The Oakland Oaks-Boston Celtics Basketball World Series?

In a tribute to the ongoing Fall Classic between the Dodgers and Blue Jays, it is worth noting that basketball has occasionally indulged in the highfalutin language of our national pastime. After the Oakland Oaks took the 1969 ABA championship, the team’s head coach, Alex Hannum, wired Celtics president Red Auerbach, whose own team had just stunned the Los Angeles Lakers to claim yet another NBA title, with a bold challenge: their two clubs should square off in the very first “basketball World Series” to determine who is the best team on earth.

Auerbach and Hannum were hardly strangers, as the latter had also coached in the ‘senior circuit’ between 1956 and 1968. What’s more, ‘Sarge’ had already bested Red twice in the NBA finals, with the St. Louis Hawks in 1958 and nine years later with the Sixers, bookending eight consecutive Boston titles!

Of course, neither Auerbach nor the NBA had any interest in deigning to give the upstart league the legitimacy of such a confrontation. To this day, then, Hannum’s idea of a basketball World Series has yet to get off the ground. Thanks to the quantum leap forward of international hoops in recent decades (the last four players to win the MVP have all been born outside the USA), though, there is renewed talk of an epic matchup between a team of American stars taking on their counterparts from the rest of the globe. At the very least, such a contest would revitalize the lethargic NBA All-Star Game.

In closing, we would be remiss not to mention that Chicago hosted the World Professional Basketball Tournament during the game’s semi-pro era, from 1939 to 1948. Perhaps the time is ripe for Naismith’s wondrous invention to fully adopt the jargon of its older brother?