#1 Walter Brown, Owner, 1945-1964
Born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts in 1905, Walter A. Brown didn’t have much of a basketball background before founding the Boston Celtics in 1945. Before that, he was an important figure in American ice hockey. He was a highly successful coach of the amateur Boston Olympics hockey team, with whom he won five Eastern Hockey League championships. In 1933, he coached the United States to its first gold medal in the Ice Hockey World Championships. In 1951 he bought the Boston Bruins, and from 1954 to ‘57 he served as president of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF). In light of his contributions to hockey in the United States, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962.
His father George V. Brown was the manager of the Boston Garden, which opened in 1928, and after his death in 1937, Walter took over. In 1945 he decided that Boston ought to have a professional basketball team and founded the Boston Celtics. The next year, he co-founded the Basketball Association of America (BAA), considered the forerunner of the NBA. In 1949, he played a key role in merging the BAA with the National Basketball League (NBL), forming the NBA.
The Celtics initially struggled, but things changed in 1950 with the acquisition of head coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach from the Tri-Cities Blackhawks (now the Atlanta Hawks) and the drafting of two young stars, Bob Cousy and Ed Macauley. The team was also ahead of its time when it came to race, with the Celtics being the first NBA team to draft a black player, the shooting guard and small forward Chuck Cooper.
The Celtics’ offense took off starting in ‘50-51, but a championship eluded the team until ‘56-57, when rookies Bill Russell and Tom Heinsohn joined the team, and they beat the St. Louis Hawks in the Finals. The Celtics made it back to the Finals every year for the remainder of Brown’s tenure, beating the Minneapolis Lakers in ‘59, the Hawks again in ‘60 and ‘61, the now Los Angeles Lakers in ‘62 and 63, and the San Francisco Warriors in ‘64. They also made the Finals in 1958 but lost to the Hawks.
Walter Brown died in September 1964 at the age of 59. Shortly after, the Celtics retired number “1” in his honor, as he was considered the most important person in the team’s history. Also in ‘64, The NBA Championship trophy was re-named the Walter Brown Trophy in his honor. It was re-named the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 1984 after NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien who retired that year. In 1965, he was posthumously inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1997, he was inducted into the IIHF Hall of Fame in its inaugural year, as a tribute to his contributions to hockey around the world.
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