Original Celtics

The Original Celtics were a barnstorming professional basketball team in the 1920s. There is no relation to the modern Boston Celtics. The Original Celtics are often credited with extending the reach of basketball across America and for establishing the importance of aggressive defensive play. As a group, the team was enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959.

The team's roots lay in the New York Celtics team that disbanded during World War I. In 1918, James Furey assembled his own team around a nucleus of those truly "original" Celtics, adding other players mostly from the West Side of New York City, and defiantly called his new squad the Original Celtics. Initially they played in various struggling professional leagues, before becoming primarily a touring squad which traveled up to 150,000 miles a year while completing a 150-200 game schedule. They won about ninety percent of their games and finished 1922-23 with the unbelievable record of 193-11-1. Hoping to claim an undisputed national championship, they challenged the nationally famous Franklin Wonder Five, but the Franklin coach refused as his team "was too tired" after a grueling year.

The team's first dominant player was "Dutch" Dehnert, a 6'1" (1.85 m) standing guard whom some credit with introducing the modern concept of pivot play. When ballhandling wizard Nat Holman (later to coach national championship teams at CCNY) was signed to play for then-coach John Whitty in 1922, the Original Celtics hit their stride. Other outstanding individual players on these squads were another "big man", Joe Lapchick; John Beckman, called the "Babe Ruth of Basketball"; George "Horse" Haggerty; and speedy Davey Banks.

In 1926, the American Basketball League, developed by sports entrepreneur George Preston Marshall, effectively railroaded the team into joining its ranks by prohibiting member teams from playing against them. The Original Celtics responded by so dominating the league in their first two seasons that the league forced them to break up and apportioned their players to the other teams. The strategy backfired as game attendance plummeted and, further deflated by the Great Depression, the A.B.L. folded after the 1931 season. The Original Celtics briefly reorganized as a barnstorming team in the 1930s, but never replicated their initial glory.