John Long (basketball player)
American basketball player (born 1956)
John Eddie Long (born August 28, 1956) is an American former professional basketball player.
Amateur career
Long played high school basketball at Romulus High School, and signed to play for Dick Vitale at the University of Detroit. Long established himself quickly with a Detroit program that would produce an unprecedented run during his time with the Titans (1974–1978). Vitale added future NBA players such as Terry Duerod, Terry Tyler and Dennis Boyd and built a dominating independent program at the Jesuit university. Long played shooting guard for the team, averaging 23.3 ppg on a .525 shooting percentage as a senior.
UD advanced to the 1977 NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament in his junior year, defeating Middle Tennessee in the first round before losing to Michigan in the Sweet 16 86–81 to end a stellar season, finishing #12 in the polls.
The team was left out of the NCAA in Longs's senior year, 1977–78, playing in the 1978 NIT, despite a 25–4 record and a #18 ranking. In four seasons at Detroit, Long scored 2,167 points, the first Titan to score more than 2000 points, and was inducted into the Detroit Mercy Titans Hall of Fame in 1993.
Professional career
After starring at the University of Detroit, the shooting guard was selected by the Detroit Pistons in the second round of the 1978 NBA draft. The move was largely influenced by Pistons Head Coach Dick Vitale, who coached Long at UD before going to the Pistons in 1978.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “John Long (basketball player)” as american basketball player (born 1956). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american basketball player (born 1956). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q533916. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1974, 1978 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Long (basketball player)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.