From Wilt Chamberlain to Jeremy Lin: 10 NBA 'firsts'

Jeremy Lin's rise on the NBA radar provides the impetus to look back at Wilt Chamberlain's highest-scoring game and nine other NBA 'firsts.'

5. The first player-coach to lead his team to an NBA title: Buddy Jeannette

Twenty years before Boston’s Bill Russell led to the Celtics to back-to-back championships as a player-coach, Buddy Jeannette of the Baltimore Bullets both played for and coached the team to the 1948 championship of the Basketball Association of America, as the NBA was known in an earlier incarnation. Jeannette was an all-star guard. Just how Jeannette, Russell, and any of the 38 other players who held both jobs simultaneously managed to do it is a good question – especially given the need to concentrate on one’s own assignments while also calling timeouts, making substitutions, and plotting strategic moves. Boston center Dave Cowens was the league’s last player-coach during the 1978-79 season. The league prohibited hiring player coaches beginning in 1984 so that teams couldn’t work around the salary cap .

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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