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As far as I'm concerned, an icon of over 25 years has resigned.
(But enough about Mubarak.)
lol its as much of a shock as you can get in a move whithout leaving the country. The move has been good though. Glad I got to go to some spurs jazz games with Sloan still coaching. =)That matter of perspective, we can definitely agree on. Sorry about the move, hope it hasn't been too much of a culture shock.
As far as I'm concerned, an icon of over 25 years has resigned.
(But enough about Mubarak.)
WoJo's yahoo article on Sloan reeks of D-Will slurping.
another laker homer getting ready for when DWill bolts for the fakeshow as soon as he can.
he breaks a lot of news but he's one of the most pompous bball writers out there. he constantly bashes LeBron for all the same things he slurps Kobe for.
that guy.
rant/
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/spursna...oan-could-not/Buck Harvey: Popovich burns on, as Sloan could not
Buck Harvey
Gregg Popovich said exactly 10 words to his team after the game Friday night. Going by the results of the evening, they did well to hear 3.3 of them.
“We win as a team,” Popovich told them behind closed doors, “we lose as a team.”
Then he walked out of the locker room and took a similar slant with the media. “It didn’t go in the hole,” he shrugged.
But this is not how his night would likely end. Popovich would look at video with his assistants, and he would come up with a list of mistakes, and he would be ready to later correct the Spurs with more than 10 words.
After all the years, after all the similarities, this is why Popovich is finally different than Jerry Sloan.
Keep reading...
This is clearly on management and partly on Williams.
If Mgn. won't back the coach when he has to discipline a player such as Williams, then what good can the coach accomplish after that?
It means the team is not, or soon will not, buying into the system.
He had no recourse at that point except to resign, and apparently his assistant felt the same way.
If you read Karl Malones' interview, he basically says the same thing and lays the blame on both Williams and Mgn.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slu...gnation-maloneMalone says Sloan would never quit anything
By Lynn DeBruin
An agitated Karl Malone says the Jerry Sloan he knows would never quit anything and suggested his longtime Utah Jazz coach just grew tired of garbage that came with the job and certain players.
“They changed the floor back to old school. They changed the uniform back to old school. Somebody tell the damn players to start playing like old school,” Malone said before the Jazz hosted the Phoenix Suns on Friday night. “It may work. They spent a lot of money on the rest, now how about you tell the players. I’m just calling it like I see it.”
Malone, who has exchanged phone messages with Sloan since his resignation, also took issue with some national analysts and players who were particularly critical of Sloan.
The most outspoken player in recent months had been star guard Deron Williams, who clashed with Sloan about the coach’s practice schedule and study demands.
“You’re a professional,” said Malone, a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player and one of greatest power forwards in league history. “You don’t need for me to break a film down for you. If you want to stop the guy you’re playing, they pay you millions of dollars. You get you a TV and break the player down yourself.”
Sloan and longtime assistant Phil Johnson both said they decided to step down after Wednesday’s emotional loss to Chicago. Their resignations were announced at a press conference Thursday that was not attended by a single player.
That alone irritated Malone, who was drafted in 1985—the year after Sloan first joined the Jazz as an assistant.
“I don’t even need to answer whether I would have been there or not,” said Malone, who followed Sloan and All-Star guard John Stockton into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.
“If I got something to say or do to a man, I’m going to look that man in the eye and tell him what is going to happen. That’s just me now.”
He also took issue with analysts declaring the game had passed by Sloan.
“It’s like saying the game passed Phil Jackson by,” Malone said. “Old school worked. The players (have) got to buy into the system.”
Asked if he thinks the 68-year-old Sloan was forced out rather than voluntarily resigned because he had run out of energy, Malone reiterated his statement. “I said what I said earlier. The guy I know and love, he don’t quit or nothing,” Malone said.
Jazz president and CEO Randy Rigby downplayed Malone’s comments.
“Karl is Karl. That’s Karl,” Rigby said after Utah’s 95-83 loss to Phoenix. “And he’s right, Jerry isn’t a quitter. But it was Jerry’s decision and we’re going to support that. But I can tell you he was not forced out by any of us.”
Asked if today’s players have too much pull, Malone thought back to his own contentious battles with Sloan over the years.
“I remember (late team owner) Larry Miller in this locker room, right here when me and coach Sloan was butting heads after a game in front of everybody,” Malone recalled.
He said Miller would drop his head and not say a word but check on both player and coach a bit later. Sloan and Malone always said they were fine and asked about the other.
“Larry never got in that because he knew we’d work it out,” Malone said. “That’s the way it should be.”
Williams has denied forcing Sloan’s hands with a “me or him” ultimatum.
“Maybe arguing was the last straw, so there I am, guilty of that,” Williams said of a halftime clash with Sloan during Wednesday’s loss. “But I think anybody who believes I could force coach Sloan to resign is crazy. He’s stronger than that and personally if I said that to him, he’d probably go tell me to go do something.”
