Former Utah Jazz coach 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 alltime 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 in Atlanta. 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 year in San Antonio.
“We lost one of the giants of basketball, not only of the NBA variety but basketball in general,” said longtime NBA executive Rod Thorn. “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.”