Origins of Speed The Coach Who Invented the modern NBA 🏀

The NBA is faster than ever. Data shows players are running further and faster than at any point in history. But where did this obsession with speed come from?

It started with a "jailbreak." In an era of peach baskets and standing still, Coach John B. McLendon introduced a radical system: press, run, and shoot in under 8 seconds.

In this Episode 

• How the 1944 "Secret Game" (88-44 score) foreshadowed the high-scoring blowouts of the modern NBA.
• Why McLendon's "full court pressure" philosophy is the ancestor of today's defensive schemes.
• The direct link between a 1940s "lab" in Durham and the fast-paced highlights you watch on your phone today.

Speed isn't new. It was just waiting for the world to catch up.

Transcript

 It's dramatic. The pace difference is dramatic. This team tonight has really upped their pace, um, compared to last year in a, in a league that prioritizes speed, like this is the fastest paced NBA that we've ever seen. I think across the league, ev everybody understands now we have all the data players are running faster and further than ever before.

 This is a story about speed, how basketball and speed came together in the first place. This year. I've been hearing a bunch. I fast the game moves and that this is the fastest pace ever, but that got me thinking. Where did the, the fast break. Come from and who came up with it in the first place because basketball's origins are all about peach baskets and standing and knocking the ball out of the hoop with a stick.

Not exactly the type of fair that we saw last night in the NBA cup or that we're seeing throughout basketball College Pro or even at the lower levels. I am Aaron Meyer, and this is Iconic Seasons. The McClendon Effect,

the eight second idea. Imagine a coach demanding a shot every eight seconds. In the 1940s when most college games crawled to the final scores in the forties, maybe the fifties, that wasn't a tweak. It was like jailbreaking your phone. Who is the man behind it? John b McClendon.

He was a protege of Dr. James Naismith, the architect of the modern fast break, and a revolutionary who used a whistle the way some people use a bullhorn.

Today we're gonna trace the blueprint from his segregated Kansas childhood to Durham, North Carolina to a Sunday morning in 1944 when a locked door and a hush crowd of zero and an 88 to 44 score announced a new kind of basketball freedom

Act one hiawatha to Lawrence finding the game.

Hiawatha Kansas, 1915. John b McClendon is born to an African American father and a Delaware Native American mother. He's 10 when he sees his first basketball game. 10 When the gears start turning. He grows up under the shadow of segregation, signs, customs, and you can be here but not there of American life.

Yet the game, the game is a different language. Movement, spacing, rhythm, a puzzle you can solve if you're willing to run. By 1933. McClendon set his own course to study at the University of Kansas under the games inventor, Dr. James Naismith. Not rumor, not legend, the man himself.

When John arrives in Lawrence, he becomes the first black student in kus Physical education program. He seeks out Naysmith. Politely, persistently with the respect of a student and the hunger of a future architect. What does Naysmith teach him? Not a playbook or a philosophy. Keep the ball and the players in constant motion attack where the ball is, the game is meant to be played, not held.

It is insane to think about the fundamental nature of basketball being created. We look to reinvent it these days. But the excitement of this moment must have been incredible. Literally for the first time doing something in basketball, and you can still see it. You can feel the tweaks that still burst this type of excitement when people change the way the three pointers used.

McClennan soaked all this up. Movement was his morality. Pace was his purpose. But campus is still campus. He's cut repeatedly from the all white Jayhawks team. He faces the daily grind of small cuts that become big scars, then an early act of courage. The swimming pool in Lawrence is segregated. McClendon with naysmith support lead a push to desegregate it.

He is not a headline. He's a student, but he's learning a lesson that he'll carry for a life. Use the institution's rules to confront the institution's fears.

By 1936, he becomes kus first, black graduate in physical education, degree in hand, philosophy in his heart, and a memory bank full of what it costs to ask for a fair game.

