Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,517

This is the grave of Ossie Schectman.

Born in Queens in 1919, Oscar Schectman grew up in a Jewish immigrant family. His parents had come over from Russia. He was a very good athlete and starred in high school in both baseball and basketball. He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn (what a disgusting human to name a high school after, but fits New York City’s 19th century role as a pro-Confederate or at least anti-anti-Confederate stronghold) and then Long Island University, where he played hoops. In 1939, LIU with Schectman starring won the National Invitation Tournament, which at the time was more prestigious than the NCAA title, but don’t tell that to my fellow Oregon Ducks, who won the first NCAA title in 1939 for our own title team, and I doubt there will ever be a second. He was then a first team All-American in 1941.

In the early 40s, there wasn’t much of a world for professional basketball, but people were trying to create something. Schectman signed with the Philadelphia Sphas, an explicitly Jewish team in the American Basketball League. In fact, Sphas, about which I was curious of the meaning, is the acronym for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association that funded the team. Not all the players were Jewish, but most of them were. I am not sure why Schectman was not in World War II, but he wasn’t. He was playing basketball. With the Sphas, he was second in the league in scoring in the 1943-44 season, averaging all of….10.5 points per game. Wasn’t exactly the Splash Brothers era yet….

In 1946, a new league formed. This was the Basketball Association of America, which would soon become the National Basketball Association. Schectman signed with one of the teams in the new BAA. That was the New York Knicks. In the first game in the new league’s history, the Knicks were playing at the Toronto Huskies in front of 6,000 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens, home of that city’s NHL team. The game started, Schectman got the ball, and he scored. This was the first goal in the history of the modern NBA. That’s basically what he is known for today. There’s not even that much to say.

Schectman only played for the Knicks in that 46-47 season. He scored 8 points a game that year, which placed him at 39th in the league. The next year, he was back in the ABL, with the Paterson Crescents. He was a first team all leaguer that year and they won the title. But Schectman left professional basketball at the end of that year. I can’t imagine he made much money at it and probably wanted to get on with his life. He became a salesman in New York’s garment district to support his young family.

Schectman’s contribution was not even known until 1988. That year, Ricky Green of the Jazz scored the league’s 5 millionth point. Hoping for a good story, the NBA did research to figure out who scored the first points and that led them back to Schectman. In 1998, Schectman was named to the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He got more attention later in life. There was a documentary about that first Knicks team, called The First Basket, and it was released in 2008. He was a huge hoops fan until he died. That happened in 2013, by which time he was splitting his time between his New York apartment and a place in Florida. He was 92 years old.

Ossie Schectman is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the 46-47 Knicks, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bob Fitzgerald is in Calverton, New York and Stanley Stutz is in New Rochelle, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.