Hammond Calumet Buccaneers

The Hammond Calumet Buccaneers were a professional team of basketball that competed in the National Basketball League for only the 1948–49 season. They were based in Hammond, Indiana, and played in the Hammond Civic Center for home games.

The team ranked third in the Eastern Division, and was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Syracuse Nationals.^[1] After losing their playoff series to the Nationals, the Calumet Buccaneers would join the Oshkosh All-Stars and Dayton Rens (an all-black team) as the only NBL teams not to join the Basketball Association of America (BAA) in their merger to become the NBA. For the case of the short-lived Hammond Calumet Buccaneers franchise, the people involved with the franchise tried to raise the funds necessary to get themselves their promotion into the NBL/BAA merger that's now known as the NBA, but they ultimately failed to get the funds necessary on their ends to get the merger promotion in mind.^[2] While the Rens didn't do a dispersal draft of their players due to racial segregation and the All-Stars initially diverted their players into an original Wisconsin-based NBA team out in either Milwaukee (before the existence of the Milwaukee Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks) or Green Bay before later forcing their players into a dispersal draft into the now-NBA's teams, Hammond's players (which featured the likes of Don Boven, Joe Camic, Jake Carter, Ted Cook, George Glamack, Dick Hammond, Bobby McDermott, Al Miksis, Stan Patrick, Jack Phelan, Ollie Shoaff, Sterling Scott, John Sebastian, Wayne See, Chips Sobek, and Clint Wager) would all move out of Hammond and look to play for the Waterloo Hawks instead.^[3]