(Editor’s note: Welcome back to The Athletic NBA 75. We’re re-running our top 40 players to count down every day from Sept. 8-Oct. 17, the day before the opening of the 2022-23 NBA season. This piece was first published on Jan. 3, 2022.)
If you’re an NBA fan, you know George Mikan was professional basketball’s OG big man. He did almost everything anyone has ever done in the NBA before anyone else did anything in the league.
Oh, you’re not too familiar? To the biographical box score we go:
- Did Mikan get cut from his high school team like Mike?
- Was Mikan kidnapped (well, maybe not kidnapped, but strategically detained) so he wouldn’t leave town without signing a contract as the Clippers did to DeAndre Jordan in 2015?
- Did the NBA sell the game and the league based on Mikan’s marquee-worthy star power and, on occasion comically, at the expense of the team much like the NBA promotes LeBron vs. KD, Steph vs. Giannis today?
- Can Bob Pettit, Karl Malone and Tim Duncan, among others, thank Mikan for the position where they made their Hall of Fame careers — power forward?
- Was Mikan so dominant close to the basket that the NBA changed the size of the lane to dampen his dominance as it did for Wilt Chamberlain?
- Could he put up numbers so otherworldly that teams would do anything to stop him, including stall, which in turn caused a crisis so debilitating that the NBA changed the rules again, and in turn, saved the league?
- Be the first NBA player in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and in the first class?
- Oh, and as commissioner of a rival league, did he approve of a rule (yes, another rule) that, thanks to analytics, has changed the philosophy of the modern NBA game?
- Have a bed made by inmates from a state penitentiary? (Uh, OK, that one, as far as I know, is unique to Mikan.)
OK, OK, we get it, dude. He was a trail blazer long before there was a franchise in Portland. But …
Yes, imaginary narrative foil, I can hear the wheels in your head turning while contemplating this because there is always one question about a pre-shot clock player that gnaws at observers of the modern game: Does a guy who played in that era belong here? At No. 35 in The Athletic’s NBA 75 countdown?
This is not about whether you’d rather have Mikan instead of Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This list is as much about the impact of that player in NBA history. And, to be honest, Mikan is probably far too low on our list at No. 35 if we were to apply that line of thinking. In terms of impact on the NBA, Mikan is without a doubt top 10, maybe top five. You could even argue the top three. He may not resonate with the kids (or even Gen Xers), but Mikan is that important to the NBA and its history.
Bud Grant, Mikan’s Lakers teammate from 1949-51, and Pro Football and Canadian Football Hall of Famer, who coached in four Super Bowls and multiple NFL Hall of Famers, thinks so.
“I’ve played pro football, coached pro football, played pro basketball and played a lot of baseball, so I’ve been around athletes my entire life,” said Grant, 94, in a telephone interview with The Athletic, “and I don’t know (current athletes) personally, but I follow a lot of sports, I know something about all those sports having played them and, in my career, George Mikan was the greatest competitor I’ve ever been around.”

Mikan was a huge draw for the fledgling NBA. (Associated Press)
Still, how can a guy who retired seven decades ago be that important to the NBA?
Glad you asked. But before we get to Mikan’s career numbers, which look somewhat pedestrian by today’s standards (spoiler alert: they are, and they’re not), let’s look at what Mikan, the first, great, dominant center in basketball history, represented at the time: efficiency.
And I’m not talking modern basketball efficiency with a 3-point line — which, of course, didn’t exist — but shots-at-the-rim efficiency. Because before Mikan, even that level of efficiency didn’t exist.
To understand Mikan’s influence, you need to understand how different the game was in 1941, when Mikan was a freshman at DePaul. Basketball may have been 50 years old at the time, but the game was still in its relative adolescence. The rule mandating a jump ball at half court after every made basket had been eliminated only three years before. Jump shots were new and unusual and were considered showing off. Attempting one could get you benched.
At the time, the game was controlled by quick guards who worked the ball around until they got a good shot, which was either a layup attempt or an open two-handed set shot from more than 25 feet. Ironically, basketball’s big men were looked down upon. They were seen as “uncoordinated,” “cumbersome oafs,” “galoots,” “goons” and “freaks.” They, in the parlance of the day, “gummed up the works” of a game fueled by guards whizzing around the court. Big men were there to get the rebound, then get out of the way.
Mikan’s initial tryout for Joliet (Ill.) Catholic High School team lent some credence to this perception. Already self-conscious about his height, he also wore those now-familiar thick, horn-rimmed glasses … but not during tryouts. A gangly Mikan, who had never played basketball anywhere but his yard, squinted his way through.
