1949-50 NBA 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 1950 NBA Finals were the first championship series played under the newly formed National Basketball Association, created earlier that year through the merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League. The defending BAA-champion Minneapolis Lakers, anchored by George Mikan, faced the Syracuse Nationals, who had posted the league's best regular-season record and won the Eastern Division. The best-of-seven series opened in Minneapolis on April 8 with a tight 68-66 Lakers win, and Syracuse answered the next night, taking Game 2 91-85. After a gap for travel, the Lakers won Game 3 91-77 on April 14 and Game 4 77-69 on April 16 to take a 3-1 lead. Syracuse forced a sixth game with an 83-76 win in Game 5 on April 20, but Minneapolis finished the series in Syracuse on April 23 with a lopsided 110-95 victory. Game 1 of this series is historically notable for featuring what is often cited as the first known buzzer-beating shot in NBA/BAA Finals history: Lakers guard Bob Harrison hit a shot from roughly 40 feet away at the final buzzer to win the game, an early example of the kind of dramatic finish that would become a hallmark of NBA Finals lore in later decades. George Mikan, who led the entire league in scoring during the regular season at 27.4 points per game, was again the dominant force for Minneapolis, closing out the clinching Game 6 with a 40-point performance. Syracuse's Dolph Schayes, a future Hall of Famer in his own right, averaged 16.8 points per game for the Nationals and represented the growing generation of stars who would help legitimize the newly unified league. This championship gave the Lakers their third consecutive professional basketball title, following the 1948 NBL championship and the 1949 BAA championship, a remarkable run across three different leagues in three consecutive years that cemented Minneapolis as the first true dynasty of the professional game. The merger that created the NBA for this season was itself a major structural milestone, unifying a fractured professional basketball landscape and setting the stage for the sport's growth over the following decades. The league that season featured a mix of larger media-market franchises and smaller-city clubs like Syracuse, Fort Wayne, and Sheboygan, a reminder of how geographically and economically unsettled professional basketball still was even after unification. The Lakers' win affirmed Minneapolis as the league's flagship franchise entering the 1950s, a status the team held until it eventually relocated to Los Angeles later in the decade.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 1950 NBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference: 1950 NBA Finals