The Eastern Professional Basketball League (1946-78) was fast and physical, often played in tiny, smoke-filled gyms across the northeast and featuring the best players who just couldn’t make the NBA—many because of unofficial quotas on Black players, some because of scandals, and others because they weren’t quite good enough in the years when the NBA had less than 100 players.

In Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League, Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein tell the fascinating story of a league that was a pro basketball institution for over 30 years, showcasing top players from around the country. During the early years of professional basketball, the Eastern League was the next-best professional league in the world after the NBA. It was home to big-name players such as Sherman White, Jack Molinas, and Bill Spivey, who were implicated in college gambling scandals in the 1950s and were barred from the NBA, and top Black players such as Hal “King” Lear, Julius McCoy, and Wally Choice, who could not make the NBA into the early 1960s due to unwritten team quotas on African-American players.

Featuring interviews with some 40 former Eastern League coaches, referees, fans, and players—including Syracuse University coach Jim Boeheim, former Temple University coach John Chaney, former Detroit Pistons player and coach Ray Scott, former NBA coach and ESPN analyst Hubie Brown, and former NBA player and coach Bob Weiss—this book provides an intimate, first-hand account of small-town professional basketball at its best.

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Clouds of blue cigarette smoke drifted lazily upward from packed houses, further diminishing already-inadequate lighting. On the rock-hard, ankle-killing floor were the Scranton Miners, doing battle — often quite literally — with the Wilkes-Barre Barons, Allentown Jets or some other team from another working-class town in the Eastern League. Nobody played defense, and it was not unusual for the final score to be in the 130-125 range. Two native Scrantonians who grew up as Miners fans, Syl Sobel and Jay Rosentein, comprehensively captured the athletes, culture and personality of the era in Boxed Out of the NBA.

This is no mere reminiscence. It’s a deeply researched, well-documented history of the league that also is timely, in that they were able to interview dozens of the characters, players and impresarios, like recently deceased Miners owner Art Pachter, who made the league not just a minor league alternative to the fledgling NBA but an extraordinary enterprise unto itself.

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If you are a basketball fan and are looking for a good read I heartily recommend Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League!