Bob Pettit, NBA's First MVP and Hall of Famer, Dies at 93

Bob Pettit died Wednesday at 93, leaving behind a career that reshaped how basketball's biggest players could operate on the court. LSU announced his death Thursday without disclosing the cause. The man who won the NBA's first Most Valuable Player award in 1956 spent all eleven of his professional seasons with the St. Louis Hawks, making the All-Star team every single year he played.

Pettit arrived in the league as the 1955 Rookie of the Year during the Hawks' final season in Milwaukee before the franchise relocated south. The following year, at age 23, he led the entire league in scoring with 25.7 points per game and claimed the inaugural MVP trophy. Three years later, he delivered what would become the signature achievement of his career: leading the Hawks to the 1958 championship, a victory over the Boston Celtics that interrupted one of professional sports' most suffocating dynasties. Boston would win nine titles in ten seasons during that era, and Pettit's Hawks were the only team to break through. It remains the franchise's only championship.

At 6-foot-9 and 205 pounds, Pettit was a physical anomaly for his time. He played power forward before the position had a name in basketball's vocabulary, and he was among the first big men who refused to camp out with his back to the basket. Instead, he faced the court, moving and scoring from multiple angles—a radical departure from the post-bound centers who dominated the game. His Hall of Fame biography notes his "resolve" as the quality that separated him from contemporaries like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Elgin Baylor. He rarely sat out games, a durability that accumulated into staggering career numbers: 26.4 points and 16.2 rebounds per game across his tenure. When he retired after the 1964-65 season, he held the NBA record for career points with 20,880 and ranked second all-time in rebounds with 12,849. He won the MVP again in 1959, when he led the league in scoring at 29.2 points per game, and he was named All-Star Game MVP four times—a distinction matched only decades later by Kobe Bryant.

Yet Pettit's dominance was shadowed by timing and geography. The Hawks reached the Finals four times during his career, and all four matchups were against Boston. Beyond the 1958 triumph, they lost twice in seven games and once in five. He finished two championships short of what his talent might have earned in a different era. Playing in St. Louis, a smaller market than the coasts where television cameras congregated, Pettit never achieved the national profile his statistics deserved. The NBA was not yet a televised phenomenon, and his excellence reached a fraction of the audience that would later follow his successors.

Robert Lee Pettit Jr. was born December 12, 1932, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of a law enforcement officer who served as East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff. He was a late developer in basketball, not making his high school varsity team until his junior year. As a senior, he led Baton Rouge High School to a state championship and drew more than a dozen college offers. He chose LSU, where he starred as a sophomore onward—the rules of that era prevented freshmen from playing varsity. He led the Southeastern Conference in scoring for all three of his seasons, averaging 25.5 points as a sophomore, 24.9 as a junior, and 31.4 as a senior. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970, joining only Pete Maravich and Shaquille O'Neal as LSU players to reach that honor. Bronze statues of Pettit and O'Neal stand outside LSU's home arena, the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. His number 50 is retired by the university; the Hawks retired his number 9.

After leaving basketball, Pettit returned to Baton Rouge and built a second career in banking and financial consulting. In his later years, he remained a regular at LSU games and New Orleans Pelicans contests, a quiet presence at the sport he had quietly transformed.