160. Joe Lapchick
The first of our list of the 160 best basketball players. Lapchick was an early pioneer of the game and starred on the original Celtics team of the late 1920’s and 1930s. Despite being only six-foot-five, Lapchick is regarded by many as the best center of the era.
Lapchick joined the Original Celtics in 1923, the team was the second incarnation from the New York Celtics who had disbanded during World War I. In the early days team’s jumped from league to league as many leagues simply could not sustain themselves, however, instead of doing that the Celtics decided to become a barnstorming team; a team without a league who went to other cities to play.
The casual fan today would not recognize the NBA of Lapchick’s era. There were no grandiose arena’s filled with 18,000 screaming fans, there were no charter jets, or medical staff or any of the luxuries players take for granted today. Instead, there was rickety old high school gymnasiums filled with asbestos and maybe 200 mildly entertained fans, cramped team buses which rarely had heat in the winter and never had air conditioning, and the luckiest of teams may have a doctor or medical student who played in their spare time for the team, the rest had bandages and a bottle of whiskey.
Due to the growing restraints on barnstorming in the mid 1920s the Celtics joined the American Basketball League, and dominated the league so much that the league forced them to disband. Lapchick than began to play for the Cleveland Rosenblums, whom he lead to two ABL titles. The success with the ABL was short lived however as the ABL had to face the Great Depression with the rest of America. The league disbanded in 1931.
Lapchick reformed the Celtics in 1932 with many of the original members. Lapchick invested a lot of money in the team when money was a scarce commodity. Due to financial restraints not only was Lapchick a player he also was the team’s bus driver. Lapchick stayed with the Celtics until 1936 when he retired from playing professional basketball and began to coach St. John’s University.
Lapchick would coach St Johns from 1936 until 1947 and again from 1956 until 1965. The 9 years between his two St John’s coaching stints were filled with him coaching the New York Knickerbockers of the newly former National Basketball Association.
Lapchick would die of a heart attack in 1970 at 70 years of age, he was elected to the basketball hall-of-fame in 1966.
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