1946-47 BAA Finals

Result

Games

Finals MVP

The Finals MVP award was not introduced until 1969; no Finals MVP was named for this series.

Series context

The 1947 BAA Finals closed out the very first season of the Basketball Association of America, the league that would merge with the rival National Basketball League three years later to form the modern NBA. The Philadelphia Warriors, coached by Eddie Gottlieb, met the Chicago Stags in a best-of-seven series, though it ended up needing only five games. Philadelphia took control immediately, winning Game 1 by a comfortable 84-71 margin on April 16 and following up with an 85-74 win in Game 2 the next night. The series then shifted to Chicago, where the Warriors edged the Stags 75-72 in Game 3 to move within one win of the title. Chicago avoided the sweep with a narrow 74-73 victory in Game 4, but Philadelphia closed things out back home on April 22 with an 83-80 win, capped by a clutch late jump shot from Howie Dallmar. The Warriors' championship run was built around Hall of Fame forward Joe Fulks, one of the first true scoring stars in professional basketball and a pioneer of the jump shot at a time when most players still shot set shots or hook shots. Fulks led all playoff performers with 222 total points in the postseason and was electric in the Finals, reportedly scoring 29 points in the second half of Game 1 alone. His scoring outbursts were remarkable for the era, when team totals in the 70s and 80s were the norm and individual 20-point games were still relatively rare. An important quirk of this inaugural postseason: Philadelphia did not actually win the BAA's Eastern Division during the regular season. The BAA's original playoff structure funneled division runners-up into a separate bracket, and the Warriors advanced to the Finals out of that runners-up bracket rather than as an outright division champion, while Chicago won the Western Division outright. This unusual arrangement (used only in the league's first two seasons) meant the eventual champion did not have to be a division winner, a format the league would soon abandon in favor of more conventional bracket seeding. For the Stags, this was the only Finals appearance in franchise history; Chicago folded just three years later, in 1950, one of several charter BAA franchises that did not survive the league's shaky early years. The 1947 Finals thus stand as the foundational championship of a fledgling professional league still finding its footing, played in front of modest crowds in a basketball landscape dominated at the time by college basketball and older barnstorming professional circuits, but one that set the template for the NBA Finals that would follow.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 1947 BAA Finals
• Basketball-Reference: 1947 BAA Finals