Yesterday, the NBA announced that they are awarding Fort Wayne with a Development League (aka D-League) expansion team, bringing pro-basketball back to town. I say back because what's virtually unknown outside of Fort Wayne is that more than 50 years ago, in fact 1941, the Fort Wayne Pistons were founded by Fred Zollner, an area industrialist who built pistons for Ford and GM. Jim Hareas writes:

The Zollner Pistons competed in the National Basketball League (NBL), which began as the Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935 and changed its name in 1937 with hopes of attracting a larger fan base. It was a league that was ahead of its time when it came to the marriage of professional sports and corporate commercialization, boasting such team names as the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets.

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In those days, you would drive into town and look for the biggest building,” recalled Jeannette, like McDermott, a Basketball Hall of Famer. “We drove up to this bar and I got out of the car and ran inside and I said to the bartender, ‘Hey, we are supposed to play a basketball game in this town today, can you tell me where it is?’ He said, ‘This is the place.’ I looked around and there were tables all over the place. After we got dressed they had shoved all the tables back and put a basket on one wall, and on the other side they had a basket drawn up into the ceiling. The referee drew a big circle on the middle of the floor, and a net dropped down around the floor. And the damnedest fight you ever saw started. That was a real education.”

In 1948, the Pistons, along with three other teams from the NBL, joined the Basketball Association of America. It was a merger in which Zollner played a pivotal role in overseeing. The BAA then adopted a new name prior to the 1949-50 season, the National Basketball Association.

The revenue streams weren’t exactly flowing, considering that the Pistons played the majority of their games at Fort Wayne’s North High School. It wasn’t until Zollner convinced the city to build an all-purpose arena so they would finally have a big-league home. The Pistons surged to the NBA Finals versus the Syracuse Nationals in 1955 and because no one in this northern Indiana city had expected them to reach the championship series, the arena was already booked, having previously scheduled a bowling tournament, forcing the Pistons to play Games 3, 4 and 5 in Indianapolis.

“He was really disappointed,” said Danny Biasone, the owner of the Nationals and inventor of the 24-second shot clock, said of Zollner. “He said, ‘I’m moving the team to Detroit.’ And that's what he eventually did."