Best Team You Never Heard Of Story Of The 1942-1943 Washington Bears

The 1942-43 Washington Bears were the only major league professional basketball team to ever go undefeated over the course of a season. An all-black team owned by Abe Lichtman, a Jewish owner of movie theaters that catered to black audiences, and run by black radio legend Hal Jackson, the Bears almost exclusively featured former members of the New York Renaissance, including player-coach Tarzan Cooper.
The World Professional Basketball Tournament was an invitational tournament that featured many of the best professional teams in the world, operating out of Chicago and run by the Chicago Herald-Tribune. It was the only professional basketball organization to explicitly accept black teams, and its first two champions in 1939 and 1940 were the Renaissance and the Globe Trotters respectively.
In 1942-43, the Bears received a bye as one of the four highest-profile teams of the tournament, along with the Trotters, Fort Wayne Zollners, and Sheboygan Redskins. As such, their first game was in the quarterfinals against the Rock Spring Sparklers, a University of Minnesota alumni team led by future NBA champion Tony Jaros and Jaros' future coach John Kundla. They blew them out 40-21. The Redskins and Globe Trotters both crashed out of the competition in the QFs, so the Bears got a relatively easy semifinal matchup against the second-best service team in Dayton and won 38-30.
In the championship, they played rough defense on Leroy Edwards and took him out of his element in much of the same way NYU famously had when he was in college. Both the Bears' starting and backup centers fouled out despite conservative officiating, and they held Edwards to a single make from the field. John Isaacs and Pop Gates led the way for Washington in a convincing 43-31 championship win in front of 11,000-12,000 in attendance, but I'll spare the details since you can actually watch a few highlights for yourself, at the end.