How the NBA went from nothing to "nothing but net"
David George Surdam is an associate professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa and the author of Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression.
"A fascinating story about the evolution of the NBA. Surdam's command of the economic history of the formative years of the NBA is flat-out impressive. He tells a compelling story of the role of a small group of owners who stayed with the sport and the league when it was always on the verge of financial collapse and then began to cash in when the league caught on in the 1960s, a long-shot gamble that paid off big." James Quirk, co-author of Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports
Basketball fans need only read the first sentence of Surdam's introduction, in which he explains what the National Basketball Association (NBA) is, and see that the last third of the book is made up of tables, notes, and bibliographic references, to get the drift that this is not aimed at them. Rather, Surdam (economics, Univ. of Northern Iowa; Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression) utilizes a tremendous amount of data to examine how the nascent NBA survived its early lean years. He concludes that the league owed its success to owners' willingness to innovate (e.g., with the introduction of the 24-second shot clock, the forcing out of small-market franchises, rapid albeit belated integration, allying with television broadcasting, etc.) despite absorbing large financial losses. It is a shame that his analysis includes only the NBA's first 15 years, ending in 1961, well before the arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, who, conventional wisdom holds, revived a league that was moribund during most of the 1970s. VERDICT The eyes of academicians might light up at this study, but those of average sports fans may glaze over. Recommended for its appropriate audience in the business of sports.-Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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