Jerry Sloan celebrates 20th anniversary as Utah Jazz coach with win

The headline alone sounds like a typo in this era of revolving door coaching changes in the NBA—Jerry Sloan celebrated his twentieth anniversary at the helm of the Utah Jazz on Tuesday with a victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves.  Earlier this season, he became the first coach in NBA history to win 1000 games with the same team.  Sloan is not only the longest tenured head coach in the NBA by a wide margin (San Antonio’s Greg Popovich is #2 as he enters his 13th season) but in all of North American professional sports.

Jerry Sloan became the head coach of the Utah Jazz on December 9th, 1988 replacing Frank Layden.  He didn’t get off to a particularly auspicious start, losing his first game and posting a 3-6 mark after his first road trip.  The “lowlight” of that trip was a loss to the expansion Miami Heat, who’d lost 21 of their first 22 games.  His first big accomplishment was a win over the powerful L.A. Lakers on Christmas Day, and he’s been a fixture on the Jazz sidelines ever since. 

To fully understand just how long Sloan has been the Jazz head coach, you have to leave the realm of sports and consider some other current events.  When he became coach of Utah, Ronald Reagan was finishing out his second term as President with his VP, George Herbert Walker Bush waiting in the wings.  Mikhail Gorbachev was still Premier of the Soviet Union, which actually still existed.  In 1988, compact discs outsold vinyl records for the first time.  Madonna was still married to Sean Penn, and legendary English death metal band Bolt Thrower released their first album “In Battle There Is No Law”.  “Miami Vice” was still on television in the US, but the big TV event of the year was the furor over “Who Shot J.R. Ewing?” on “Dallas”.  The original Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) was the state of the art in video games,  and the big movie of the year was “Rain Man” starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise.

In sports, Roy Jones, Jr. was known as the boxer who was screwed at the summer Olympics a few months earlier.  Mario Lemeiux and Wayne Gretzky  battled it out for the NHL scoring title, though the Calgary Flames were the surprise winner of the Stanley Cup.  Kirk Gibson led the LA Dodgers to the World Series title and Joe Montana began to earn his legendary status with a comeback win for the San Francisco 49ers over the Cincinnati Bengals.  Kareem, Magic and the LA Lakers defeated Isiah, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman for the NBA title.

In other words, he’s been coaching a long time.  The primary reason for his longevity is his toughness and competitive drive, which is still respected by his former teammates as well as the NBA stars he coaches today.  Bob Love, a former Sloan teammate during his playing days with the Chicago Bulls remembers:

"That guy was tough as nails. He was as mean as a snake."

Longtime NBA voice Marv Albert:

"He was one of the toughest guys I've ever seen."

Current Laker coach Phil Jackson played in the NBA at the same time as Sloan elaborated on his qualities as a player—qualities very familiar to those who’ve watched his Jazz teams over the years—noting that he was:

"a blue-collar worker … a guy that took charges and hit the floor and was always a tough, tough defender."

In his characteristic low key style, Sloan downplays his legendary toughness as merely the only tool at his disposal to compete with players like Oscar Robertson and Jerry West:

"I had to do whatever I could to play. I couldn't compete with them athletically."

Sloan has a tendency toward self depreciation, but many basketball experts consider him the toughest player ever in the NBA.

Ironically, Sloan has never been named NBA Coach of the Year which may be the most egregious injustice in all of professional sports.  His biggest problem may be the crux of his ability and longevity—consistency.  The NBA likes to give its “Coach of the Year” award to the mentors of improbable turnarounds and the caretakers of championship dynasties.  All Sloan does is win, year after year with the talent he’s got to work with.  Sometimes that talent has been among the best in the league—Stockton and Malone, or the current vintage of Boozer and Williams.  Even in the first post Stockton/Malone season, however, he posted a winning record—a feat that went unappreciated by most, but not Jazz GM Kevin O’Connor who quipped that for that performance:

"He should have been named coach of the century."