John Albert Kundla was an American college and professional basketball coach.
17 Facts About John Kundla
2.
John Kundla was the first head coach for the Minneapolis Lakers of the National Basketball Association and its predecessors, the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League, serving 12 seasons, from 1947 to 1959.
3.
John Kundla's teams won six league championships, one in the NBL, one in the BAA, and four in the NBA.
4.
John Kundla was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995 and the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.
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John Kundla was born in the mining town of Star Junction, Pennsylvania to parents from Jakubany, at that time Austria-Hungary, now Slovakia.
6.
John Kundla then moved to the high school ranks as the head coach of DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
7.
John Kundla turned the offer down as he was not impressed with the professional ranks.
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Elgin Baylor 8.
Team representatives returned, and this time the offer had been upped to $6,000 and John Kundla took the job at age 31.
9.
John Kundla then guided the George Mikan-led Lakers, which included star Jim Pollard, to the 1948 NBL title.
10.
In 1959, knowing that the Lakers franchise was going to be moved to Los Angeles and despite having future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor on the team, John Kundla chose to stay in Minnesota and resigned from the Lakers position to coach his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.
11.
John Kundla was the first Gophers coach to give scholarships to African-American players, resulting in him receiving hate mail.
12.
In 1996, John Kundla was voted as one of the 10 greatest coaches in the history of the NBA.
13.
John Kundla was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995, after being lamented as "all but forgotten" in a 1992 USA Today column.
14.
John Kundla was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.
15.
John Kundla met his wife, Marie, while they were undergraduates; the two raised six children.
16.
John Kundla's wife died in 2007; the following year he moved into the Main Street Lodge Assisted Living Home in Minneapolis and continued to watch and follow the NBA.
17.
John Kundla turned 100 in July 2016 and died on July 23,2017, twenty days after his 101st birthday.