（2级，尽快）Remembering Jerry Sloan

On June 8, 1998, Jerry Sloan took his seat at the podium in the bowels of the United Center. His Utah Jazz, the team he coached for 23 seasons during a Hall-of-Fame career, had just suffered a 96-54 defeat at the hands of the Chicago Bulls in Game 3 of the NBA Finals.

He was handed a boxscore printout, took a look and then asked the question that would become memorable for decades to come: “Is this actually the score? I thought they scored 196. It seemed like they scored 196 … I’m somewhat embarrassed for NBA basketball for the guys to come out and play at this level, with no more fight left in them than what we had. It’s an embarrassment for all of us.”

The quote encapsulates Sloan’s wicked sense of humor, which always belied a tough exterior, a toughness that also hid his humanitarian nature. But the quote also shows Sloan’s hatred of losing, his competitiveness and his inability to half step around a subject.

Indeed, Jerry Sloan always told it how it was, for better, or for worse.

He coached the Jazz to 1,223 victories in those 23 seasons and enjoyed a head coaching career that spanned 26 seasons. He died on Friday morning, the Utah Jazz announced, succumbing to complications of the Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia he battled since 2016. He was 78.

Sloan’s legacy with the Jazz, the state and the NBA is absolute. By the time he retired in 2011, he had the third-highest win total (1,221) in NBA history, as he was then one of five coaches in league history to have won at least 1,000 games. He led the Jazz to consecutive NBA Finals appearances, beginning in 1997, with John Stockton and Karl Malone as his vaunted pick-and-roll duo.

He was tough. He was incapable of nonsense. He demanded his guys play hard, and he gave his players 100 percent in return. But Sloan was also self-effacing. He cared about his players, family, friends and loved ones. He respected the guys who played for him, which is why he could always command respect. And he always had his players’ collective backs, which led to confrontations on multiple occasions, such as in 2003, when Sloan was given a seven-game suspension for pushing referee Courtney Kirkland.

Through it all, Sloan did it his way. He is one of four coaches in NBA history with 15 consecutive winning seasons. He is one of only two coaches in league history to win 1,000 games with the same team.

“It was a great learning experience for me to watch someone who had the ability to control a team and be the coach,” former Jazz General Manager Kevin O’Connor told The Athletic.

“All he cared about was getting guys better so that they could do well in the profession. He always had your back.”

O’Connor recalls the time Matt Harpring, now an analyst for Jazz games and then a tough-minded small forward, returned from a knee injury that cost him significant time. The Jazz front office put Harpring on a minutes restriction, which was immediately threatened by a game that went to overtime following his return. With the restriction coming in at 24 minutes, Sloan pulled Harpring from the lineup, much to the forward’s chagrin. Despite Harpring actively lobbying Sloan to get back into the game, he kept Harpring on the bench for the duration of the extra session.

“Matt wasn’t happy about it,” O’Connor said. “But, Jerry went to him after the game and said, ‘I’m not going to risk your career by playing you 27 minutes. If they (the front office) tell me to play you 24 minutes, I’m going to play you 24 minutes.'”

Sloan was obsessed with winning. But he wanted to win the right way. He coached the same way whether he had one of the best teams in basketball, which he had in the respective primes of Stockton and Malone, or whether he was starting over with a new cast. Somehow, Sloan never took home an NBA Coach of the Year award.

But, arguably, his best coaching job should have yielded such. With Stockton retiring and Malone moving on to the Los Angeles Lakers, the 2003-04 Jazz were widely predicted to be one of the worst teams in the league. To make matters worse, Harpring missed 50 games with his knee injury. But Sloan led the Jazz, without an established star on the roster, to a 42-40 record and came within a game of making the playoffs. Sloan finished behind the Memphis Grizzlies’ Hubie Brown in Coach of the Year voting.

Peers, players, friends and former teammates say the same thing about Sloan: His consistency shaped him as a basketball coach and as a person. And the soft spot he had for his players went as far as getting the most out of them as did his demanding that they play hard.

“He was a no-nonsense coach and a very fair coach,” said Darrell Griffith, who played for Sloan in the late 1980s. “He was very knowledgeable of the game. When he took over, we were just about to take off as a franchise. Jerry came in and put the whole system in. We were knocking on the door. We were always a contender. We always had winning seasons, so you could see the promise there. He made us a good defensive team. He was a great coach, and I loved playing for him.”

Every season, Sloan would gather his roster together for a team meeting at the beginning of training camp. He would look his guys in the eyes and he would say the same thing.

He would tell them that they were on the roster for a reason. He wanted the guys that were in that room, and that he had no intention of trading or removing anyone from the team. He would tell them at the beginning of each camp that he wanted to attack that year with the group he had at the beginning of the season.

“You could see the loyalty that he had to the guys and to the team,” said Ronnie Price, a longtime point guard for the Jazz. “I’ve never seen anything or been around anything like that before. I’ve been on a lot of teams and I never heard those statements anywhere else. He was always hurt by every trade. Every movement of a player, it weighed on him. We never put too much emphasis on what other teams were doing. We always focused on us as a unit.