Act two, the Durham Lab building the fast break. 1937 Durham, North Carolina. North Carolina College for Negroes. Today it's North Carolina Central University. McClennan arrives as an assistant and becomes the head coach by 1940 and starts doing something audacious. He makes the basketball court his own laboratory conditioning was brutal in the best way.

Practiced tempo, uncomfortable the way he designed it. His defensive philosophy, pressure from end to end, his standard, a shot in eight seconds. Get the ball, push the ball, trust the pass. Live with the Ms. Hunt, the rebound. Do it again. Well, the nation's average college game, AMED along, or maybe even crawled.

McClendon's Eagles sprint into the eighties and nineties in 19 43, 44. They're the highest scoring college team in America.

Opponents try to hack the system. Some tighten the nets, some deaden the ball to steal seconds, so the coach starts carrying scissors with him. If you wanna slow us, you'll have to do it in front of me, but his laboratory is also a sanctuary. The players brilliant, disciplined fast, are also denied the stage they deserve.

Tournaments are closed, media's thin, and Jim Crow is thick. So McClendon does what innovators do. He finds a workaround. First, a hint. In 1942, he arranges one of the earliest integrated college games, an all black team versus a white team from Brooklyn College. Quiet, careful, courageous, a win, a seed planted, and two years later, he plants a whole forest.

Act Three Durham 1944. The world is at war. The South is still under Jim Crow. The laws are not soft suggestions. They're etched into the walls, into the signs of daily life. McClendon wants his players to feel the measure of competition. They're denied to know there's good or better than any team they can't legally face.

What's his solution though? A clandestine game with Duke University. Students from the medical school played in secret on a Sunday morning. He clears the gym. No crowd, no band, no headlines. The doors are barred. The teams walk into the floor. That feels like a stage and a trap all at once. His players carry more than uniforms.

They carry the weight of a system that tells them they're lesser.

One player would later say, even if you believe in equality, there was still that feeling inside. Segregation doesn't just wall you out, it tries to move in. Tip time, the ball floats, touches down and something beautiful happens. Speed passing lanes like shortcuts, defense that breeze down your throat. Duke had never seen a pace like this, and the scoreboard tells one story 88 44, but there's a second act.

After the game, the players mix in scrimmage, black and white Jersey scrambled, just hoopers. They talk, they laugh, they compare calluses in a building that could get them arrested. They deliver a quiet sermon. The only color that counts is the orange in your hands.

Act four context. The walls outside the gym. Why the secrecy? Because the rules outside the sidelines are not a game. Professional lanes are narrow. The New York Renaissance, the Rens have barnstormed their way to dominance. 85% wins across, uh, thousands of games, yet they still live outside the mainstream.

Applause, the Harlem Globetrotters dance and Dazzle to survive, sometimes hiding brilliance behind their comedy to soften the rooms that would otherwise have thrown them out. In 1949, the NBA forms without black players quotas and fit will haunt the league's early decades in college. The NCAA shutters, the idea of opening its postseason to black colleges, casting the slur of jungle ball questioning whether black coaches are competent enough.

This is the Air McClendon breeze and it clarifies his mission If the front door is locked, build a side entrance. If the system doubts black coaches when and ways the system cannot ignore, so he organizes he networks HBCU coaches. He becomes a strategist of both X's and O's and R's and C'S rules and culture.

In Durham, he keeps teaching movement. In meeting rooms, he drafts the first sketches of a bigger court

Act five. The lab becomes a lighthouse.

The genius of McClendon is that he makes radical ideas feel inevitable. The fast break. Where pushing pace, because pace equals pressure and pressure creates mistakes. Full court press, why give you peace in the back court when anxiety can steal your lunch money

conditioning. If you can run a mile a minute, you turn close games into an avalanche. Players buy in because it works and because he asked them to be more than athletes. The three Ws, no wine, no weed, no women, they aren't puritanical skulls. They were APAC for his teams. Not just trying to win the game, trying to win the future, and the community showed up.

