Pistons Got Their Start in Indiana

The last time the Pistons played for the NBA championship, they called Fort Wayne home, and when members of the original team weren’t on the court they were turning out truck pistons in Fred Zollner’s factory.

The Pistons got their start in Fort Wayne 40 years ago.

Their story capsulizes the change of professional basketball in America: semi-pro teams scrapping for dollars during World War II, then organizing the NBA, and later abandoning the smaller markets where owners couldn’t make enough money.

Zollner’s Fort Wayne Pistons lived their NBA glory days just before the industrialist moved his team to Detroit in 1958. They competed for the NBA title in 1955 and 1956, and top players like forward George Yardley commanded salaries that reached $15,000.

The Pistons lost in both championship playoffs, the first to the Syracuse Nationals by one point in the seventh game, then to the Philadelphia Warriors in five games. Attendance dwindled to a hardy few at the 10,000-seat Memorial Coliseum.

The move to Detroit looks inevitable only in hindsight.

“I think it came as somewhat of a surprise, although it was general knowledge Fred Zollner not happy with fan support he was getting,” said Hilliard Gates, the former Pistons’ play-by-play announcer and now vice president of WKJG-TV.

“We were sort of the Green Bay of pro basketball, in a small city,” said Carl Bennett, 72, who was the team’s first coach and general manager. “But when the league went to 82 games, 41 games at home, there was no way we could support it in Fort Wayne.”

Bennett led the team from the local YMCA industrial league into the old National Basketball League in 1941.

“When the Pistons were in the NBL, the players worked for the piston company on a weekly wage,” Bennett said. “And that’s all they got until the end of the season when money left over was divided.

“On the first year, the players got around $2,500.”

The Piston name was linked to early rule innovations that today’s fans take for granted, Bennett said.

The 24-second shot clock came about after one of the greatest stall games ever ended in a 19-18 victory over the Minnesota Lakers in the early 1950s, he said. Basketball took a hint from 6,500 infuriated fans and took the basic step to open up the game.

The foul lane was widened to 12 feet from 6 feet in the late 1940s after the experiment proved a success in three Piston exhibition games, Bennett said.

Yardley, who now lives in Newport Beach, has been a staunch Laker fan since retiring from the game in 1960. A bad knee and the $25,000 price tag on the four courtside season tickets he held for 15 years at the Forum in Inglewood, leave him watching the championship series on television.

“We were very much like the present-day Lakers,” Yardley said of the old Pistons. “A finesse team, fast-breaking, not as physical as Syracuse. And I think Syracuse played very much like the Detroit Pistons do. They’re deep. They try to keep an even level of effectiveness throughout their game.”

Yardley ended his career with Syracuse, making $20,000 a year.

The history of the Pistons then and now turns up some odd parallels.

Their bid for the 1955 title collapsed with an intercepted pass with 12 seconds left. In 1987, an errant pass from Isiah Thomas cost the Detroit Pistons a victory over the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals.