By the Numbers: 1960-61 versus 2010-11

[Michael Anthony]

I was looking at Bob Pettit's season averages on BasketballReference, and was blown away by his production... One thing lead to another, and I started comparing this year's Celtics to the Celtics 50 seasons ago:

PG: Cousy - Rondo
SG: S. Jones - Allen
SF: Ramsey - Pierce
PF: Heinsohn - Garnett
C: Russell - O'Neal

Field Goals: 3,699 - 3,023
Field Goal Attempts: 9,295 - 6,219
Field Goal Percent: .398 - .486
Attempts / Game: 117.7 - 75.8

Free Throws: 2,062 - 1,459
Free Throw Attempts: 2,804 - 1,895
Free Throw Percent: 73.54% - 76.99%
Attempts / Game: 35.49 - 23.11

Points: 9,460 - 7,913
Points / Game: 119.7 - 96.5
Opp Points / Game: 114.1 - 91.1

Some interesting conclussions:

• Free throw shooting is as good as it ever was
  Free throw volume was pretty suprising
  The number of missed shots was staggering
  I wonder if the game was more up and down, or if it was more about offensive rebounds and missed putbacks

[oldmanspeaks]

A few things to remember. First they shot fouls immediately with a lot of fouls being one and one (you have to make the first to get the second). So any big man was going to be fouled immediately. The "paint" was much smaller which made it easier to defend. There were no 3s so if you wanted to score a lot of points you had to shoot a lot.
Traveling was actually called so there were fewer drives to the hoop. You couldn't push off as much as an offensive player which made shooting more difficult. 
Because there were far less teams everybody had shot blocker in the middle.
On the other hand, people worried about the shot clock too much and they tried to force it inside too much which seldom worked. It was basically fast break basketball and if you didn't get it down the court, you ended up with relatively poor shot.

[nickagneta]

There was also the unwritten rule of only two black players per team and teams like St Louis and others had 0 black players. Basically only two players in the entire league played modern day, above the rim basketball, Bill Russell and Elgin Baylor.

The game was much more high contact with slow, plodding, muscular big men literally getting into fights on a game in game out basis. Fighting was normal and didn't warrant suspensions.

Also, in order to get an assist you had to pass the ball to someone who scored without having previously dribbled the ball. So there were not assists on fast break buckets.

And let's not forget these guys didn't play basketball 24/7/365 as they had jobs in the off season and traveled in coach on plains and sometimes buses. There were no AAU camps, specialty camps for learning the game, weight rooms, instructional coaches, multiple coaches, etc. So the quality of shooting wasn't near what it was.