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1953 - 1957
The claim: Starred for a Fort Wayne team, with one honest boundary. George Harry Yardley III (3 November 1928 - 12 August 2004) was a Stanford forward from Hollywood, California, whom the Fort Wayne Pistons drafted in 1950 and signed in 1953, after he kept his amateur standing for a run at the 1952 Olympics. The boundary is his most famous feat: the first 2,000-point season in NBA history came in 1957-58, after the franchise had moved to Detroit, and this section does not move it back. What belongs to Fort Wayne is everything that made it possible.
The Fort Wayne years: Yardley scored 4,380 points in four Fort Wayne seasons, a springy-legged jump shooter whose turnaround jumper the Hall of Fame biography still singles out, and he led the Fort Wayne Pistons to the NBA Finals in 1955 and again in 1956, the franchise's two championship-round appearances in this city, both lost. Those Finals teams are the summit of Fort Wayne's years in the top division of American professional basketball, and Yardley was their best player; the News-Sentinel's Top 50 project ranked him third among the century's Northeast Indiana athletes, behind no Piston of his era.
The Detroit coda and the honour: In the Pistons' first Detroit season Yardley averaged 27.8 points a game, scored 51 against Boston on 15 January 1958, and closed the season with 2,001 points, breaking George Mikan's record of 1,932 and becoming the first man to score 2,000 in a season of only 72 games. He was a six-time All-Star who averaged 19.8 points for his career. In 1996 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the second Fort Wayne Piston to enter, following McDermott. The Hall's own biography begins his story where this section does: he played for Fort Wayne, and his Fort Wayne teams reached the Finals.
Sources:
- Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, George Yardley biography: the Fort Wayne and Detroit seasons, the two Finals, the 2,001 points.
- News-Sentinel, Northeast Indiana Top 50 project, Yardley profile (egen.fortwayne.com): the 4,380 Fort Wayne points and the 1996 induction.
- Detroit Free Press, Pistons draft history, 24 August 2020: the 1958 scoring season in detail.