Bobby McDermott: the greatest player in the world, in a piston town

1941 - 1946

The claim: Starred for a Fort Wayne team. Robert Frederick McDermott (7 January 1914 - 3 October 1963) was a 5-foot-11 guard from New York whom Fred Zollner brought to Fort Wayne in 1941 for the first season of his Zollner Pistons in the National Basketball League, on a five-figure salary, after McDermott had played against the Pistons the year before and shown Zollner exactly what he was buying. What he was buying was the best two-handed set shot the game had known, and the player who would run the team from the floor as its player-coach.

The Fort Wayne years: From 1941 to 1946 McDermott was at his peak and the Pistons were the league's terror: nearly eighty percent of their games won, three consecutive regular season titles from 1943 to 1945, the NBL playoff championships of 1944 and 1945, and three straight titles at the World Tournament in Chicago, where the nation's best professional teams met. McDermott led Fort Wayne in scoring five straight years, led the league in scoring in 1942-43, was named the league's Most Valuable Player five consecutive seasons, and finished as the NBL's all-time leading scorer with 3,583 points, totals gathered in an era of slow-down basketball when twenty points in a game marked a scorer.

The standing: In 1945 a panel of the league's coaches voted McDermott the greatest player in professional basketball history, a verdict the modern game has forgotten and the Fort Wayne record has not. His career ended in 1950; he was killed in an automobile crash at Yonkers, New York, in 1963, at 48. The game's memory caught up late: in 1988, twenty-five years after his death, Bobby McDermott was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the first Fort Wayne Piston so honoured, and the standard against which every Fort Wayne professional since is quietly measured.

Sources:

1. From Way Downtown, Bobby McDermott: Blast from the Distant Past (Jim McDermott's account, written for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, 2016): the Zollner signing, the five MVP seasons, the 1944-45 titles, the 1945 vote.
2. News-Sentinel, Northeast Indiana Top 50 project, McDermott profile (egen.fortwayne.com): the set shot, the five scoring years, the 1988 induction.
3. National Basketball League scoring leaders record: the 1942-43 scoring title and the 3,583 career points.
4. Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, inductee list, 1988.