Dick Barnett, champion Knick with a singular jump shot, dies at 88

Dick Barnett, a former New York Knicks player and member of the Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University men’s basketball team that won three straight national championships in the late 1950s, at his home in Manhattan, Jan. 29, 2024. (Jeenah Moon/The New York Times)

By Richard Goldstein

Dick Barnett, who helped propel the New York Knicks to their glory days in the 1970s with his unorthodox jump-shooting style, playing on the only two NBA championship teams in the organization’s history, died Sunday in Largo, Florida. He was 88.

His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his niece Valerie Tibbs Patterson.

Danielle Naassana, a producer of “The Dream Whisperer,” a PBS documentary about Barnett and his college career that came out last year, said he had been frail in recent years but did not appear to have a fatal illness.

Barnett was voted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2024 in its men’s veterans category.

Playing for 14 seasons in the NBA, his last nine with the Knicks, Barnett teamed with Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe at guard, Willis Reed at center and Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere at forward under coach Red Holzman.

The Knicks won NBA championships in 1970 and 1973 with unselfish play and tenacious defense that complemented their scoring power. Barnett displayed all-around court skills but was remembered most for executing jumpers with a form that had not been seen before.

When he launched his signature left-handed shot from his 6-foot-4-inch frame, his legs flew backward. Resembling a shot-putter, he put up high-arcing shots off his left ear, while telling the player guarding him, “too late,” and directing his teammates to “fall back,” since there would be no need for an offensive rebound.

When Barnett was playing with the Los Angeles Lakers, before he became a Knick, their longtime broadcaster Chick Hearn would shout when Barnett went up for a shot, “Fall back, baby!”

Barnett led Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (now Tennessee State), one of the South’s historically Black colleges and universities, to three consecutive National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national championships, from 1957-1959, playing for future Hall of Fame coach John McLendon.

McLendon recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1991 how Barnett “would go up and back at a 40-degree angle” on his jumpers.

“It was an undefendable shot,” McLendon said. “When he’d hit the floor, he was often off balance; sometimes he’d exaggerate it. One time, he fell clear up in the second row after the shot.”

That style was developed “without rhyme or reason, something that came naturally and worked for me,” Barnett told Times sports writer Harvey Araton for his book “When the Garden Was Eden” (2011).

He added, “It was in the playground before I even got to high school that I learned how to execute that shot without really knowing what I was doing.”

The Syracuse Nationals selected Barnett in the first round of the 1959 NBA draft. He played two seasons for them and then one season for George Steinbrenner’s Cleveland Pipers of the short-lived American Basketball League, coached by McLendon at the season’s outset. After that he spent three seasons with the Lakers, playing with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Los Angeles traded him to the Knicks for forward Bob Boozer in October 1965.

Barnett joined with Reed, who was in his second season, as the first major building blocks for a Knick franchise that had been floundering for years. He averaged a career-high 23.1 points a game in his first season with New York and made the All-Star team for the only time in his career in 1968.

He teamed with Frazier in the backcourt when the Knicks won the 1970 NBA championship, defeating the Lakers in a seven-game final. Reed, who died in 2023, provided a memorable emotional lift for the Knicks in Game 7, playing against Wilt Chamberlain on a badly injured leg, while Frazier hit for 36 points and Barnett had 21.

When the Knicks won the championship again in 1973, defeating the Lakers in five games, Barnett was in his final full season, playing as a reserve behind Frazier, Monroe and Dean Meminger.

He became an assistant coach to Holzman the next season, returned to play in five games as an injury fill-in, then retired for good with 15,358 career points for an average of 15.8 points a game.

Barnett was stylish off the court as well as on it.

Holzman told of the time when he was scouting for the Knicks and saw Barnett, who was with the Nationals, enter the old Madison Square Garden for the first time. “He walked in with a Chesterfield coat, homburg, striped pants, spats and an umbrella hooked on his arm,” he recalled in his memoir, “The Knicks” (1971, with Leonard Lewin).

Richard Barnett was born Oct. 2, 1936, in Gary, Indiana, where his father, Ezra, was a steelworker, and his mother, Etta, worked at a candy store and ran the household. He starred on his high school basketball team before attending Tennessee A&I.

From 1957 to 1959, his team won back-to-back-to-back championships in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, a separate conference smaller than the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was the first Black college basketball team to win any national championship.

The 2024 documentary focused on Barnett’s efforts to win greater recognition for that team, which culminated in their collective induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. When the surviving members of the team were invited to the White House last year, Barnett remarked, “Finally.”

Barnett did not graduate from Tennessee A&I, but while he was a Laker he received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Cal Poly. He obtained a master’s degree in public administration from New York University while a Knick and a doctorate in education from Fordham University in 1991. He taught sports management at St. John’s University and established a publishing imprint, Fall Back Baby Productions, for which he wrote poetry and commented on athletes and race.

His survivors include his wife, Erma; his daughter, Tona; his son, Jeren; a sister, Jean Tibbs; and grandchildren. Barnett had lived mostly in New York in recent decades and moved to Florida last year.

In March 1990, the Knicks raised a banner with Barnett’s No. 12 high into the rafters of Madison Square Garden, along with another one reading “613,” representing Holzman’s victories as the Knicks’ coach.

In February 2023, Barnett joined some of his surviving former teammates from the 1972-73 championship squad for a 50th-anniversary celebration of that title during halftime of a game at the Garden. Bradley pushed a frail Barnett in a wheelchair onto the court to accept the applause of fans.

In his 1971 memoir, Holzman praised Barnett for more than his shooting.

“He has such great basketball instinct,” Holzman said. “He grasps things faster than anyone.”