1947-48 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 1948 BAA Finals pitted the Baltimore Bullets against the defending-champion Philadelphia Warriors in a best-of-seven series that ran from April 10 to April 21, 1948. Philadelphia drew first blood, winning Game 1 on the road in Baltimore 71-60, but the Bullets responded by taking three straight: 66-63 in Game 2, 72-70 in Game 3, and 78-75 in Game 4, all tightly contested single-digit outcomes that put Baltimore one win from the title. The Warriors staved off elimination with a 91-82 win in Game 5, forcing a Game 6 back in Baltimore, where the Bullets closed out the series decisively, 88-73, on April 21 to claim their first and only BAA/NBA championship. The Bullets' title was a landmark moment for the city, representing, per historical accounts, the first professional sports championship ever won by a Baltimore-based team. Baltimore remains to this day the only defunct franchise ever to win a BAA/NBA championship; the team struggled financially in subsequent seasons and folded partway through the 1954-55 season. Joe Fulks again led Philadelphia's scoring in the Finals, but this time it was not enough, as Baltimore's balanced, physical style of play proved the difference. Baltimore was led by player-coach Buddy Jeannette, a future Basketball Hall of Famer who guided the Bullets from the court while also directing them from the bench; his title with Baltimore is credited as the first championship won by a player-coach in professional basketball history. As with the 1947 Finals, the format of the 1948 BAA playoffs was unusual and worth noting. Rather than a clean bracket built strictly around division champions, the league again ran a runners-up playoff bracket alongside the main divisional bracket, and Baltimore advanced to the Finals through that runners-up bracket rather than by winning its division outright. Specifically, Baltimore worked through the runners-up bracket by eliminating the New York Knicks and Boston Celtics from the East before beating the Chicago Stags, the Western runners-up, in a best-of-three series to reach the championship round; Philadelphia, meanwhile, needed a full seven games to see off the St. Louis Bombers in its own semifinal series before advancing as the Eastern Division's top seed. This structure, which produced Finals participants that were not division champions in both 1947 and 1948, was used only in those two seasons before the league moved to more conventional seeding. The full playoff tournament that year spanned roughly a month, with the championship series itself stretched over twelve days, including several back-to-back and closely spaced games typical of the era's grueling travel-heavy playoff scheduling. This period represented the BAA's uncertain second season, played amid financial struggles for several franchises and ongoing competition with the rival National Basketball League for players, arenas, and fan attention. Both leagues would merge the following year to form the NBA. The 1948 championship is often remembered as a triumph of a smaller-market, up-and-coming franchise over the league's marquee early superstar in Fulks, and it underscored just how unsettled and top-heavy the league's competitive landscape still was in these formative years.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 1948 BAA Finals
• Basketball-Reference: 1948 BAA Finals
• Wikipedia: Buddy Jeannette