NBA great Sloan dies at age 78
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 oneroom 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.
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 he was revered as a player with the Bulls, and his No. 4 jersey was the first retired by the franchise.
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.
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.
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.
Jerry Reinsdorf called Sloan “the face of the Bulls organization from its inception through the mid-1970s.”