“His ways of leading, he made us better men, versus just making us better basketball players,” Price added. “He helped us become better people. He taught us how to be professionals, and how to have a successful and long-lasting career.”

Gerald Eugene Sloan was born March 28, 1942, just south of McLeansboro, Ill., the youngest of 10 children, which became a single-parent home after his father died when Jerry was 4. Growing up in a small town, Sloan had to work for everything he was given, which shaped him as a teenager and as a young adult. He was used to fighting for everything and having nothing handed to him. He grew up on a farm, and he farmed for much of his life away from the court. He was no stranger to hard work and to exhausting chores.

He also became a great basketball player, a gift that would eventually lead him to places he never thought he would go. Today, the Hamilton County High gymnasium is named after Sloan. In 1960, Sloan graduated as one of the best high school basketball players in Illinois. After briefly attending the University of Illinois, he later attended the University of Evansville, where he became one of the best Division II players in the country, which led to him being taken 19th overall in the 1964 NBA Draft by the Baltimore Bullets as an eligible junior. But Sloan decided to return to school, and Evansville, which had won the D-II title the year before, repeated as champs, with Sloan being named Most Outstanding Player for the second consecutive year. In 1965, the Bullets again tabbed Sloan, this time with the fourth overall pick in the first round.

“I’ve known Jerry since I was a kid and he was always a great player,” current Jazz executive Dave Friedman said. “I was a big Southern Illinois University fan when he played for Evansville. He was always the best player on the floor. He was tough. He played hard every second. I remember he made Pete Maravich’s life tough. Guys just didn’t do that to Pete Maravich.”

“Jerry, he just had something inside of him that drove him to succeed,” said Bob Weiss, the longtime NBA head coach who played with Sloan on the Chicago Bulls. “When he came up as a kid, he had to work for everything he got. By the time he came to the NBA, he only had one speed. He knew only one way to play.”

History remembers Jerry Sloan as one of the best defensive guards to ever play the game. By the time his 11-year career ended, he would have two NBA All-Star games on his resume. He made the league’s All-Defensive first team four times. He made second-team twice. At 6-feet-5 and with long arms, Sloan made life miserable for opposing guards.

He never backed down to his opposition, and scored 14 points per game over the course of his career. Sloan hated to lose. He brooded over every defeat. He vowed to teammates to come back harder. And eventually, he became one of the elite two-way guards in the league. Sloan was one of the original Chicago Bulls, taken by the franchise in the expansion draft ahead of their maiden season of 1966-67. With Sloan, Weiss, Norm Van Lier, Bob Love and Chet Walker, the Bulls were a consistent playoff team.

In 1978, Sloan became the first player in franchise history to have his number retired.

“Jerry was very trustworthy,” Weiss said. “He was a friend and a guy that you can rely on. His competitiveness was right up there with Michael Jordan. The guy just hated to lose. I know of a lot of guys who lost sleep when they knew they had to be guarded by him the next day. He would pick his opponent up at halfcourt, and he would never give an inch.

“He was the backbone of the team. He wasn’t a tremendous offensive player with moves, but he was a good shooter and he got his shot off quickly. He was the first guy to come into the league and start taking charges. He was just a great defensive presence.”

Multiple knee injuries forced the end of Sloan’s playing career in 1976. In 1978, he joined the Bulls bench as an assistant coach. In 1979, he became a head coach for the first time, taking over the Bulls.

“I never thought he would be a good coach because he was so intense and he took it so personal with the referees when he played,” Weiss said. “But he slid right into it. He didn’t miss a beat.”

Initially, Weiss was correct. Sloan’s initial foray into coaching wasn’t a smooth transition. He was fired a few months into his third season, after compiling a 94-121 record. But, after some time away from the game and a year as a scout for the Jazz, Sloan was hired by the Jazz as an assistant in 1985. He almost went into the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) after accepting a head coaching job with the Evansville Thunder. But he chose to accept the job as an assistant with the Jazz, instead.

In Salt Lake City, Sloan spent three years under Frank Layden as an assistant, learning under one of the better coaches in the league. He did what he always did, which was show up to work, toil as hard as he could when he was there and try to improve every single day. Eventually, he made an impression on the players.

“We didn’t know him well as a coach when he first came to the Jazz,” former player Thurl Bailey said. “We knew about his toughness and we knew him well as a player. But in time, we looked at him like another head coach. We didn’t look at him as an assistant. Even then, he was learning and training on the job. He had so much knowledge as a player, we all sought him out for advice. Those things connected with us.”

In 1988, when Layden became team president, Jerry Sloan became the head coach of the Jazz and began one of the most storied coaching runs in NBA history.

Sloan led the Jazz to 16 consecutive seasons with a playoff berth. During that stretch, he won six division titles. He led his team to 50-win seasons 10 times. Stockton and Malone were the obvious headliners. But, by 1997, the Jazz were an elite team. Jeff Hornacek, Bryon Russell and Greg Ostertag formed a terrific trio of supporting players. The bench was deep and athletic. Sloan was not only one of the best coaches in the league, but also Phil Johnson was one of the best assistants in the league.

