NEW YORK _ The Long Island Celtics. How does that sound?
Believe it or not, it could have happened.
Nearly five decades ago, the owner of the Celtics wanted to move one of the most storied franchises in sports history to Long Island.
It was 1970, and the new owner of Boston's NBA team was a New Yorker named Woody Erdman. According to stories that appeared in Newsday and the Boston Globe that year, he immediately began lobbying Nassau County officials to let him relocate his franchise to the under-construction Nassau Coliseum, which was planned to open in 1971.
So, it wasn't the county trying to woo the Celtics' owner to the arena being built on Hempstead Turnpike. It was the other way around.
"I'm a New Yorker, and it's natural for me to want my teams to play in New York," Erdman said in Newsday's March 27, 1970 edition. "I want my teams to play in our Coliseum."
Imagine that. The Celtics, who had won 11 of the past 13 NBA championships, were considering leaving the aging parquet floor at the Boston Garden (41 years old at the time) for a shiny new home in Nassau County.
Erdman was attracted to New York for several reasons: the size of the market, its television potential and his ties. According to a Newsday profile, his company TransNational Communications owned the radio rights to the Mets and Giants. He hired former New York star athletes, Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford and Giants defensive back Dick Lynch, as vice presidents.
"It's so utterly incomprehensible now that a team with their reputation and their success was in that circumstance one year after their 11th championship, but they were," longtime Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan said recently. "They were!"
Don Chaney, a Celtics player at the time who would later coach the Knicks, added: "It's kind of a scary thought, and I'm saying that only because of tradition.
"It doesn't even sound right, the Long Island Celtics."
