ExJazz coach Sloan dies
Jerry Sloan, the Hall of Fame coach who was a fixture for decades in Utah and took the Jazz to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, died Friday. He was 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 pickandroll-to-perfection era in Salt Lake City. He is fourth on the NBA’s victory list.
Sloan was a twotime AllStar as a player with the Chicago Bulls, led his alma mater, Evansville, to two 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 had 1,221 NBA coaching wins, behind only former Warriors coach Don Nelson, Lenny Wilkens and Gregg Popovich. And Sloan’s 23 seasons with the Jazz are the secondlongest string 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 Sloan 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.“
And he was revered as a player with the Bulls, his No. 4 jersey the first to be retired by the franchise.
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 mid1970s.”
“A great player and a Hall of Fame NBA coach,” the Bulls chairman said Friday. “Most importantly, Jerry was a great person.”
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.
Fellow coaches raved about him. The majority of George Karl’s coaching career overlapped with Sloan’s, and Karl simply adored his rival.
“What I admired about him, is he was a friend to all coaches,” Karl said. “He stood up for coaches. … He was a man that stated his opinion, didn’t mind being overly aggressive with referees and many times got thrown out because of it. But if he thought he was being wronged, he stood up for himself. I admired that.” Associated Press writers Pat Graham and Andrew Seligman contributed
to this report.