Top 100 NBA Players: #85

Max Zaslofsky

You may have noticed that I didn't include Max's standing in other ranking systems above this paragraph. There is a good reason for this: He wasn't included in any of them. Many people tend to ignore the very early years of the NBA (or BAA as it was called for 3 years), but there were some pretty good players back then, and Zaslofsky was probably the league's first star player, even before George Mikan came along.

In 1946-47, the very first year of the BAA, Zaslofsky was named to the All-BAA First Team at only 21 years old, and he remained the youngest player named to the First Team for nearly 50 years, when LeBron James took that honor away from him. With all of the great young players who have come through since then, wouldn't you have thought one of them would have made the First Team? As it stands, he is still the second-youngest ever given that honor.

In 1947-48, he led the league in scoring and would have been named the MVP if the award existed back then. His 21.0 points per game doesn't look so impressive today, which may be another reason that he is overlooked, but the average team only scored 72.7 per game back then, because there was no shot clock to increase the speed of the game. If you adjusted his scoring average for today's faster-paced league, his average would be 28.8, which is considered a pretty good average.

Another reason people don't remember him is that his best years were spent with a team that no longer exists. He was named to the All-BAA or All-NBA First Team in each of his first four seasons with the Chicago Stags, but when they went out of business in 1950, his rights were given to the New York Knicks in the dispersal draft. The fact that there is no team around to celebrate his accomplishments makes him more likely to be forgotten.

Zaslofsky never won a title as a player, but he did play in the NBA Finals 4 times, twice as the best player on his team, and once as its second option. The fourth appearance was after his prime, but the fact remains that he was largely responsible for 3 teams appearing in the NBA Finals, a huge accomplishment in any era.

From the chart, it does not appear that he belongs in the same league as Chris Bosh, who I featured yesterday, but when you take the era into account, you realize that they were not that far apart, as the following pace-adjusted chart shows.

He may not have lasted nearly as long as Bosh or other players do today, but with the 3 seasons of leading teams to the finals as a top-2 player, which Bosh has never done, he has to be placed above him on the list of all-time greats. If he were transported into today's NBA, he would probably get destroyed, but the fact still remains that he had a big impact on the league when it was still forming, and that counts for something, in this case recognition as the 85th-best player of all time.