Williams received a loud round of applause when he was introduced before Friday night’s game but there also was a smattering of boos in the crowd.
Malone said it was purely coincidental that he had plans to attend Friday night’s game, which marked the debut for new Jazz coach Ty Corbin.
He lives in Louisiana and indicated his children were on a school break and wanted to see a game.
“We had planned this trip and low and behold I didn’t know all this would happen,” Malone said of the two resignations.
“I don’t know the details, but the way things appeared to have happened wasn’t good.”
Malone says he was besieged by calls on Thursday but chose not to return any.
“Thursday was not a good day for me to react,” he said. “People don’t understand. The whole NBA lost a man who put his heart and soul and everything else in it.”
Malone wished Corbin well but said he could never replace what was lost. He also reiterated a standing offer to help out in any way he can, especially with the organization at a crossroads.
“At some point in time I will be honored if I would be mentioned as a coach,” he said, noting the time may not be right now since his son is still in high school.
“Something I’ve always stated to the Jazz organization … I’ve always been a phone call away.
Assessing Sloan: Call Him Coach
By PHIL MILLER
Phil Miller covered the Utah Jazz for The Salt Lake Tribune from 2002 to 2007.
Jerry Sloan’s coaching style was the subject of tributes and testimonials last week, but a more acute critique came a half-dozen years ago in the form of an ice bag in Greg Ostertag’s right hand. Fed up with Sloan’s postgame harangue about a Utah Jazz loss, the 7-foot-2 Ostertag chucked the handiest missile he could find at the silver-haired Sloan. Witnesses said Sloan simply ducked and continued his lecture unfazed.
Such was the practice of player relations during Sloan’s 23 seasons in Utah, an era that ended abruptly on Thursday with his resignation and that of his chief counsel, Phil Johnson.
“I’m not here to be loved,” Sloan said probably 100 times each season. But he was loved, or at least respected, by nearly everyone he came in contact with during his coaching tenure, the longest in N.B.A. history.
Even Ostertag, whose annual clashes with Sloan were almost as rote as a Stockton-to-Malone pick-and-roll, treasured their relationship. His was one of the first calls Sloan received upon announcing his departure.
Sloan’s public image, at least outside Utah, is one of intensity, ferocity, perhaps a touch of rage, all born of the courtside compe iveness that television cameras capture. He screams at his players, rants at referees. He is the N.B.A. career leader in technical fouls, and made headlines in 2003 by responding to a provocative remark by the referee Courtney Kirkland with a shove, a breach of decorum that earned a seven-game suspension.
The sideline lunatic of popular perception, however, is almost the an hesis of the off-the-court Sloan. He is witty and self-deprecating, considerate and generous; an hour before each home game, he routinely stationed himself on a corner of the court to sign autographs and pose for photos. In a league filled with Lamborghini egos, Sloan is pickup-truck humble.
His speech is peppered with southern Illinois slang and quaint country metaphors. He regularly compared the Jazz’s young players to horses approaching a fence, “and we’ll see whether they rear up.” He deplored it when they “played like they were wearing tuxedoes,” and disliked it when a game devolved into mere “jackpotting around.” If the players were not willing to work hard, he frequently said, “maybe someone will come along and give them a handful of candy.”
So unpretentious were Sloan and his staff, they ate their pregame meals in the media dining room, sitting among the reporters other coaches avoid. Though he never enjoyed interviews, he did not turn them down either. News-media relations is part of the job, he believed, and he detested the notion of not living up to his responsibilities.
Sloan would not allow his players to shirk them either. After one game in 2005, Sloan walked through the Jazz’s locker room and noticed reporters waiting. Told that most players routinely spent a half-hour in the trainer’s room, off limits to reporters, until the throng dissipated, Sloan strode into the trainer’s room. Thirty seconds later, 10 players filed out and took questions.
Sloan valued steadfastness in the face of challenge above all, and his teams were the model of discipline and teamwork, running precise screens and rigid patterns that stood out in a sport that increasingly embraced improvisation. His players were not allowed to wear headbands for fear of calling attention to the individual over the team.
But the line between perseverance and intransigence is thin. Sloan’s offense was either relentless or predictable, depending upon your view, and Deron Williams, with a compe ive fire the equal of his coach’s, was only the latest player to chafe at the Jazz’s confining structure.
In the N.B.A., though, superstar players are too priceless to alienate, too important to silence, and Sloan seemed to sense that another internal battle might turn nuclear. Either he was unwilling to wage it — “My energy level has dropped off quite a bit,” he said at his farewell — or he feared the damage to the franchise that stuck with him.
And it was a shock to those who have watched him wage such battles for decades.
Karl Malone said Sloan once challenged him to a fistfight during a team huddle.
“He said, ‘I’ll fight you as long as I can see you,’” Malone said Friday at a news conference. “And I said, ‘It won’t be long.’ We laughed about it. That’s the coach I know.”
http://offthedribble.blogs.nytimes.c...all-him-coach/
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