December 30, 1936: Hank Luisetti Revolutionizes Basketball

December 30, 1936: Hank Luisetti changes the game of basketball forever.

A forward, he took his Stanford University team, defending Champions of the Pacific Coast Conference, into the old Madison Square Garden in New York, to play the Number 1- ranked team in the country, Brooklyn-based Long Island University.

New Yorkers, who, even then, thought they knew everything about basketball, and that their teams had practically invented it (this while Dr. James Naismith was still alive), had heard that Luisetti had taken shots with just one hand. This was blasphemy: You had to use both hands, to steady your shot and make it more accurate. One-handed shots were took risky, unless you wanted to use a hook shot.

But Luisetti not only used one hand, he used jump shots. Combining the two? This was madness. Well, on this night, it was a glorious madness. He scored 15 points, but that was a big total in those days. Stanford beat LIU, 45-31, not merely ending the Blackbirds' 43-game winning streak, the longest in college basketball history to that point, but blowing them out.

"I'd get the ball, take a dribble or two and jump and shoot on the way up," Luisetti explained. "I didn't jump and shoot at the height of my jump, the way they do now. I'd let the ball go right near my face. I'd push and shoot, off my fingertips."

"Hank could take over a game like Michael Jordan if he had to," said former Stanford teammate Don Williams. "He was an absolute artist on the basketball court." Certainly, Ned Irish, head of basketball operations at Madison Square Garden and eventually the founding owner of the New York Knicks, thought so: Thinking that Luisetti was the only player who could singlehandedly sell out an arena the size of The Garden, he invited Stanford back for a Holiday Festival in 1937, and they won again. Two nights later, on January 1, 1938, in Cleveland, they played Pittsburgh school Duquesne, and won 92-27. In that game, Luisetti became the 1st player in NCAA history to score 50 points in a game.

Luisetti led the Stanford Indians -- they became the Cardinal in 1972 -- to 3 straight Conference Championships. This was before there was an NCAA Tournament, but they were voted National Champions in 1937.

He arrived on the scene too late to make the 1936 Olympics. He kept his amateur status by playing for Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) teams, including the Olympic Club of his hometown of San Francisco, but the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled due to World War II. He served as a Navy officer, but developed spinal meningitis, ending his basketball career, ruining Irish's hopes of making him the Knicks' 1st star.

In 1950, when he was only 34 years old and should still have been playing, the Associated Press voted him 2nd behind the still-active George Mikan on their list of the top basketball players of the 1st half of the 20th Century. He was a charter inductee into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He ran a travel services company, and died in 2002, at the age of 86.

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December 30, 1936 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football seasons were over. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And no NHL games were scheduled. So there were no other scores on this historic day.