The Royals won the league championship in Cervi’s first season; in his second, he was the league’s leading scorer and most valuable player. In his third season — he was by then a player-coach — he was an all-star and the coach of the year.  He moved to the Syracuse Nationals as player-coach in 1948, a year before the N.B.L. and the Basketball Association of America merged to become the National Basketball Association. He was player-coach until 1953 and full-time coach until he was fired during the 1956-57 season, after the Nationals got off to a slow start. He coached the Philadelphia Warriors in the 1958-59 season.  As a player in that low-scoring era, Cervi averaged 7.9 points a game. His coaching record was 366-264, and his Nationals won the 1955 N.B.A. title by defeating the Fort Wayne Pistons in the finals.  Cervi was inducted as a coach into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Mass., in 1985. Recalling his coaching years, The Syracuse Post-Standard wrote in 1997, “The Nationals shot poorly but succeeded because they played Cervi-style basketball: nasty, with an emphasis on defense.”  Cervi knew what he wanted on offense, too. “Al didn’t like plays,” Dolph Schayes, one of his Hall of Fame players, told The New York Times in an interview in 2007. “We played a lot of freelance ball, Eastern style, good, aggressive, fundamental, high post, lot of movement.”  Alfred Nicholas Cervi was born Feb. 12, 1917, in Buffalo and grew up playing sandlot basketball and semipro ball in high school before the Bisons invited him to play for them. He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Ruth; a son, Allen; his daughters Kathleen Cervi and Marcia Mundrick, and four grandchildren.  Cervi always admired Holzman, particularly because Holzman stressed defense when he coached the Knicks to titles in 1970 and 1973. To Cervi, the modern game had put too much emphasis on offense and not enough on defensive skills.  “I don’t know what they’re talking about today when they talk defense,” he said in an interview quoted in “Who’s Who of Sports Champions” (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). “Your hand has to be in your man’s face. You don’t let him get the ball. The first thing in good defense is to keep the ball from your man.”  A version of this article appears in print on November 11, 2009, on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Al Cervi, 92, a Basketball Hall of Famer. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Cervi, considered one of the strongest guards of the 1940s and ’50s, found even more success as an N.B.A. coach, leading Syracuse to a title in 1955.