Al McGuire, Meminger’s coach at Marquette, once said he was “quicker than 11:15 Mass at a seaside resort.”

From Saturday’s New York Times:

Dean Meminger, Who Helped Knicks to a Title, Dies at 65

Dean Meminger, a speedy guard and tenacious defender who honed his basketball style in Harlem playgrounds and went on to play for the Knicks’ 1973 N.B.A. title team, was pronounced dead on Friday in a hotel room in Upper Manhattan. He was 65.

The police said that staff members at the Casablanca Hotel, on West 145th Street, discovered Meminger unconscious in his room and that emergency medical personnel pronounced him dead. The cause was under investigation, but the police said there were no signs of trauma.

Meminger had long battled an addiction to cocaine and had acknowledged using drugs as far back as his N.B.A. days, when he was among a glamorous cast of Knicks in the franchise’s glory years. In 2009, he was critically injured in a four-alarm fire in his room in a building in the Bronx.

Meminger got his start when he was “recruited by Rice High School of Manhattan out of a grammar school basketball tournament.”

That was in the mid-’60s, when the highschooling staff attended Fordham Prep, whose basketball team was routinely trounced not only by Rice but also by Lew Alcindor’s Power Memorial Academy.

Good times, yeah?

Rest in peace, Dean the Dream.