In a team huddle, Father Gilbert Burns asked Mikan why he was squinting. Mikan, according to Michael Schumacher, author of “Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, The Minneapolis Lakers and the Birth of the NBA,” mumbled something about bright lights. When Burns told Mikan no one else seemed to have a problem with the lights, Mikan admitted to not wearing his glasses. Burns still had two cuts to make to get the team to 12 players. He asked Mikan for his uniform.
“You just can’t play basketball with glasses on.”
Mikan left Joliet Catholic, and — while wearing his glasses — played for Quigley Preparatory Seminary on Chicago’s North Side, two hours from his Joliet home, and then for the freshman team at DePaul University, where he enrolled with the intent to become a lawyer. He played well enough in a scrimmage against the varsity that someone suggested he go to a good basketball school. A tryout was set up with Notre Dame coach George Keogan and assistant Ray Meyer. Again, Mikan, who didn’t know he had broken his right foot a few days before, did not impress. He remained at DePaul.
“No matter where a tall guy went in those days, there was always someone to tell him he couldn’t do something,” Mikan once recalled to the Chicago Tribune.
Mikan got a break when Meyer got the head gig at DePaul in 1942. Meyer saw Mikan’s potential but knew he didn’t have much coordination and coaching. Meyer set out to change both. But first, Mikan had to learn … to dance.
To tap into Mikan’s potential, Meyer took to turning Mikan from a human pinball who banged and stumbled his way around the court into an unstoppable force by using what we today would call cross-training. Meyer, according to Schumacher, hired “a co-ed” to teach Mikan to dance to improve the center’s footwork. He had Mikan hit the speed bag and jump rope with the boxing team. He made Mikan chase a 5-foot-5 guard around the gym to improve his speed. Mikan wouldn’t jump when he put up a hook shot, so Meyer had Mikan jump over a bench while shooting.
But the most important drill was one Meyer devised to help Mikan develop ambidexterity, a drill coaches still use to this day — the “Mikan Drill.” The two spent six days a week one summer working out as Mikan perfected the drill, laying the ball up with his left hand on the left side of the hoop, catching the ball and keeping it above his head (because no one could reach it there) as it came through and laying the ball up with his right hand until his legs turned to jelly.
Mikan’s newfound ability close to the hoop represented a dramatic shift on both ends of the floor. No one had played near the rim, let alone above it. Hell, goaltending hadn’t even been defined yet, as Mikan, playing center in Meyer’s zone defense, would stand in front of an opponent’s hoop and knock shots away. Coaches and fans had a fit. No one had thought of goaltending, because players such as Mikan, and 7-foot Bob Kurland of Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) hadn’t been around. In 1944, the NCAA finally banned the practice.
On offense, Mikan’s and Meyer’s (the M&M Boys) summer workouts unleashed a force for the next three years unlike the game had ever seen. With Mikan, DePaul went to the NCAA Final Four in 1943 and won the NIT in 1945. His 53 points against Rhode Island in the ’45 NIT semis is still a DePaul record, and Mikan remains fifth on the Blue Demons’ all-time scoring list with 1,870 points. The M&M Boys were 81-17 in their time together.
After his final season at DePaul, Mikan had a choice: go to law school or play pro basketball, which was at the bottom of the sports pecking order. But thanks to his unprecedented college career, Mikan received numerous offers from teams in the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) but chose to stay in Chicago (and sleep in his eight-foot-by-six-foot bed made by Illinois State Penitentiary inmates), joining many former DePaul teammates with the Chicago American Gears of the NBL for the unheard-of five-year, $60,000 contract. He suited up for the Gears just before the 1946 World Professional Basketball Tournament, scored 100 points in five games and helped the Gears to a third-place finish in the tournament. It would be the last time a team with a healthy Mikan didn’t win a professional title.
When Gears owner Maurice White cut Mikan’s brother Joe, he also wanted to cut George’s salary in half. George held out, lawsuits were filed and the Gears stumbled to a 9-10 record. With Mikan back, the Gears finished 26-18 — good for third in their division — and went on to win the 1947 NBL title.
Using Mikan’s star power as his meal ticket, White, after being denied the NBL’s commissioner’s position, had the bright idea of breaking away from the NBL and forming a 24-team league called the Professional Basketball League of America (PBLA). Pro basketball now had three leagues: the NBL, the BAA and the PBLA. Predictably, the PBLA struggled against the two established leagues and folded two weeks into the season.
