Phil Sellers, Rutgers basketball’s gold standard, dies at 69

Phil “The Thrill” Sellers, the dominant forward who led Rutgers men’s basketball to the 1976 Final Four and remains the program’s gold standard, has died, Rutgers announced. He was 69 and recently suffered a stroke after having been hospitalized for an intestinal illness.

“Breaks my heart,” tweeted legendary ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale, who recruited Sellers to Rutgers. “To me he is the greatest star to ever wear a Rutgers uniform.”

The 6-foot-4 Brooklyn native remains the Scarlet Knights’ all-time leading scorer (2,399 points) and rebounder (1,111 boards), averaging 21.0 points and 9.7 rebounds per game over his four-year career. How elite was Sellers? He owns two rare distinctions among New Jersey men’s college basketball players:

He’s one of just two players to earn multiple All-America citations from the Associated Press, as a third-teamer in 1975 and first-teamer in 1976 (Princeton legend Bill Bradley was a three-timer).

He’s one of just two Jersey collegians to be a two-time recipient of the Haggerty Award as the top player in the metropolitan area, a feat matched only by Seton Hall’s Myles Powell (2019 and 2020) in the prestigious honor’s 87-year history.

But statistics and awards only tell part of Sellers’ story. His arrival at Rutgers in 1972 as a heralded recruit who had previously committed to Notre Dame was in itself a seminal event. Though Rutgers basketball never had been on the national stage aside from a run to the 1967 NIT semifinals, Vitale, then an aggressive 30-year-old assistant coach, got Sellers to take a recruiting visit to New Brunswick along with fellow Big Apple schoolboy legends Lloyd (later World B.) Free and James “Fly” Williams.