Danny Biasone, Ex-Team Owner And N.B.A. Innovator, Dies at 83
By Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr.
May 27, 1992 - The New York Times Archives
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May 27, 1992, Section D, Page 19 Buy Reprints
Danny Biasone, the former team owner who rescued professional basketball from an impending demise by inventing the 24-second shot clock, died on Monday at University Hospital in Syracuse. He was 83 years old and died of a blood infection, his family said.
If there was ever a "Why-didn't-I-think-of-that?" idea, it had to be Mr. Biasone's brainstorm that required pro basketball teams to take a shot within a fixed time after getting possession of the ball.
Until Mr. Biasone, a bowling-alley proprietor who owned the old Syracuse Nationals, persuaded the National Basketball Association to introduce the 24-second clock at the beginning of the league's ninth season, in the fall of 1954, the sport had degenerated into a lackluster game of keep-away.
Teams ahead in the fourth quarter would simply stall for time, passing the ball back and forth, dribbling away from opponents while crowds moaned and headed for the exits. Although teams rarely used a game-long stall, which the Fort Wayne Pistons employed on Nov. 22, 1950, to defeat the Minneapolis Lakers, 19-18, the league's lowest-scoring game, it was not uncommon for five or more minutes to pass without a single shot from the floor. Simple Arithmetic
As the 1954-55 season approached, so many fans had been walking out that the league, which had lost 9 of 17 franchises in four years, seemed headed for oblivion.
For all the obvious appeal of a shot clock, it took Mr. Biasone three years to persuade the N.B.A. to go along with his idea. He derived the number simply by dividing the estimated average number of shots a game over the previous three seasons (120) into the 2,880 seconds of a 48-minute game.
In August 1954, several owners went to Syracuse, where Mr. Biasone, using pickup teams that included Dolph Schayes and other stars of the Nats, staged a demonstration at his alma mater, Vocational High School. The owners were impressed enough to use the clock during the exhibition season, and by the time the season opened it was a fixture.
Results were immediate and striking. Average team scores rose 14 points the next season, to 93 points a game, an 18 percent increase, and the number of teams scoring 100 or more points in playoff games jumped from 3 to 18. 'The Patron Saint'
The faster, more exciting high-scoring game also appealed to fans, and the league's commissioner, Maurice Podoloff, who died in 1985, was ever after outspoken in his praise of Mr. Biasone, calling him "the patron saint of the N.B.A."
"The adoption of the shot clock was the most important event in the N.B.A., and Danny Biasone is the most important man in the N.B.A.," he once said.
Mr. Biasone, who was born in Italy on Feb. 22, 1909, came to the United States at the age of 10 and settled with his family in Syracuse.
He was a star quarterback in high school, and afterward held a succession of jobs before he and a partner opened a restaurant in 1936. In 1941 he bought a property that became the bowling alley he operated until his death.
It was in 1946 that he established the Nationals franchise in the National Basketball League, a forerunner of the N.B.A. In 1963 he sold the franchise, now the Philadelphia 76ers.
Although he was never elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, where a special exhibit honors his accomplishment, his invention of the shot clock did not go unrewarded.
In the final playoff game of the clock's first season, 1954-55, Mr. Biasone's Nationals came from behind to win their only championship.
Mr. Biasone is survived by his wife, Rachel, and a nephew, Joseph.
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