Despite the fact that he’d never played professional ball, coached a college team, or developed any sort of national reputation as a college player, Auerbach approached Mike Uline, the owner of the Washington Arena and one of the men at the meeting at the Hotel Commodore, and proposed himself as the coach for Uline’s new team, the Washington Capitols.

Auerbach made his case to Uline by giving him a singular analysis of the state of basketball at the time and how he could exploit it to put together a winning team. Since the sport was intrinsically improvisational, and since television, then in its infancy, had yet to create a national audience with common expectations of how it should be played, the game of basketball had, in the five decades of its existence, evolved distinct regional differences. One outstanding player influenced how everyone else in town played. One forceful coach imprinted all the good players of one state with a certain style, and they passed it on to the kids they coached. As a result, for example, Midwesterners emphasized a running game while New Yorkers focused on perimeter set shots. Most of the professional teams being put together in the summer of 1946 hoped to capitalize on the popularity of local college players by drafting and featuring them. As a result, those teams would inevitably lean heavily on the prevailing local style of play.

However, Auerbach told Mike Uline that what no one seemed to understand was that the way to build a winning team was by hiring players from all regions of the country, each bringing with him the special skills that his region emphasized. Auerbach explained to Uline that he had firsthand experience of how successful such a team could be. While in the navy, he had been a chief petty officer in charge of recreation at the naval station in Norfolk, where he ran an intramural sports program and consequently got to know basketball players from around the country. Those men were now all being discharged and were in need of jobs. If he became coach, Auerbach told Uline, he could put together a talented, inexpensive team from that pool of ex-navy men, fielding backcourt players from New York, runners from the Midwest, rebounders from California. Most of the other franchise owners were hiring college coaches; Ned Irish brought in Neil Cohalan from Manhattan College to run his new team, the Knickerbockers; the Chicago investors signed Harold Olsen from Ohio State. But Mike Uline, an innovative Dutchman who’d made his fortune patenting various types of ice-making machinery, liked Auerbach’s idea and offered him a one-year contract for $5,000.

Going into his first season, Auerbach knew that no one had ever heard of him, that he had no reputation to speak of, and he was afraid the referees and the name coaches such as Cohalan and Olsen would dismiss him as nothing more than an overpromoted lightweight high school coach. He also wanted to establish his authority over his own players, since most of them were his age or older, and all of them were better basketball players than he’d ever been. “If you get obnoxious you build incentive,” he once told one of his players. And so he turned himself into a courtside presence that everyone in the league would be forced to contend with. During games he did not so much feign rage as he allowed it to engulf him. He pounded his fists together so angrily that his knuckles became swollen, and so he began rolling up a program before each game and using it to smack his hand. He snarled at the opposing team’s fans, shook his fist, sighed, waved his cigar, smacked his hand with his rolled-up program. He hated hearing the word why from his players—Why’d you take me out?—and none of them were allowed to question or ask for an explanation for any of his decisions. He protested virtually every call made against his team, storming over to the official in question, tapping cigar ashes on the man’s shoes, and flecking his face with spittle as he shouted at him. He wanted to keep officials off balance and doubting themselves in the hope that, in the crucial closing minutes of the game, they might hesitate to rule against his team. And so he never gave ground, acting on the assumption that he was always right and everyone else was always wrong. He wanted it understood throughout the league that no one was going to hose Auerbach.

Auerbach’s methods produced results. In their first year, the Capitols ran up a seventeen-game winning streak and had a record of 49–11, a winning percentage that would remain a record for twenty years. But, in what would come to be another signature Auerbach statistic, the Capitols also led the league in defense, becoming the team with the fewest points allowed. Auerbach produced two more winning seasons with the Capitols, ending up in the playoffs each year and making it to the finals in the third, where his team lost to the Minneapolis Lakers in six games.

Nonetheless, the Washington Capitols were barely afloat financially, and in the three years since its inception, the entire league had been floundering. Four teams lasted only one season. None of the owners wanted to spend money on those that survived. Many early games were played on wooden floorboards laid over hockey ice; puddles formed on the court and the shivering players sitting on the bench wrapped themselves in blankets.