Jerry Sloan is One of the All Time Greatest NBA Coaches

With the news yesterday that former player and coach, Jerry Sloan, is now suffering from Parkinson's disease and early on set dementia, I found myself profoundly upset. I didn't expect this reaction to come from me. When he was coaching the Utah Jazz in the early to mid nineties, I disliked everything about that team. The Jazz were the only team that I disliked more than the Bulls back then.

To give you a point of reference as to where I was in my life at that time, I was a middle school aged child that was a Seattle Supersonics fan. So, naturally, I really, for lack of a better word, hated the Jazz because the Sonics couldn't beat them and I hated the Bulls because, when the Sonics finally beat the Jazz, they ran into the vaunted Bulls teams of the mid nineties. The Jazz and the Bulls exemplified two great, but two very irritating teams to a younger me. In fact, looking back at that time in my life, I think I disliked the Jazz even more than the Bulls.

The Jazz were led by Karl Malone and John Stockton. These two were world class butt heads in my opinion. I still believe that Stockton is the dirtiest player of all time in the NBA and Malone was so arrogant, it drove me nuts. They were coached by Jerry Sloan. As a young kid, he was the leader of this horrible dictatorship that they had going on in Utah. He put those guys out there and he coached them to play dirty, in my opinion at that time. Now, this blog isn't just to bust on the Jazz, but all this is needed to get to the main point. I'm not here to rip apart a guy that is very ill. I promise, I'll get to the good stuff soon, but this preamble is very necessary.

As I keep saying, I did not like this team or their coach when I was a child. I guess a better way to put it would be, I didn't appreciate or understand the game of basketball back then as much as I do now. Looking back at it now, the coaching and the ability to get the best out of the players you have on your roster was done masterfully by Jerry Sloan. Look, all of us, when we were pre teens, hated these teams that our team couldn't beat. We didn't understand the nuance and the spectacular coaching it took to get players that weren't as athletic or as gifted to play better and to game plan better. That all goes back to coaching.

I still, in my 30's, don't care for John Stockton or Karl Malone, but, damn, do I respect the hell out of Jerry Sloan. This didn't just come up yesterday when the news was announced, I've been on the Jerry Sloan bandwagon ever since he led a Jazz team led by Deron Williams to multiple payoff appearances. Those teams, in the early 2000's, had no business even being relevant, but, once again, Jerry Sloan got the best out of a mostly mediocre roster. I mean, look at what happened to Deron Williams when he left the Jazz for a max contract in New Jersey, his career imploded. I feel like a lot of that has to do with coaching. Williams left a great coach to get paid and to play for an inferior coach.

A couple of years after Williams left, Sloan retired. When he retired, much like I felt yesterday, I was stunned and a bit upset. I was sad that an all time great coach was leaving the NBA. There were, and still are, so few great coaches left and when Sloan retired, there was one less great coach. As I started to gain more knowledge of the game and the wit and will it takes to be a coach, that's when I earned respect for Sloan. Granted, this all came after he retired, but looking back, he was a great motivator and a great coach. To will teams with guys like Byron Russell, Jeff Hornacek, Tom Chambers and Mark Eaton to 50 plus win seasons and two finals appearances is incredible. Sure, he had two hall of famers in Stockton and Malone, but basketball is a 5 player team sport and no matter if you have two hall of famers, you have to get the other three starters and the bench players to be equally invested and Sloan excelled at that. He drew up some of the greatest pick and roll plays when he had Stockton and Malone. Those plays were deadly. Teams knew they were coming, but they still couldn't stop it because it was so well run and drawn up. Coaches still use his pick and roll philosophy today. It has lasted decades.

Jerry Sloan's best teams were the Stockton and Malone teams, but as I said before, he also led teams with players like the aforementioned Deron Williams, Carlos Boozer and Andrei Kirilenko to 50 win seasons and multiple playoff appearances. They still ran the pick and roll, with Williams and Boozer, and while it may not have been as devastating, it still worked. It was a thing of beauty to watch when the Jazz would run their pick and roll. Go back and watch some footage of the play, it's wonderful. He continued to coach all the way until 2011 and he was still as fiery and competitive as he was when he was a player and very early in his coaching career. That's another thing that I respected later on about Sloan. He was so competitive and fiery, he would run up and down the court and constantly argue with the officials to stick up for his players. He'd get so fired up at times, it looked like he wanted to be on the court. I didn't like it as a child, but I love it as an adult. So, when he left in 2011, I was shocked, as I said earlier, and he left to little fanfare. He just resigned and was gone. Rumors would pop up occasionally that he may come back and coach again, but they never materialized. I feel like that's a good thing. He did such a good job and stuck with one team his whole career. I like that he left and didn't try to get back in the game, a la Phil Jackson and his current deconstruction of the Knicks.

This news yesterday though, it stinks. Sloan is an all time great, a hall of famer, and now he is suffering from not one, but two horrible, life threatening diseases. I've seen, first hand, what dementia can do to someone and it's not pretty. To throw Parkinson's on top of that, that is a bummer. I hate that an all time great like Sloan has to suffer like this. His body and his mind will soon deteriorate and he won't remember his great career, but fans of the NBA will always remember how great he was. Sloan is a once in a lifetime coach. He was Gregg Poppovich before Gregg Poppovich. He was the surly genius that all other coaches feared. I hope Sloan can somehow get better and live some sort of a normal life, but I just don't see that happening. It's unfortunate. I don't want to lose another NBA legend. We've already lost Daryl Dawkins and Moses Malone, please don't take another NBA legend from us way too soon.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast. Follow him on twitter @tykulik.