George Mikan

It's hard to believe today, but until the 1940s basketball was considered a sport better suited to shorter men than to taller, less nimble players. George Mikan, a 6-10 giant of a man who possessed superior coordination and a fierce competitive spirit, was one of the prototypes for the dominating tall players of later decades. Towering over most of his competitors, he was one of the most effective scorers of his day, averaging 22.6 points over a professional career that lasted nine years -- one with the Chicago American Gears and eight with the Minneapolis Lakers.

Mikan was so hard to defend and to score against, in fact, that the NBA had to change its rules of play in order to keep him from completely overwhelming the league. Few players have had such a huge impact on the game. In 1950, Mikan was voted the greatest player of the first half of the century by The Associated Press.

The notion that someone could be tall enough, and jump high enough, to deflect a ball while it was above the basket was unthinkable before the 1940s. But that changed when Mikan perfected the art of goaltending -- then a perfectly legal practice because it was considered impossible when he played college ball.

"We would set up a zone defense that had four men around the key and I guarded the basket," Mikan recalled. "When the other team took a shot, I'd just go up and tap it out." He swatted away so many would-be baskets at DePaul that the NCAA decided to outlaw goaltending.

Mikan did seem to single-handedly overpower the rest of the league at times, so much so that the NBA tried to make it more difficult for him to score by expanding the width of the key, from 6 feet to 12 feet. The 24-second clock also came about because of Mikan. In a game in 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons decided that the only way they could win was to hold onto the ball and not let the Lakers have it. They ended up winning, 19-18, in the lowest-scoring game in NBA history. The league implemented the 24-second shot clock a few seasons later.