Sloan was hard on his players. He consistently demanded their best. But he was also compassionate. He cared about them as people and not just commodities.

“Jerry was the same guy every day,” Friedman said. “That’s what I’ve always admired about him. He knew that it doesn’t cost anything to be nice to people. He understood everyone had a job to do. He had good instincts and he worked hard at it like he did everything else. He competed to be a good coach and a good communicator. He was not afraid to have his other coaches speak up. He always told players not to be afraid to come to him if that player had an idea. He tried to lead by example.”

In 1991, Bailey was traded from the Jazz to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Days before the deal, the team was in Miami preparing to face the Heat. Sloan asked his power forward to come to dinner with him. There, he gave Bailey the truth. He told him there was a deal being discussed and that there could be talk in the media. He told Bailey to keep showing up and keep playing hard.

“He was straight up and upfront,” Bailey said. “I knew that I didn’t have the start that I had in previous seasons. He told me to keep my eyes and ears open. That conversation comforted me in a way. Because he was upfront with me, it wasn’t as tough a blow as it could have been. You always knew he had your back in any situation.

“The little things that he taught me, they stuck with me. Things like tuck your shirt in. I have kids that play basketball and I now tell them the same things. Be on time. Come in prepared. The trust factor. As players, we had so much trust in him, and that’s rare.”

Sloan won his 1,000th game in 2006 against the Dallas Mavericks. By that time, he was on his way to accomplishing a rare feat, even if he hadn’t won a championship. He built a juggernaut around Stockton and Malone, and then built another great team, this time around Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer.

The system that worked so well in the 1990s was still in place. There was the pick-and-roll play. There were the solid baseline screens, designed to get the big men easy buckets. There was the unyielding defense. There was the deliberate offensive style, predicated on toughness and precision.

By the late 2000s, Williams would become one of the best point guards in the NBA. Boozer would become one of the best bigs in the league. Mehmet Okur, Paul Millsap and Andrei Kirlienko formed another terrific supporting cast. By 2007, the Jazz would get back to the Western Conference Finals. From that point until Sloan’s retirement, the Jazz were one of the better teams in the NBA.

“Coach Sloan was so consistent, and that’s what made him who he is,” said Tyrone Corbin, who played for Sloan in the 1990s, coached under Sloan and succeeded him as Jazz head coach.

“Coach showed up every day and demanded maximum effort. But he made sure to give maximum effort himself and that’s why the guys gave him so much effort.”

Sloan resigned in 2011, along with Johnson, a move that preceded the Jazz trading Williams to the Brooklyn Nets two weeks later. The night before Sloan’s resignation, he and Williams had a disagreement, which was highly publicized and talked about to this day.

O’Connor tried to talk Sloan and Johnson out of leaving, but to no avail. The moves eventually gave way to the Jazz we see today, a team coached by Quin Snyder and headed in the front office by Dennis Lindsey.

“I handled the situation poorly,” O’Connor said. “I didn’t want him to leave, but I sensed during the season that it was coming. The biggest thing that Jerry did was he cared about the franchise. The thing with Deron was certainly an instrument, but it wasn’t the only instrument. I don’t think that’s fair to him or Deron.”

When Sloan retired, an era of basketball retired with him. He was an everyman kind of coach, one who wasn’t afraid to get into the trenches. In today’s league, virtually everyone separates from the media. Sloan may have been gruff on occasion, but he also embraced the media. He knew they had jobs to do and told his players such. He and Johnson typically ate in the Jazz media room, and often held informal conversations with reporters.

“Coach Sloan was honest to a fault,” said ESPN’s Marc Spears, who has covered the NBA for two decades. “Once he was comfortable with you, he would allow you inside his amazing basketball brain. I loved his humility. He was a very simple man who didn’t take life too seriously. I really enjoyed looking at my schedule and seeing a game that had the Jazz on it. He was the only head coach that would eat in the media room.

“The last time I saw him, I told him how much he meant to me. I relished every moment I was able to spend with him.”

Sloan was preceded in death by his wife, Bobbye, to whom he was married for 41 years. She died in 2004 of pancreatic cancer, after a six-year battle against breast cancer.

Sloan’s retirement was quiet. He attended Jazz games on a regular basis. He returned to the team n 2013 as a consultant. Beyond that, he stayed mostly out of the public eye. The foundation of Sloan’s legacy still exists in the Jazz. Their third star duo, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, has taken the Jazz to three playoff appearances in three seasons together. The Jazz are still one of the best defensive teams in the league. The lunchpail mentality, the hard work throughout the franchise, it still exists.

“The culture is still there,” said New Orleans Pelicans center Derrick Favors, who was traded to Utah for Williams in 2011. “Even now, the toughness, the defensive mindset, it’s all there. When I first got to Utah, coach would come into the locker room to say hello and just to talk. Just being around him, you felt that legendary presence of Jerry Sloan. You knew he was special.

“Even today, you can’t think of Utah Jazz basketball without thinking of Jerry Sloan.”