Crowd swell, sometimes integrated crowds in places where the word is still whispered. In 19 43, 44, as the highest scoring team in the land. North Carolina College is a beacon. Not because the newspaper says so, but because every opponent knows.

So think about the audacity. A black coach in the Jim Crow South, building a machine on tempo and trust, and then using that machine to invite white opponents to face something they've never faced. Basketball is honest. It reveals you and your team.

One more note about that. 88 44 people remember that number and they should, but the margin is only part of the message. The rest lives in the mixed scrimmage afterward in the laughter in the blow. That didn't fall in the future that did

sometimes the most revolutionary noise is the kind the world doesn't hear right away.

/

What speed feels like. Close your eyes. Well, unless you're driving ball out, one dribble, head up center, lane Runner wings fill, hit ahead, pass two strides, glass eight seconds reset. That's what McClendon taught. If you've ever watched a modern team fly and transition, if you watch any NBA team right now and thought, wow, that looks like jazz.

You're hearing his chart.

Act six costs and courage. What innovation asks of you?

Innovation costs. It costs wind in your lungs and doubt in your gut. And friends who say, why not slow down? What are you doing? For McClennan, it costs. Knights wondering if the next step forward, we'll invite a step back from the wrong hands. It costs the humility to accept that a brilliant scheme doesn't matter if the world refuses the stage, but he keeps going.

He sees the overlap between strategy and society. If we can increase the number of possessions in a game, maybe we can increase the number of chances a generation gets if we can prove that black coaching competency isn't just adequate, but elite, maybe we can pry a door into the postseason walls.

Durham becomes proof of concept. The secret game became a legend and McClendon. He becomes a coach with a cause that knows how to set a back screen.

There's another truth here. Belief McClendon wants his players to believe they're as good as any white player better if they put in the work. That's not arrogance, that's antidote. Against any culture that says stay small. He scripts a game where you must play big.

Act seven, coach an inventor. The Naysmith thread. All right, let's circle back to Naysmith. The inventor didn't hand John a trophy. He handed him a question. What is the game for? For Naysmith, sport was about moral formation, body, spirit, mind. For McClendon, it becomes a moral momentum. Body, mind, spirit, society.

Constant movement isn't just offense, it's ethic, attack where the ball is means attack, where the barrier is. You can draw a straight line from the Peach basket to the eight second shot clock in John's head from the whistle in Springfield to the Whisper in Durham Run. Don't ask permission.

Act eight

side doors become front doors by the late 1940s. The pressure McClendon others apply, starts to show committees form the case for inclusion builds. The NAIA will become the first national tournament to open an at large path for HBCUs in the 1950s.

But we'll get into that in part two. Right now stand in the 1940s with me. The secret game is over. The scores are wiped. The gym empties the doors. Un bar the law remains.

The world doesn't change overnight yet something has changed.

A set of black students walk off the floor with a new certainty. The boundary is imaginary. If you're brave enough and organized enough to cross it, the secret game became a shared blueprint.

We call this an iconic season, not because there's a banner in an arena, but because it's a pulse in the game's bloodstream.

McClendon's Laboratory in Durham didn't just change how fast we ran. It changed why we run. Eight seconds is more than a tempo. It's a theology of urgency. Full court press is more than a tactic. It's a way of refusing to surrender an inch of the world to fear. And the secret game, it whispers across decades.

Sometimes the most important victories don't have ticket stubs. Next time we'll sprint into the 1950s, we'll watch the side doors become front doors, NAIA inclusion demands that integrated hotels and restaurants at the tournament site and the launch of a threepeat at Tennessee that forced the nation to adjust its lens.

If this story moved, you share it with a teammate, a coach, or that friend who swears the fast break is poetry. Subscribe to iconic seasons. Leave a review. It helps more hoop heads. Find these hardwood histories and send us a voice memo.

Until next time, keep your dribble low and your eyes up.