Little things add up to Hall of Fame careers for Sloan, Stockton

In the winter of 2002, one season before John Stockton retired, I asked the Utah Jazz point guard why, in half-court situations, he still looked toward the bench to get a play call from coach Jerry Sloan. After all, Stockton was in the 18th year of a stellar career, a Hall of Fame lock whose intelligence and decision-making ranked him as one of the top half-dozen lead guards of all time. Stockton looked at me quizzically, as if I had asked him, "When you go fishing, why do you use a pole?" To Stockton, the answer was self-explanatory.

"Why wouldn't I?" Stockton said. "He's the coach. He runs the team."

End of explanation.

And so they will go into the Hall of Fame together, as they should, two rock-solid and stolid personalities, the architect and the quarterback of one of the greatest precision offenses in NBA history. Sloan set it up, all those across-the-lane and back screens, all those little things that nobody saw that resulted in wide-open jump shots. And Stockton saw that it got done, the engineer, the executor par excellence.

The obvious visual associated with Stockton is this: He dribbles downcourt, quickly but carefully, head up, eyes wide open, deliberating his options. With seven or eight seconds left on the shot clock, forward Karl Malone comes up and sets a pick. Stockton brushes his own man off the pick and heads toward a sliver of daylight. But then he decides instead to slip an off-the-dribble bounce pass to the Mailman for a layup, thus collecting one of the 15,806 assists Stockton amassed in his career, a few thousand more than any player in history.

But I have a different visual. Stockton comes down with the ball, gives off to a wingman, then veers into the lane where the heavy traffic is congregating. At precisely the right moment, he sets a back pick on a much larger player, a center or power forward, bounces off the neck-rattling contact, and comes back to get the ball in better position, closer to the basket, his defender perhaps lost in the scrum. He did that thousands and thousands of times, contact ill-befitting a man built (6-foot-1, 175 pounds) for passing, not picking.

In that respect, Stockton was a second-generation version of the former Chicago Bull Sloan, who for 11 years was a monster on- and off-the-ball defender, an outside linebacker of a player who could also score (14 points a game), rebound (7.4), pass (2.5 assists) and pugilize (he once squared off against Wilt Chamberlain). In Stockton, who is also the NBA's all-time leader in steals, Sloan found not only a floor manager but also a blue-collar version of himself.

"Whatever I asked John to do, he did," Sloan told me once, extending his ultimate encomium. When I asked Stockton to sum up his coach, this is what he said: "Teaching players the right habits -- that's what Jerry Sloan is about."

If they were ideally matched in personality, they also seemed geographically well-placed in conservative Salt Lake, two no-nonsense, hold-the-bright-lights-hold-the-big-city types who never drew attention to themselves. But do not go overboard trying to make them into a single archetype, the introspective gunslinger, perhaps, or the unsmiling Marlboro Man.

For one thing, Stockton never touched a Marlboro. As far as I know, he never drank either. The same cannot be said of Sloan. For many years during a coaching career with the Jazz that began in 1984 (he was an assistant for three years and elevated to the head job early in the 1988-89 season), Sloan did too much of both. Away from the court, Sloan was most at home in a barroom, chasing away the demons of coaching with alcohol, tobacco, profane bluntness ("Right now our main problem is that we're f------ terrible," he might say of his team) and corny jokes. "I'm on a seafood diet," he told me one night over a postgame beer in Chicago. "I see food, I eat it."