As the PBLA imploded, the NBL’s Detroit Gems went bankrupt. In their one season in the NBL, the Gems had been a disaster. They finished 4-40 and were lucky to draw dozens of people to their home games — if people could find them. The Gems had no home arena. Minnesota businessmen Ben Berger and Morris Chalfen were convinced by sportswriter Sid Hartman that a pro basketball team would be good for Minneapolis. Berger bought the rights to the franchise for $15,000, and there was a new team in the NBL — the Minneapolis Lakers. (Fun fact: If you type Detroit Gems into a Google search, you’ll get the most recent Lakers score.)
With many of the PBLA players having defected from the NBL, the league put all PBLA players — including Mikan — into an NBL draft disbursement pool, and the Lakers, formerly the 4-40 Gems, had the No. 1 overall pick. The Lakers and general manager Max Winter surprised no one by choosing Mikan.
Mikan didn’t want to uproot his family from Chicago. His wife, her relatives and his relatives were in the area or close by. Minneapolis was a haul, and as cold as Chicago could get in the winter, cold is different in Minnesota. In Chicago, he also could finish his law degree and start a practice.
But Mikan flew to Minneapolis to listen to Winter and Hartman’s pitch to play for the Lakers. Getting Mikan to the Twin Cities didn’t seem to be a problem, but keeping him there was. After hours of talk, no deal had been struck, and Mikan and his lawyer scheduled a flight back to Chicago. Mikan asked Hartman to drive him to the airport. Hartman said yes, but he and Winter had no intention of getting Mikan to his plane on time.
“Lakers general manager Max Winter and I,” Hartman wrote in his obituary for Mikan in the Star-Tribune in 2005, “negotiated with Mikan, who wanted $12,000 a year, which was a lot of money in those days. The story has been told before how Mikan broke off negotiations with us, and I drove him to the airport to catch the day’s last flight to Chicago.
“Winter suggested, in Hebrew, that I make sure he missed his plane home. Well, I went north instead of south, and (he) missed the flight. Mikan had to stay here overnight, and the next day we signed him to a three-year deal for $12,000 per year. It was the same contract given to our other star player, Jim Pollard.”
Thanks to some impromptu wrong turns, the Lakers had a centerpiece to a future dynasty.
By teaming Mikan with Pollard, a speedy, athletic small forward, the Lakers steamed toward a 43-17 record and first place in the NBL’s West Division. Mikan, who averaged one-third (21.3) of the Lakers’ 64.1 points per game, was even better in the playoffs, scoring 244 points in 10 games as the Lakers rolled to the 1947-48 NBL title, Mikan’s second title in as many professional seasons.
The heavily East Coast-based BAA, being in direct competition with the mostly Midwestern NBL, was desperate for a player of Mikan’s impact on the floor, but more importantly, with the star power to put people in seats. So, it did what most rival leagues had done throughout the early histories of their respective professional sports: it raided the NBL of its best teams.
Before the 1948-49 season, the BAA took the Lakers, their rivals, the Rochester Royals (now the Sacramento Kings), and the Fort Wayne (now Detroit) Pistons — with the biggest star, Mikan, of course being the main reason for the pilfering. In turn, the champion Lakers had traded the small towns of Sheboygan, Wis., Oshkosh, Wis., and Anderson, Ind., for the big arenas in Boston, Philadelphia and New York City.
Mikan’s presence in the BAA represented a paradigm shift in a sport’s offense. In the two seasons before Mikan and the Lakers joined the BAA for the 1948-49 season, the league’s average field goal percentage was an astonishingly low .279 in 1946-47 and a not-much-better .284 in 1947-48. (The NBA didn’t average .400 field goal shooting per team until the 1959-60 season, Wilt Chamberlain’s first.)
Mikan, meanwhile, scorched the league to the tune of 1,698 points for an astronomical 28.3 points per game on .416 shooting. Mikan’s total points and his average were easily BAA records. He also shot more free throws (689), made more free throws (532) and contributed nearly twice as many win shares (20.9) as the Warriors’ Ed Sadowski (10.7) in second place. It was the first of three consecutive 20-plus win-shares seasons for Mikan. Only Chamberlain, with six, had more, and only Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan had as many, with three seasons apiece. LeBron James and Oscar Robertson are the only other players with a 20-plus win-shares season in NBA history.
That first season, the Lakers would sweep their way through the Chicago Stags and Rochester Royals en route to defeating Red Auerbach’s Washington Capitols 4-2 in the finals for the Lakers’ first BAA title, Mikan’s third pro title in as many seasons. Mikan played with a broken right wrist in the last two games. No worries. He scored 51 points in those two contests.
”I had a right-handed hook, and everyone had been overplaying me,” Mikan told The New York Times in 1997. ”One summer, Coach Meyer had me shoot a thousand hook shots a day, 500 from each side.
”My lefty hook became better than my right, and it was hard for anyone to stop me.”
