities. The West's breakthrough win, paired with Mikan's individual dominance, foreshadowed the shift in on-court power that Mikan's Minneapolis Lakers were enforcing across the league's championship rounds during these same years, even as the All-Star series itself would swing back toward Eastern control for most of the rest of the decade.

Sources

• Basketball-Reference — NBA All-Star Game History
• Basketball-Reference — NBA & ABA All-Star Game MVP (Kobe Bryant Trophy)
• Wikipedia — 1953 NBA All-Star Game