Jerry Sloan, coach of Jazz glory days who played at Evansville, dies at 78
(AP) — Jerry Sloan walked up the steps to the stage at the Basketball Hall of Fame to give his enshrinement speech in 2009, almost as if he were dreading what the next few minutes would bring.
He never wanted the spotlight.
“This is pretty tough for me,” Sloan said that night.
Talking about himself, that wasn’t easy. But basketball, he always made that seem simple.
Sloan,
who spent 23 years as coach of the Utah Jazz and took the team to the
NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, died Friday at 78. The team said that for
four years he had Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
Sloan
presided over the glory days of the John Stockton and Karl Malone
pick-and-roll-to-perfection era in Salt Lake City. He is fourth on the
NBA’s all-time win list.
“Before coming to Utah, I was certainly
aware of Coach Sloan and what he meant to the NBA and to the coaching
world,” Jazz coach Quin Snyder said Friday. “But, upon living in Utah, I
became acutely aware of just how much he truly meant to the state.”
Sloan
was a two-time All-Star as a player with the Chicago Bulls, led his
alma mater, Evansville, to a pair of NCAA college division national
championships and was an assistant coach on the 1996 U.S. Olympic team
that won a gold medal at the Atlanta Games. He fell in love with the
game as a student in a one-room Illinois schoolhouse, never forgetting
his roots.
“His more than 40 years in the NBA also paralleled a
period of tremendous growth in the league, a time when we benefited
greatly from his humility, kindness, dignity and class,” NBA
Commissioner Adam Silver said.
Sloan often said numbers meant nothing to him. That’s a shame, because he has so many to marvel.
Sloan’s
1,221 NBA coaching wins have only Lenny Wilkens, Don Nelson and Gregg
Popovich ahead of him. And Sloan’s 23 seasons with the Jazz are the
second-longest string that one coach has with one team in NBA history;
Popovich is in his 24th season with the San Antonio Spurs.
“We
lost one of the giants of basketball, not only of the NBA variety but
basketball in general,” said longtime NBA executive Rod Thorn, who hired
Thorn as coach of the Bulls in 1979. “No one ever played harder. He was
a very, very good player and then became one of the top coaches in the
history of the NBA.”
Out of Sloan’s 23 seasons with the Jazz, the
team finished below the .500 mark only once. He’s one of five coaches to
roam the sidelines for at least 2,000 games, and the only one of those
five with a winning percentage better than .600.
And he was revered as a player with the Bulls, and his No. 4 jersey was the first retired by the franchise.
“Loyalty
was his badge of honor and his no-nonsense approach to competition was
perfect for the game,” said Miami Heat President Pat Riley, the fellow
Hall of Famer who called it a privilege to coach against Sloan. “Jerry
will go down in history as one of the most admired great winners and
respected teachers of basketball ever.”
Sloan spent 34 years in
the Jazz organization, as head coach, assistant, scout or senior
basketball adviser. Sloan started as a scout, was promoted as an
assistant under Frank Layden in 1984 and became the sixth coach in
franchise history on Dec. 9, 1988, after Layden resigned.
“Like
Stockton and Malone as players, Jerry Sloan epitomized the
organization,” the Jazz said in a statement. “He will be greatly
missed.”
Sloan retired as coach of the Jazz abruptly in 2011, amid
reports of conflict with Deron Williams, the team’s point guard at the
time. Williams, in an Instagram post Friday, said he was “blessed” to play for Sloan.
“I
know things didn’t end well between us in Utah, however I’m glad that i
got the chance to sit down with him before it was too late,” Williams
wrote. “Definitely something that would have haunted me for the rest of
my life.”
Sloan was the coach at Evansville for all of five days in 1977. He then made an arduous — and fateful — decision.
He
was going to take over for his college coach, Arad McCutcheon, who was
retiring. Sloan signed a contract but backed out quickly, citing
undisclosed personal reasons. Later that year, a plane carrying the
Evansville team and coaches crashed, killing all 29 people aboard.
Had
he not left Evansville, Sloan could have easily been on that plane. And
he thought about that countless times over the next four decades.
“That
incident on December the 13th, 1977, made me realize that there are a
lot more things more important than basketball,” Sloan said in 2009.
“Even though I love this game, I will always be grateful for what it’s
given me.”
Sloan’s longevity with the Jazz was remarkable. During
his time in Utah, going 1,127-682 in regular seasons, there were 245
coaching changes around the league and five teams — Charlotte, Memphis,
Toronto, Orlando and Minnesota — did not even exist when he started with
the Jazz.
He coached Chicago for parts of three seasons, going
94-121. His playing career there was cut short by knee issues, and he
averaged 14.0 points, 7.4 rebounds and 2.5 assists in 755 games.
They
called Sloan “The Original Bull” because he was selected in the 1966
expansion draft and became known for his toughness and grit. He remains
the only NBA player to average more than seven rebounds and more than
two steals a game in his career.
Jerry Reinsdorf called Sloan “the face of the Bulls organization from its inception through the mid-1970s.”
“A great player and a Hall of Fame NBA coach,” the Bulls chairman said Friday. “Most importantly, Jerry was a great person.”
AP Sports Writer Andrew Seligman in Chicago contributed to this report.