Dick Barnett, who helped propel the Knicks to their glory days in the 1970s with his strange jump-shooting style, and who played on the only two N.B.A. championship teams in the Knicks’ history, died in his sleep last night in Largo, Fla. He was 88.
The Knicks announced the death, at an assisted living facility, on social media on Sunday, soon after a dramatic victory in a first-round playoff series against the Detroit Pistons. 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 become increasingly frail in recent years but did not appear to have a fatal illness.
Barnett was voted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in its men’s veterans category in April 2024.
Playing for 14 seasons in the N.B.A., 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 N.B.A. championships in 1970 and 1973 with smart, unselfish play and tenacious defense that complemented their scoring power. Barnett displayed all-around court skills but was remembered most for unleashing jumpers with a form that had not been seen before or since.
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 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, “Fall back, baby,” when Barnett went up for his shot.
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 to 1959, playing for the 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 the Times sportswriter Harvey Araton for his book “When the Garden Was Eden” (2011). “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 N.B.A. 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. They 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 N.B.A. 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 37 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 on Oct. 2, 1936, in Gary, Ind., where his father was a steelworker. He starred on his high school basketball team before attending Tennessee A&I.
From 1957 to 1959, his team won back-to-back-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 recent 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 succinctly, “Finally.”
Barnett did not graduate, 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 a sister, Jean Tibbs. He 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 and 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. The Knicks have not won a championship since 1973.
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.”
The night before Barnett and Holzman were honored, Barnett recalled a long-ago road trip.
“Some of the players felt it would improve our eyesight if we went to the burlesque show at the hotel, even though we might miss curfew,’’ he said. “When we mentioned it to Red, he told us not to go because we might see something there that we shouldn’t see. But we went to the burlesque show anyway. And we did see something there that we shouldn’t have seen. We saw Red.’’
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