By this time, Mikan’s dominance as a player on the floor and status off it was unquestioned. He was pro basketball’s first superstar at a time when pro basketball desperately needed a larger-than-life figure. Mikan more than provided it in the media capital of the United States — New York City. Mikan was no stranger to “sophisticated” New York basketball fans, having played in, and dominated, the NIT at Madison Square Garden on 50th and 8th Avenue. When he and the Lakers were scheduled to play the Knicks in December 1949, the game was billed as “Geo. Mikan vs. Knicks” on the MSG marquee. Mikan gave the folks a show with 38 points, but the Knicks — apocryphally five against one — won the game, 94-84.
The loss to the Knicks dropped the Lakers to 14-7 at the time as they struggled to incorporate rookie Vern Mikkelsen into the offense. Both Mikan and the 6-7 Mikkelsen were centers. Lakers coach John Kundla decided to play a double pivot, with the two centers near the hoop. One problem: the lane, being six feet wide, was clogged with both big men, and the Lakers stumbled to a 16-10 start.
Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be Mikan. Kundla moved Mikkelsen out of the post and had him face the basket. Mikkelsen said it took him two years to learn the new position, but essentially, he became basketball’s first power forward.
The Lakers, led by Mikan’s 27.4 points per game, went 35-7 the rest of the way, tying the Rochester Royals for the Central Division crown. The Lakers then proceeded to go 11-2 in the postseason, defeating the Syracuse Nationals four games to two to win the first championship under the National Basketball Association banner in 1950.
In an era in which most teams averaged between 80 and 84 points per game, Mikan averaged an astronomical 31.3 points per game to earn his fourth pro title in as many seasons. That same year, Mikan was named the best basketball player of the first half of the 20th century.
Not only was Mikan a skilled, tall man at 6-10, but also he was wide at 245 pounds. His No. 99 stretched across his chest as if the uni top were a size too small. When Mikan planted himself on the right block, three feet from the hoop, he was immovable and virtually unstoppable.
“He was big,” Grant said, “and he was heavy, and when I say heavy, he was big-boned, strong and in good shape, of course. He was a big, strong presence on the inside of the game.”
Mikan was, in modern parlance, a bucket. He may have had his best season in 1950-51, dominating the NBA on both ends of the floor. He led the league in points (1,932), points per game (28.3), field-goals made (678) and free-throws made (576).

Lakers coach John Kundla and Mikan celebrate the 1952 NBA title, the fourth professional title in five years for the duo. (Associated Press)
Yet, the Lakers wouldn’t win the title in 1951, as a broken ankle hobbled Mikan in the postseason. He tried to play on it, but without Mikan at full health, the Lakers fell to the rival Royals in the Western Division finals.
The Royals series hadn’t been the first time Mikan played through broken bones, sprains and approximately 160 stitches throughout his career. In a welcome-to-pro-ball moment, Mikan lost four teeth his first week with the Gears thanks to an elbow from Oshkosh center Cowboy Edwards. Mikan soon learned to give as good as he got, and when questioned by reporters about his rugged method, Mikan lifted his shirt to reveal a bevy of bruises and welts, none of them self-inflicted.
“What do they think these are?” Mikan said as Bill Jauss recalled in the Chicago Tribune. “Birthmarks?”
Grant, who had been a starter for most of the teams he played for in his career, was a Lakers reserve. He had a front-row seat for game-by-game walloping opponents gave Mikan. The angrier he got, the better Mikan played.
“I got to observe from a different perspective of being on the court and sitting on the bench and watching George and knowing how beat up he was getting,” Grant said. “They tried to push him out of the middle, and they’d put their big hatchet men on him and beat on him and push him and shove him.
“He didn’t fight back, he played back. He didn’t get in scuffles. They’d beat on him and he’d just turn around and put the ball in the basket. Knowing and being that close to a great player like George, and playing with him, I got a better perspective of what a great competitor he was.”
Mikan could give as good as he got. His elbows, the ones he would lead with on hook shots from the low post, were nearly lethal. “Without a doubt, he had the sharpest elbows that God ever made, and I mean that sincerely,” former college teammate and pro foe Jack Phelan said.
“You know that statue out there in Minneapolis,” Phelan continued, noting the Mikan statue outside of the Target Center in Minneapolis, “part of my teeth are on that statue.”
Lakers teammate Swede Carlson loved running opponents into Mikan screens.
“He could raise that left elbow and move to the basket, and the bodies would just start to fly,” Carlson was quoted in Schumacher’s book. “I used to like to pass him the ball, cut out around and then listen to the sound the guy guarding me made when he ran into George.”
