John Harding Lucas (born October 31 1953 in Durham, North Carolina) is a retired American professional basketball player and coach. Lucas attended the University of Maryland where he was an all-American in basketball as well as tennis. He played for the US national team in the 1974 FIBA World Championship, winning the bronze medal. He played in the NBA for fourteen years and was a member of the 1986 Houston Rockets team that made the NBA Finals, in which they lost to the Boston Celtics. However, that off-season his career took a turn for the worse when longstanding drug problems became known. Several Rockets teammates, including Mitchell Wiggins and Lewis Lloyd, were banished from the NBA due to positive cocaine tests. Lucas, also a cocaine user and alcoholic, submitted voluntarily to trea