NBA legend and Hall of Famer Bob Pettit has died aged 93.
Pettit's family confirmed that he died on Wednesday, September 23, at his home in Metairie, Louisiana. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced his death on Thursday. No cause of death has been announced.
Pettit became the NBA's first Most Valuable Player in 1956 and won the award for a second time in 1959.
He spent his entire 11-season NBA career with the Hawks franchise, initially in Milwaukee and then St. Louis, and was selected as an All-Star in every season he played.
Pettit led the St. Louis Hawks to the 1958 NBA championship and retired in 1965 as the NBA's all-time leading scorer.
He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971 and was named to the NBA's 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.
Lean Edge Thoughts...
Some NBA careers require context to understand their importance.
Bob Pettit's requires almost an introduction to the league he helped build.
When the NBA handed out its first Most Valuable Player award in 1956, Pettit won it.
When the league needed a team capable of interrupting the emerging Boston Celtics dynasty, Pettit's St. Louis Hawks did it.
When Pettit retired in 1965, nobody in NBA history had scored more points.
Those facts alone place him somewhere important in basketball history.
But numbers separated from their era don't quite explain Pettit.
He entered an NBA that looked almost nothing like the global league that exists today.
Television exposure was limited. Teams moved cities. Salaries bore little resemblance to modern professional sport. Even the way frontcourt basketball was played was still evolving.
Pettit became one of the players who helped move it forward.
At 6-foot-9, he could score away from the basket rather than simply operating with his back to it. He rebounded relentlessly. He played with the physicality expected from a big man while possessing skills that helped redefine what forwards could do.
And he produced numbers that still look startling more than six decades later.
Pettit finished his career averaging 26.4 points and 16.2 rebounds per game.
He was an All-Star in every one of his 11 NBA seasons.
He won two MVP awards and four All-Star Game MVPs.
Then there is 1958.
Boston had Bill Russell and was beginning a run that would dominate an era.
St. Louis stopped them.
Pettit scored 50 points in Game 6 of the NBA Finals as the Hawks clinched the championship.
The franchise has not won another one since.
That gives Pettit a unique place not only in NBA history but in Hawks history.
Every Atlanta team that has chased a championship since ultimately traces the franchise's last successful journey back to Pettit and St. Louis.
There is another reason his death matters.
As the NBA moves further from its earliest decades, fewer people remain who directly connect the modern league with the period in which its identity was still being formed.
Pettit wasn't watching that history happen.
He was one of the people creating it.
LEAN EDGE VERDICT
Bob Pettit's career belongs to a version of the NBA many modern fans never saw, but his place in its history hasn't faded with it.
The league's first MVP.
Two-time MVP.
Eleven seasons, eleven All-Star selections.
An NBA champion.
And, when he walked away from basketball, the greatest scorer the league had yet produced.
Statistics can be compared across eras endlessly.
Influence is harder to measure.
Bob Pettit helped establish what an NBA superstar could be before the league became the NBA the world recognises today.
He leaves behind one of the foundational careers in professional basketball history.
