Cliff Hagan, the all-American with a signature hook shot who played on Kentucky’s powerful teams of the early 1950s and who went on to help take the St. Louis Hawks to the 1958 N.B.A. championship, the only league title in the history of the franchise, died on Thursday at 94.
His death was announced by the University of Kentucky, where he played on the 1951 N.C.A.A. championship team and led the Wildcats to an unbeaten season in 1953-54.
In his 10 seasons with the Hawks, he was a prototype for the N.B.A.’s modern small forward, though he was perhaps remembered as much for his inclusion in a deal that brought Bill Russell to the Boston Celtics and propelled the Celtics’ dynasty of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
At 6-foot-4, Hagan was relatively small for the frontcourt, even in the N.B.A. of his time, but he teamed with the power forward Bob Pettit, in one of the league’s most formidable scoring duos.
Hagan’s shooting game featured running hook shots that he could sink with either hand from up to 18 feet from the basket.
“I learned that hook shot in junior high, and it was my way of dealing with taller players,” Hagan told Terry Pluto in his oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “I was a solid 215 pounds. Even though the men I covered were usually bigger than I was, I was often just as strong and usually a lot faster.”
Hagan averaged 27.7 points a game in the 1958 N.B.A. playoffs, with the Hawks defeating the Celtics in a six-game final series. “That was never mentioned,” Hagan once told The Lexington Herald-Leader in remembering his own scoring spree, “certainly not at contract time by the owner.” Perhaps that was because Pettit overshadowed him, scoring 50 points in Game 6.
Hagan was a five-time All-Star, averaged more than 20 points a game for four consecutive seasons and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1978.
He was selected by the Celtics’ coach, Red Auerbach, in the third round of the April 1953 N.B.A. draft. Auerbach also drafted Hagan’s teammates Frank Ramsey, in the first round, and Lou Tsioropoulos, in the seventh round.
All three were graduating that spring, but each had a year of collegiate basketball eligibility left, since Kentucky had been banned from N.C.A.A. play in the 1952-53 season as an outgrowth of its involvement in the point-shaving scandal that had rocked college basketball a few years earlier.
Hagan joined with Ramsey and Tsioropoulos in leading Kentucky to a 25-0 record and a Southeastern Conference championship in 1953-54. But all three were ineligible for the N.C.A.A. tournament because they had already graduated, prompting Kentucky to decline to participate.
Hagan entered the Air Force afterward and played on military basketball teams. When it came time for the April 1956 draft, Auerbach wanted Russell, viewing his shot-blocking and rebounding brilliance as the missing pieces for his Celtics, who had outstanding scorers but no dominant big man.
The Rochester Royals took Si Green, a guard out of Duquesne, with the first pick. Auerbach engineered a deal under which the Hawks, who had the second pick, took Russell but traded him to the Celtics in return for getting their All-Star center Ed Macaulay, a native of St. Louis, along with Hagan.
Known as the Tri Cities Blackhawks when they joined the N.B.A. in 1949, the Hawks, going on to play in Milwaukee, St. Louis and Atlanta, still await a second N.B.A. title.
Clifford Oldham Hagan was born on Dec. 9, 1931, in Owensboro, Ky. He was a starter and center as a sophomore for Coach Adolph Rupp on the Kentucky team that defeated Kansas State in the 1951 N.C.A.A. tournament final. He averaged more than 20 points a game in his last two seasons at Kentucky, when he was a consensus all-American.
Hagan played mostly at guard as a rookie on the Hawks team that lost to the Celtics in the 1957 N.B.A. final.
The following season, having switched to forward full time, Hagan played alongside Pettit; Charlie Share, a bruising center; and the guards Slater Martin, the former Minneapolis Laker star and another future Hall of Famer, and Jack McMahon as they rolled to a championship under coach Alex Hannum.
Hagan retired for the first time after the 1965-66 season and spent the next season broadcasting Hawks games. He was named player-coach with the Dallas Chaparrals of the newly formed American Basketball Association in 1967 and became an All-Star once more during his three years in Dallas.
Hagan scored 13,447 points, averaging 18 a game, for his N.B.A. career. He was Kentucky’s athletic director from 1975 to November 1988, when he resigned amid an N.C.A.A. investigation into rules violations by the basketball program that later resulted in penalties.
In 1954, he married Martha Milton, and they had four children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
The Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a “sky hook” leaving defenders helpless, but Hagan told TalkZone.com in 2011 that the N.B.A. was unlikely to see any other players rely on a hook, the shot that served him so well.
“Today’s player is certainly more athletic,” he said, but he felt that “players now don’t have the patience” to develop finesse shots, noting that it took him six years to perfect his hook shot style.
“It’s just a foreign shot,” he said of the hook in today’s game. “It’s alien.”
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