A tale of two Jerrys

Krause goes out misunderstood while Sloan keeps on going

With the surprising retirement announcement of Chicago Bulls' general manager Jerry Krause, the NBA loses another of its old-timers. (You think about things like this as you get closer to being an old-timer yourself.) It's easy to issue a dismissive "good riddance" to Krause ... and many have. Few executives have garnered less sympathy in recent years than Krause, who is blamed for fracturing the Bulls' dynasty and turning Chicago into one of the worst teams in the NBA. But I'm a little sad to see him go, for he was one of a kind, and the NBA becomes slightly less colorful with his departure.

I often think of Krause in tandem with another colorful old-time Jerry, this one surnamed Sloan, coach of the Utah Jazz. One Jerry never seemed able to gain the respect of his players, even when he was in the midst of putting together a team that won six championships; the other Jerry never lost that respect. One Jerry needed always to explain his part in the grand picture, alerting everyone to the fact that he was in the middle of it. The other Jerry preferred to stayed behind the scenes and appeared genuinely put off when someone mentioned his coaching attributes. The essential difference between the Jerrys boils down to this: Jerry Sloan knows that the NBA has been, is and always will be about players. Jerry Krause, for all his ability to ferret out talent, could never bring himself to acknowledge that talent is what it's all about.

Not being a psychologist, I won't speculate as to how much the relative differences in their physical makeup figures into their personalities. Suffice it to say that Krause is a pudgy little man who looks as if he's never picked up a basketball while Sloan is a strapping ex-player who is still recognized as one of the toughest guys to ever bury an elbow in an opponent's gullet. Sloan is formidable. Walk into a bar (he doesn't go to bars anymore, but he used to spend quite a bit of time in them) and see the 61-year-old sitting on a stool in one of his John Deere caps and you know he's a man you don't want to tangle with. Krause, by contrast, can look comical. I remember encountering him early one morning at an airport snack stand. He looked like a character out of Mad magazine with an oversized trench coat and a big floppy hat that all but covered his blocky body. It was about 8 a.m. and he was eating a hot dog. But, then, so was I.

Partly because of his appearance, partly because of the relentlessness with which Michael Jordan ragged on him, and partly because we make snap, un-nuanced judgments these days (this player "can't play", this coach "can't coach", this ref "can't ref") Krause started getting branded as a guy who didn't know what he was doing ("Krause is a buffoon.") Well, he's not a buffoon. He drafted (among others) Scottie Pippen, Charles Oakley, Horace Grant, Toni Kukoc, Elton Brand and Ron Artest. He signed as free agents (among others) Ron Harper, John Paxson, Trent Tucker and Donyell Marshall. Back in ancient times, he had a hand in signing, Earl Monroe, Wes Unseld and, oh yes, a defensive whiz named Jerry Sloan. There was only one exec willing to take a chance on a far-out guy named Phil Jackson who wanted to move from a CBA coaching job to the NBA -- Krause, who installed Jackson as an assistant to Doug Collins in 1988. Krause also put in 16 years in Major League Baseball and had an eye for talent in that sport, too. He always had something to say, some nugget of information that no one else had, an opinion that was his and his alone. He had a mind for the game.

Alas, his fatal flaw was that he needed to stand up on a chair and shout, "Hey, I had something to do with this!" And he did, to be sure, but announcing it isn't what you do in the NBA. To say that Krause broke up the Bulls is a little simplistic, but not overly so. He wanted to prove that it wasn't all about Jordan and Pippen and Jackson, but you know what? At root, it was all about Jordan and Pippen and Jackson.

Sloan has won 779 games in 14 seasons with the Utah Jazz, plus another 75 in the playoffs, and, to hear him tell it, he hasn't had a damn thing to do with any of them. What he does is get players who go hard (he'll chew their butts out if they don't), run an offensive system that's simple (but not simplistic), make the playoffs every year, and then gets overlooked when the list of great coaches is read off. This season Sloan has seamlessly incorporated his fresh blood (Matt Harpring, Andrei Kirilenko) with his old meat (Karl Malone, John Stockton and Mark Jackson).

As one Jerry bails out, let's give the other his due. I'm voting for Sloan for Coach of the Year. It's time. It's way past time.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum covers the NBA for the magazine and is a regular contributor to SI.com. Click here to send a question to his Mailbag.

 

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