Dave Gavitt, the force behind the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979 and the league’s first commissioner when it emerged as a national collegiate basketball powerhouse, died Friday in Providence, R.I., near his hometown, Rumford. He was 73.

His death, from congestive heart failure, was confirmed by his son Dan.

In the 1970s, Gavitt achieved prominence as a highly successful basketball coach at Providence College. But his most enduring achievements in basketball, first on the East Coast and then both nationally and internationally, were to come.

Gavitt envisioned a time when major basketball colleges in the East would draw on big-city television and marketing opportunities to create a high-profile league, bringing enhanced revenue and the recruitment of star high school players.

He orchestrated meetings that led to the creation of the Big East with the inclusion of seven schools: Providence, Boston College, Connecticut, Georgetown, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Syracuse.

Future stars like Patrick Ewing at Georgetown and Chris Mullin at St. John’s arrived in the early 1980s. The conference began playing its postseason tournament at Madison Square Garden in 1983, creating an Eastern version of the N.C.A.A.’s March Madness. Two years later, the Big East dominated the national championship tournament. Villanova, which had joined the Big East soon after its creation, defeated Georgetown for the championship, while St. John’s also made the Final Four.

What began as Gavitt’s East Coast basketball vision has grown into a conference with a full spectrum of sports programs, including football, and the inclusion of schools from beyond the Eastern Seaboard.

But his death came two days before the Atlantic Coast Conference announced that it was accepting Syracuse and Pitt, a Big East member since the early 1980s, as new members, raising questions about the Big East’s future.

Paying tribute to Gavitt’s leadership as the Big East commissioner from 1979 to 1990, Jim Calhoun, the longtime basketball coach at Connecticut, the defending men’s N.C.A.A. champion, told The Hartford Courant upon Gavitt’s death, “It is especially sad, considering today is certainly one of those days, with everything in the news about our league, I would love nothing more than to call him and ask him simply, ‘What do you think?’ and ‘What should we do?’ ”

Gavitt was born on Oct. 26, 1937, in Westerly, R.I., and grew up in Peterborough, N.H. He played guard for Dartmouth’s basketball team and became head coach in 1967.

Coaching at Providence from 1969 to 1979, Gavitt took the Friars to the N.C.A.A. tournament five times, including the 1973 Final Four, and compiled a record of 209-84. He was Providence’s athletic director beginning in 1971 and continuing into his first years as the Big East commissioner.

Extending his influence beyond the Big East, Gavitt was the coach of the 1980 United States Olympic basketball team, though it never competed in the Moscow Games because the United States boycotted them. He was chairman of the N.C.A.A.’s Division I basketball committee when it decided in January 1984 to expand the national tournament to 64 teams the next year.

As the president of USA Basketball, the sport’s national governing body, he helped forge a partnership with the National Basketball Association to bring pro stars onto the Olympic squad, creating the Dream Team that won gold at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

“He’s really one of the most significant people in college sports the last 30 or 40 years,” said Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten.

Gavitt was the Boston Celtics’ senior executive vice president, running basketball operations, from 1990 to 1994. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2006.

In addition to his son Dan, an associate commissioner of the Big East, Gavitt’s survivors include his wife, Julie; another son, Corey; and a brother and sister.

Gavitt evidently broached the idea of a Big East Conference with Lou Carnesecca, the St. John’s basketball coach, at the conclusion of coaching clinics they gave in Italy in the late 1970s. Carnesecca was skeptical, but Gavitt persuaded him to come on board, and then came the meetings creating the league.

But when Gavitt sought television money to sustain the Big East, there were more than a few doubters.

“We made a decision that the single most important thing to do with television was a prime-time package,” Gavitt told The New York Times in 1982. “And people thought we were crazy. No one thought we could do it. No way.”

David R Gavitt