Lapchick, Joseph B.
Basketball
b. April 12, 1900, Yonkers, NY
d. Aug. 10, 1970
Lapchick left school to help support his family, working as a machinist, and played his first professional basketball game when he was fifteen. At 6-foot-5 and 185 pounds in his prime, he became a much sought player as one of the sport's first big athletes, often appearing for four or five different teams in the course of a season.
He told an interviewer that he learned to get good pay by pitting one owner against another in the era when players were hired and paid for one game at a time. "The first thing I knew I was selling myself to the highest bidder for $75 a game," he said. "Like the rest of the fellows, I'd play where the money was."
In 1923, Lapchick joined the Original Celtics, the first team to sign its players to contracts for an entire season. The Celtics were the best team in basketball during his tenure, in part because Lapchick could usually win the center jump that followed every score at the time.
The team entered the American Basketball League in 1926 and won two league championships. The ABL forced the Celtics to break up in 1928 and Lapchick went to the Cleveland Rosenblums, which won the next two championships.
After one season with the ABL's Toledo Red Men, Lapchick joined the reorganized Celtics, now owned by singer Kate Smith, for six years of barnstorming basketball.
Lapchick became head coach at St. John's University in New York in 1937. His teams won the National Invitation Tournament in 1943 and 1944. He left the school to coach the NBA's New York Knickerbockers in 1948 and compiled a record of 326 wins and 247 losses, then returned to St. John's in 1957. After two more NIT victories, in 1959 and 1965, he retired because of a heart problem. His overall record at St. John's was 335 wins against 129 losses.