20 Facts About Eddie Gottlieb

The NBA Rookie of the Year Award, the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy, was formerly named after him.

Eddie Gottlieb organized, and played for, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association teams in the 1920s.

Eddie Gottlieb was in charge of semipro baseball in Philadelphia, financed and partly owned the Negro league Philadelphia Stars, and made the schedule for the Negro National League.

Eddie Gottlieb helped coordinate the overseas tours of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Eddie Gottlieb coached the original Philadelphia Warriors, bought the team, and sent it to San Francisco in order to expand the game westward.

Eddie Gottlieb headed the NBA rules committee for 25 years and was solely in charge of NBA scheduling for the last three decades of his life.

Eddie Gottlieb was, by his own admission, a born promoter and organizer, and changed his name to Edward.

In 1917, when he was 19, Eddie Gottlieb organized a team of mostly Jewish players representing the Young Men's Hebrew Association, which supplied the team with uniforms for three years.

Meanwhile, Eddie Gottlieb had rebuilt the SPHAs in 1929 with younger talent, and in 1933 the team joined the ABL, which had reorganized as a smaller, regional circuit after a two-year hiatus.

The club stayed together for 31 years, until 1949, when Eddie Gottlieb became too involved with the new Basketball Association of America.

Eddie Gottlieb was the coach and general manager of the Philadelphia Warriors.

Eddie Gottlieb and rivaling Stags coach Harold Olsen would be the first rookie coaches to compete in the championship match-ups, with such a feat not happening again until the 2015 NBA Finals with Steve Kerr of the Warriors and David Blatt of the Cleveland Cavaliers both competing for their first championships in their rookie coaching seasons in the NBA.

Eddie Gottlieb had a major role in shaping the league's rules, serving as chairman of the rules committee for 25 years.

Eddie Gottlieb was there when Syracuse Nationals owner Danny Biasone came up with the idea of a 24-second shot clock in 1954, and he helped to implement a rule that gave a bonus free throw after six team fouls in a quarter.

Eddie Gottlieb was behind the NBA's "territorial draft" rule, which gave teams the right to claim a local college or high school player in exchange for giving up their first-round draft pick.

Eddie Gottlieb, who had purchased the franchise 10 years earlier, sold it for a $600,000 profit to a credit card company, which kept 33.3 percent of the ownership while Franklin Mieuli put together a group of almost 40 Bay Area investors to purchase the remainder of the team.

Eddie Gottlieb remained involved with the team in San Francisco before "retiring" in 1964.

Eddie Gottlieb's role was crucial: the job of planning the league schedule had become solely his.

Eddie Gottlieb was the force behind the NBA schedule until shortly before his death.

Eddie Gottlieb's story is featured in The First Basket, a documentary on the history of Jews and Basketball.