Larry Costello, 70; Player, Coach for NBA Teams

Larry Costello, a play-making guard who was a fixture in the National Basketball Assn. in the days when players wore both their hair and their trunks short, died of cancer Tuesday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 70.

The crew-cut Costello was an All-American in college at Niagara and used his two-handed set shot to great effectiveness throughout 706 games, scoring 8,622 points for three NBA teams.

He coached the Milwaukee Bucks to their only NBA title. That came in 1971, just three seasons after the league had expanded into the Midwestern city and two seasons after Bucks’ officials had won a coin flip over the other expansion team, the Phoenix Suns, that gave them the rights to draft a 7-foot-1 player from UCLA named Lew Alcindor.

In that playoff season of 1971, Alcindor, who eventually changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, teamed with veteran Oscar Robertson to help the Bucks win 12 of 14 games, including four straight in the finals against the Baltimore Bullets. That marked the fastest rise of an expansion team to a pro sports title.

Costello, who played for the Philadelphia Warriors, Syracuse Nationals and Philadelphia 76ers, also won an NBA title as a player. That came in 1967, on a 76ers team that featured Wilt Chamberlain and won a then-record 68 games. With his compact, quick-release, two-handed set shot, Costello twice won NBA titles in free throw percentage.

Costello brought a Marine-sergeant work ethic and an endless supply of yellow legal pads to Milwaukee to coach this new NBA team. He stayed for nine seasons and had one additional season, 1978-’79, with the Chicago Bulls. Costello finished his 10 seasons as a coach with a 430-300 record, the 11th-best winning percentage in NBA history. His teams were 37-23 in the playoffs.

As a coach, Costello was direct, demanding and set in his ways. At each timeout huddle, he would whip out a yellow legal pad, draw a basketball key and then do his Xs and O’s. After years of this, one of his assistants, Hubie Brown, bought him a present--many boxes full of yellow legal pads with the key already drawn. Costello put them in a closet and never took them out.

At times, Costello got so involved in strategy and play design that he left everybody else behind. In the memorable sixth game of the 1974 NBA finals against the Boston Celtics, Costello called a timeout near the end of the second overtime to set up a play. The Celtics, playing at home, led the series, 3-2, so his play call was crucial.

Costello scribbled madly on the yellow legal pad while his team watched. When they broke the huddle, Robertson, the veteran, called the other four together near center court for a few seconds. Soon, the ball came inbounds and eventually swung to Abdul-Jabbar, who took a long hook shot well down the right baseline that swirled into the net and forced a seventh game. One of the players, asked after the game why Abdul-Jabbar had ended up with such a low-percentage shot in such a key spot, said, “Larry got so excited in the timeout that he drew me in four different spots. Oscar saw this, called us together when we went out, and said, ‘Just get it to the big guy.’ ”

The Bucks lost that seventh game on their home court in Milwaukee two days later, and a key figure in that Celtic victory was Don Nelson, a rugged Iowa star who pushed Abdul-Jabbar around early and set the tone for a 102-87 rout. A few years later, Nelson became Costello’s top assistant and eventually replaced him as the Bucks’ head coach. On the way into the news conference that was to announce his promotion, Nelson, now one of the great coaches in NBA history, was stopped by a reporter and asked how he could top Costello’s legacy.

“I can’t,” Nelson said.

Details on Costello’s survivors and funeral arrangements were not immediately known.