Mike Celizic

The greatest compliment you can pay an athlete in any sport is to say that he or she changed the way the game was played. So let it be with George Mikan, who played basketball so long ago most modern fans are barely aware of his name. He was the first big man to rule the post, the first center so big and so skilled that the rules had to be changed to contain him.

It’s difficult to fathom what the game was like before Mikan, who stood 6-foot-10 and weighed nearly 250 pounds, became a national figure at DePaul during the years of World War II.

The jump shot, invented independently by several players — Kenny Sailers of Nebraska appears to have the best claim to being the first, although no one knows for sure — had been around only since about 1934. Before that, and for many years afterwards, the two-handed set shot ruled the game. Sailers took to jump shooting because it was the only way he could get the ball over the hands of his older brother, who was 6-5, with whom he played.

No matter who originated the jump shot, it negated a lot of the advantages of size. And for its first half-century of existence, it wasn’t necessary to be big to play basketball. Indeed, when Mikan started playing, some people thought he wouldn’t be very good because he was too tall.

In the mid-1940s, when you were officially tall if you made it to six feet, 6-10 was beyond enormous. The few people who did reach such altitude were thought of as freaks. Usually, they weren’t coordinated enough or quick enough to play a game like basketball.

Mikan broke the stereotype. He wasn’t just tall, he was also athletic. And he quickly showed what a big man who was also an athlete could do.

At DePaul, the team’s defense consisted of four guys in a box zone and Mikan standing under the basket. When a shot went up, he knocked it away before it could fall through the hoop. He could do that because until then it was inconceivable that anyone could routinely leap high enough to get a hand over the ten-foot basket, and because there hadn’t been anyone who could do it, there wasn’t any need to have a rule against goaltending.

That was the first change Mikan forced on the game. The NCAA quickly moved to install the first goaltending rule, and when he went pro in the National Basketball League, one of three predecessors to the NBA, the pros instituted the same rule.

There would be other changes instituted because of Mikan. Before he arrived, the free-throw circle was the same 12 feet in diameter it is now, but the lane was just six feet wide, giving it the look of an old-fashioned key hole and a name it retains today. To get him further from the basket, the league expanded the lane to 12 feet, a distance that was expanded again to deal with the generations of big men who came after him.

There was no shot clock in the original pro game. Fort Wayne, the original home of the Pistons, once beat Mikan and the Lakers 18-16 by freezing the ball so Mikan couldn’t have it. To prevent teams from slowing the game down in the future, the league adopted the 24-second clock.