They say that a boy never really becomes a man until his father dies. If this is true, Jerry Sloan became a man when he was four years old. This may have been the first major disappointment in his life, but it certainly wasn’t the last.
Jerry was the first player to have his number retired by the Chicago Bulls. That came as more of a salute to his rabid underdog intimidation of opponents and a "sacrifice your personal physical health for the team" playing style in a generation that held such personality traits in high regard, than to his actual stats or athletic ability.
The physical nature of his game might have shortened a good career, but without hard picks, three-point plays, and scrappy rebounding, there is no career at all.
Christened "The Original Bull" by sportswriters, Sloan's number hangs in the rafters in Chicago like a flag for a fallen soldier of a lost war.
Despite winning an all time record of more than one thousand basketball games as coach of the small market NBA juggernaut Utah Jazz, he has never really been recognized as a success by his peers in the Coach of the Year voting.
Coach Sloan has amassed nearly as many wins as Hubie Brown, Sam Mitchell, and Gregg Popovich combined. I list those three because each has edged Sloan for the Red Auerbach Coach of the Year award in recent seasons. Sloan also has more wins than the legendary Celtics coach for which the award is named.
NBA.com doesn’t list him in their top 10, but instead has seven coaches with lower winning percentages and nine coaches with fewer total wins on its all-time NBA coaching list. I call these snubs a tragedy, but Jerry disagrees. He cares as much about his peers’ opinions as he does about his players’ feelings.
When a sportswriter asked him about the inconsistent play of 19-year old starting guard CJ Miles he said, “We can’t put diapers on him one night and a jockstrap on him the next.” He isn’t very interested in what the league thinks either. Sloan leads NBA coaches in all-time technical fouls.
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