Jerry Sloan Remembered

Jerry Sloan, who coached the Jazz from 1988 to 2011, passed away at age 78.

Jerry Sloan was a tough-as-nails NBA All-Star, a legendary coach, and a beloved basketball elder whose contributions to the game have been memorialized in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Sloan passed away on Friday, due to complications from Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dimentia. The 78-year-old Hall of Famer led the Jazz to 19 playoff appearances and 1,223 regular and postseason wins. A bastion of stability in an unstabled profession, Sloan remained the coach of the Jazz even as the league’s other teams made 245 coaching changes.

We here at Salt City Hoops wanted to join in the celebration of all that Sloan stood for. Here are four short essays by our writers who wanted to share their perspectives or memories about the Illinois farmer turned coaching legend.

Celebration, by Kincade Upstill

Jerry Sloan was and will forever be my favorite coach, just like he is for any kid that grew up a Jazz fan in Utah. (I even wanted to name my first kid after him.) It’s fun to watch your team win and under Sloan’s long and glorious tenure, the Jazz won a lot. He was known as a defensive coach but his offensive system, flex and pick-and-roll-based scheme, was amazing to watch. Pat Riley called it the “best offensive system I’ve ever coached against.”

As a young Jazz fan, I loved watching Sloan’s fiery demeanor on the sideline that led to many technical fouls (446). It seemed like every game Sloan would jump off the bench and point out to the officials the illegal defense that the opposing team was committing. I can still hear Hot Rod Hundley giving Sloan the credit on his call.

His competiveness and loyalty to his players was unmatched. It led to many fond memories, like him blowing a kiss at Dennis Rodman after the latter knocked over John Stockton. Or the time Sloan went after Kenyon Martin when he clotheslined Karl Malone. This list could go on and on.  

Former Jazz coach and team president Frank Layden said it best: “Nobody fights with Jerry because you know the price would be too high. You might come out the winner, at his age. You might even lick him. But you’d lose an eye, an arm, and your testicles in the process. Everything would be gone.” His toughness and reputation of being someone that you didn’t want to mess with was the best trait Sloan brought to the Jazz.

He knew how to treat people right way. He wasn’t afraid to hold his players accountable, but they all knew he had their back, on the court and off. Former Jazz point guard Ronnie Price said, “You could see the loyalty that he had to the guys and to the team… 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.”

His players and fans loved him. This had been abundantly clear in the previous days on social media, seeing the outpouring of heartfelt comments and stories: media members remembering him eating in the media room with them before every game, fans sharing stories of meeting him in person and many players sharing what Sloan meant to them personally and professionally.

As we mourn our coach, it’s important to remember the good times. My favorite? Watching Sloan run off the bench to celebrate with Stockton, Malone and the rest of the team when Stockton sent the Utah Jazz to the NBA Finals.

A Genuine Moment with a Genuine Legend, by David J. Smith

Growing up, the Rocky Mountain Revue was always a highlight. Not only could you watch some exciting young players (and sometimes future stars) at the summer league event hosted in Utah, but there was a chance you’d run across NBA celebrities– coaches, players, executives, broadcasters, etc. It was probably 1990 or 1991 when my father and I walked into the East High gym. And as we walked to find our seat, lo and behold, there was Jerry Sloan.

Coach Sloan was simply sitting in the stands, casually taking in a game. I grabbed my dad and pointed Jerry out. His reply: “well, you should go say hello to him!”

After a few seconds of deep contemplation, we marched right up to him. He looked at us, smiled and said hello. He even invited us to sit with him for a few minutes. He was welcoming and friendly, even signing my Jerry Sloan HOOPS card that I happened to bring. (Those were the days!). He asked what grade I was in and encouraged me to work hard at school, saying “An education is so important.” We decided to leave him in peace and thanked him for his time. He shook our hands and thanked us for supporting the Jazz.

It was a simple interaction, but his genuine kindness made an impression that will always remain.

Priceless, by Jonathan Turnbow

I wanted to write an eloquent memoir of Jerry because I have deep rooted respect for him and his style of basketball but I feel pretty unworthy to write anything on the man that I didn’t experience myself. So here is Jerry Sloan from my perspective.

A coach I would want to play for. A coach that makes recruiting easier. A coach that has your back. A coach that doesn’t allow arm sleeves, headbands and nonsense on his gym floor. A coach filled with passion and love for the game of basketball.

I still remember my 16-year-old self waiting as I got autographs from the team during the era of Deron Williams, Mehment Okur, Carlos Boozer and others. I was waiting in the third or fourth row on one end. I looked over to the center court in my same row and saw Sloan, sitting in the stands by himself. I watched him for a while and then finally asked him to sign my hat. He sat me down and made conversation while signing my hat, extremely polite.

As I grew up watching Jazz games with my grandpa, I remember often thinking that they were the same people. Grandpa would have gotten every one of those ejections that Coach Sloan got. I owe much of my relationship with my late grandpa to Utah Jazz basketball.

