Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Adelman died Monday at age 79, the NBA Coaches Association announced in a statement. He leaves behind a legacy as one of the most respected and accomplished coaches in league history, with 1,042 regular-season wins — the 10th most in NBA history.
Adelman was the father of Denver Nuggets coach David Adelman, following a path in basketball that spanned nearly 30 years and two trips to the NBA Finals.
The record does not need much decoration; it already does the talking.
A Player First
A seventh-round pick out of Loyola Marymount in 1968, Adelman spent seven season s with five NBA teams as a steady point guard, averaging 7.7 points and 3.5 assists — mostly off the bench. His two best years came in 1971 and 1972 with the Portland Trail Blazers, the team he would later return to as head coach. He retired from playing at just 28 to pursue coaching.
"Following his NBA playing career, Rick turned to coaching where his leadership, innovation and genuine love for basketball left a lasting impression on generations of players and fellow coaches," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement.
The Portland Years
Adelman's first coaching role was at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Or egon, from 1977 to 1983. The nearby Trail Blazers, the n coached by Hall of Famer Jack Ramsay, brought him on as an assistant in 1983. He was promoted to head coach in 1989.
In six season s with Portland, Adelman won over 65% of his games. He guided the Blazers to the 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals, losing the first to Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons in five games, and the second to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in six. The record declined over the next two years, and he was fired in 1994.
One could argue that reaching the Finals twice in six years as a head coach is its own kind of statement.
Sacramento and Beyond
After brief stints in Golden State with out playoff appearances, Adelman found his most memorable work in Sacramento. He remains the only Kings coach to reach the playoffs more than once since the team relocated the re.
His offense was ahead of its time — built around the passing of Chris Webber and Vlade Divac, the shooting of Peja Stojakovic, Doug Christie and Mike Bibby. The Kings ran a motion offense that proved nearly unstoppable in the early 2000s.
In 2002, the y won 61 games and pushed the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers to seven games in the Western Conference Finals before losing in overtime of the series finale. The team never reached that peak again after Webber suffered a serious knee injury in the 2003 playoffs.
Adelman left Sacramento in 2006 and continued coaching in Houston, where his Rockets pushed the eventual champion Lakers to seven games in the 2009 second round — with out Tracy McGrady for any of the series and with out Yao Ming for four of the seven games. His career ended with three season s in Minnesota with out a playoff berth.
He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021. The offensive principles he pioneered have carried well into the modernNBA.