Throughout the years, teams tried other ways to stop Mikan and the Lakers, namely stalling after getting a lead. The most infamous example was when Mikan scored 15 of the Lakers’ 18 points in a 19-18 loss against Fort Wayne on Nov. 22, 1950. While Mikan and this game are not directly responsible for one the most significant rule changes in the history of sports — the 24-second shot clock — it’s often pointed to as one of the reasons for it.
Even though the Lakers lost to the Royals, the NBA had seen enough of Mikan’s low-post dominance. Although everyone tried to find a center to counter him, no team could find a match for Mikan. So before the 1951-52 season, the NBA itself tried to slow Mikan as it widened the lane from six feet to 12. It didn’t help.
After not making the finals in 1951, the Lakers would go on to win the next three NBA titles, giving the franchise that was bought in bankruptcy for $15,000 five BAA/NBA titles in six seasons, and Mikan seven pro titles in eight seasons. Mikan retired after the 1953-54 season, months before the NBA instituted the 24-second shot clock. He would then move into the Lakers’ front office before coming out of retirement in 1955-56, but he was too slow for a now-lightning-fast game, playing in a career-low 37 games that season and averaging a career-low 10.5 points per game. He retired after the Lakers lost to the St. Louis Hawks in the postseason.
When he called it quits, Mikan held the NBA record for most points (10,156), points per game (23.13), field goals (3,544), free throws (2,974) and most win shares (108.66). Mikan is still 66th overall in that advanced stat, ahead of other Hall of Famers such as Julius Erving, Elgin Baylor and Allen Iverson.
And if that’s not impressive enough, he came up big when his team need him most. His teams were 18-2 in postseason series, and his 31.3 points-per-game in the 1950 postseason was the single-playoff best until another Laker, Baylor, surpassed it in 1960, six seasons into the shot-clock era. Mikan did all of this in a little more than six seasons in the BAA/NBA.
According to The New York Times’ Robert Lipsyte, Mikan may have received his greatest compliments from the great centers who followed in his low-post footsteps.
”You were my hero,” Bill Russell told Mikan in Cleveland at the NBA at 50 ceremonies in 1997. ”I studied everything you did.”
And Chamberlain, at Russell’s side, said, ”Put me in that category, too.”
Mikan was a game changer after his playing days, as well. After a desultory stint as Lakers head coach in 1957-58, in which he went 9-30, Mikan was elected to the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame’s first class in 1959. Eight years later, Mikan had his hand in basketball history again, this time as commissioner of the American Basketball Association in 1967, instituting the now-iconic red, white and blue basketball and, more importantly, the 3-point line, a rule borrowed from Abe Saperstein’s failed pro league from the early ’60s. The NBA would adopt the 3-point line before the 1979-80 season.
Without an NBA pension and struggling with diabetes, Mikan died in 2005. Another great Lakers center, Shaquille O’Neal, paid for Mikan’s funeral.
Nearly seven decades after Mikan retired, the game we see today has many indelible marks that trace to Mikan.
“He literally carried the league,” Bob Cousy, the Boston Celtics Hall of Famer, told The Associated Press after Mikan’s death. “He gave us recognition and acceptance when we were at the bottom of the totem pole in professional sports.”
“He showed us how to do it,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “I certainly would not have the hook shot that went in if it wasn’t for the fundamentals I learned from George Mikan’s game.”
“He showed the world a big man could be an athlete,” Chamberlain told USA Today in 1996. “Not just some big guy who could hardly walk and chew gum at the same time. He was a splendid athlete. He was the first true superstar of the league.”
So, does Mikan belong at No. 35 on this list?
“He would bring his game up to another level as things got tough and tighter,” Grant said. “I learned that there are players who can do that and players that go the other way and can’t do that. George was the epitome of the tougher the game, the tougher he played.
“The greater the competition, the greater he competed. As I mentioned, he’s the greatest competitor I’ve been involved with.”
Career stats: G: 439 Pts.: 23.1, Reb.: 13.4, Ast.: 2.8, FG%: 40.4, FT%: 78.2, Win Shares: 108.7, PER: 27.0
The Athletic NBA 75 Panel points: 549 | Hollinger GOAT Points: 326.0
Achievements: Six-time All-BAA/NBA, Four-time All-Star, BAA/NBA champ (’49, ’50, ’52, ’53, ’54), Scoring champ (’49, ’50, ’51), Rebounding champ (’51), Hall of Fame (’59), NBA Silver Anniversary Team (’71), NBA 35th Anniversary Team (’81), NBA at 50 (’96), NBA 75th Anniversary team (’21)
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photo: DePaul University Special Collections and Archives)