Tough, hard-nosed basketball. If not coaching in the NBA, I imagined Sloan as a head coach at one of the smaller farming community high schools in Illinois. I think he would have been coaching no matter what level he was at.

His no-nonsense approach to the game will always be something that sticks with me.

As I grew up with a love for the Utah Jazz, I grew up with a love and respect for Jerry Sloan. When the Jazz announced they’d be celebrating Sloan’s career achievements with a banner ceremony, I scrambled to buy tickets. With not much money in my pocket, I spent what I had on two upper bowl tickets that were still out of my budget but I knew I had to be there. Arriving early to the game, the emotion and reality of his greatness set in and I decided to spend an extra $500 that I didn’t have so that I could be behind the basket. Being present for that evening, that speech and to see his banner unveiled is a memory that I log under the category ‘priceless’.

Favorite Jerry Sloan quote: “I don’t need a shooting guard, anyone will shoot it. I need a make-it guard.”

Basketball Philosopher, by Dan Clayton

The 2003-04 Jazz season was their first after the departures of franchise cornerstones John Stockton and Karl Malone. It was also the first season I covered the Jazz from press row.

A small Spanish-speaking weekly in the Salt Lake area agreed to pay me what essentially amounted to lunch money to write game recaps and cover other major team news. The pressroom in those days was full of “pro’s pros” type of newsroom vets. Blogging hadn’t really been legitimized at that point, and PR staffs didn’t grant credentials to many alternative publications. So I was there with the likes of Tim Buckley, Brad Rock, Phil Miller, etc. The local TV reporters sent to the (then) Delta Center were all the same ones who had covered the Jazz during the Finals runs. Imagine a postgame media scrum with mostly longtime professionals and Utah media hall-of-famers… and then imagine some 23-year-old kid sticking a cheapo digital recorder in the middle of that scrum, on behalf of a paper that was circulated mostly on racks in the waiting areas of Mexican restaurants along the Wasatch Front.

In other words, I was a bit out of my depth.

It didn’t matter to Jerry Sloan, who still treated me with respect and endured my ignorance and zeal, even when they led to questions he didn’t really feel like answering. One night early in that season, Andrei Kirilenko had a game where he piled up a decent number of assists in addition to everything else he frequently did for that young, transitioning squad. At that point, I didn’t always dare speak up in the scrums, instead letting the veteran reporters fire away. But that night, I spent the tail end of the game constructing what I thought would be an impressively thoughtful question about positionless basketball, sure to impress both Sloan and my peers. I had it all scripted in my mind, including a lengthy ramp-up about the “point forward” trend in the NBA and what it would unlock for the Jazz to have playmakers at multiple positions. 

The moment came, and I summoned the courage to start my long preamble. “Coach, you seem to be using Andrei more as a point forward, and I wanted to–“

Enough with my long preamble. Sloan cut in.

“I don’t really care what you call it. You can worry about what to call it. We just like when the ball is in his hands. Good things happen for us when he makes decisions with the ball.”

He had no interest in engaging in my philosophical discussion about positions and shifting league trends. I got the quote I needed for the story, even if he batted down my oh-so-clever premise. That’s basically how Jerry was. All he wanted to really talk about was whether his young team “executed” that night. “When we execute our system, we have a chance to win,” he’d constantly say. I’d hear him say that word about a million times over the eight seasons I covered him up close. To him, it was shorthand for playing the right way, respecting the game, and honoring the commitment you had made to play as one part of a symbiotic hole. That’s what mattered to Jerry.

Oh, and don’t stand behind him in the media scrum.

It was a privilege to cover him at all, but especially to get an up-close look at him during that season, one many consider to be his most masterful coaching job. With a roster projected to finish dead last in the Western Conference, Sloan and his charges “executed” their way to 42 wins and almost made the playoffs. During that year, there were a few times he told us how much fun he was having at reconnecting with the teaching part of his job description. He hadn’t needed to do too much of that with a veteran team on autopilot behind Hall-of-Fame veterans in Stockton and Malone. Now, with a younger group, he was once again instructing players on the craft and teaching eager dudes how to be successful at the NBA level. He really enjoyed that.

Eventually Sloan led the Jazz back to relevance. They did miss the playoffs for two more years, but then made four straight postseason trips before his abrupt 2011 retirement, including three runs beyond the first round, and a Conference Finals appearance. Then, he helped the Jazz construct their core for the next generation, as well; Sloan’s stamp of approval after his pre-draft interview with Rudy Gobert factored heavily into the Jazz’s decision to select the eventual All-NBA center. So even the current iteration of the Jazz  is a reflection of what Sloan valued most about players’ mindset and goals.

I covered him for seven more seasons after that one, which means we probably had several dozen exchanges like the one above as part of the (no exaggeration) hundreds of mob interviews I participated in. Sometimes angry, sometimes resigned, sometimes laughing, but always consistent about what he thought the right way was to play ball and what members of a team owed to each other. In that sense, I’ll always think of him as a basketball philosopher as much as a coach. Though if I tried to ask him about that, he’s probably swat away that premise too.

“I don’t really care what you call it,” he might say yet again. “You can worry about what to call it.”