Cliff Hagan Dies at 94: The Man Traded for Bill Russell

Basketball lost a quiet legend this week: Cliff Hagan dies at ninety-four, and the sport is now remembering the man who sat on the wrong side of the most lopsided trade in NBA history. The Hall of Fame forward, a five-time All-Star with the St. Louis Hawks, passed away on Thursday, according to NBA.com.

No cause of death was disclosed. The University of Kentucky, where he starred and later ran the athletics department, announced the news on Friday, according to ESPN.

The trade that changed the league

Here is the part every basketball nerd knows. The Boston Celtics drafted Hagan in the third round in nineteen fifty-three, but he spent two years in the military and never suited up for them. In April of nineteen fifty-six, Boston sent him and fellow Hall of Famer Ed Macauley to the Hawks for the draft rights to a center named Bill Russell, per ESPN.

Russell went on to win nine of the next ten titles with Boston. That deal is often treated as a punchline for St. Louis, but it skips the plot twist: the guys the Hawks got actually mattered.

The one team that beat Russell

In nineteen fifty-eight, Hagan and Hall of Famer Bob Pettit led the Hawks past Russell and the Celtics in the Finals. ESPN reports Hagan averaged a league-best twenty-seven point seven points per game in that postseason run. St. Louis reached the Finals in four of his first five seasons there.

That makes the Hawks the only team to beat Russell's Celtics in a Finals with Red Auerbach on the sideline, according to Yahoo Sports. Think of it as the ultimate revenge arc for a player who was, in his own words, just thrown into the deal.

Hagan said in two thousand eighteen that the Celtics did not know what to do with him at his size, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. He was an undersized power forward at six foot four, and he made it work with a signature hook shot that bothered much taller defenders.

A career bigger than one trade

Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, Hagan played for legendary coach Adolph Rupp at Kentucky. He helped the Wildcats win the nineteen fifty-one national title and finish with an eighty-six and five record in his time there, and his fifty-one point single-game mark stood until nineteen seventy, per ESPN.

In the pros he averaged eighteen points and just under seven rebounds across ten seasons, all with the Hawks. He earned five straight All-Star nods from nineteen fifty-eight to nineteen sixty-two, according to NBA.com and Yahoo Sports.

Then came a second act. Hagan joined the ABA's Dallas Chaparrals as a player-coach in the league's first season, nineteen sixty-seven to sixty-eight, and made another All-Star team. ESPN says that made him the first player ever to be an All-Star in both leagues.

Why his passing hits a little harder

Hagan's death lands just weeks after the passing of his Hawks teammate Bob Pettit at ninety-three. According to the Daily Mail, the two were the last living players to have won a title with the franchise, so an entire era of the NBA has now closed.

Hagan was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in nineteen seventy-eight, becoming the first former Kentucky player to earn that honour. He later served as the university's athletics director from nineteen seventy-five to nineteen eighty-eight, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

For Gen Z fans raised on highlight reels and trade-machine memes, Hagan is a good reminder that the guy on the other end of a famous deal usually has a whole story of his own. Want more sports stories like this one? Browse the sports section on GenZ NewZ.

The NBA regular season tips off on Tuesday, and expect tributes to a champion who proved a trade does not define a career. Cliff Hagan dies with a ring, a Hall of Fame plaque and a place in basketball history that has nothing to do with who he was traded for.