Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Adelman died Monday at 79, the NBA Coaches Association declared in a statement. Adelman, father of Denver Nuggets coach David Adelman, played seven seasons for five NBA teams before launching a coaching career that included two trips to the NBA Finals and 1,042 regular-season wins, the 10th most in history.
“Rick Adelman was one of the most respected and accomplished coaches in the history of the NBA,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver mentioned in a statement. “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 over his nearly 30-year run. He was a brilliant strategist and teacher of the game, and an even better person. I send my deepest condolences to Rick’s family and many friends throughout the league.”
A seventh-round pick out of Loyola Marymount in in 1968, Adelman was a steady point guard who averaged 7.7 points and 3.5 assists mostly as a reserve. His two best seasons as a pro came in 1971 and 1972, with a Portland Trail Blazers team that he would later rejoin as head coach, but after seeing his playing time retire across his final few seasons, he retired at 28 to pursue his next career.
His first venture into coaching was a humble one. Between 1977 and 1983, he coached Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. The nearby Blazers, then coached by fellow Hall of Famer Jack Ramsay, brought him on as an assistant in 1983. He was promoted to the head job in 1989, and it was with Portland that he experienced his most success.
In six seasons, Adelman won over 65% of his games as head coach of the Blazers. He took Portland to the 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals, but lost the former in five games to Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons and the latter in six games to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. Their record would decline over the next two years, and he was fired in 1994. Adelman would then spend two years in Golden State without making the playoffs before eventually resurfacing in Sacramento for perhaps his most memorable stint as a coach.
Adelman, to date, is the only Kings coach to reach the playoffs more than once since the team relocated to Sacramento. There, he built an innovative offense that helped inform where the game would go in the decades that followed. Built around the genius passing of Chris Webber and Vlade Divac and the excellent shooting of Peja Stojakovic, Doug Christie and Mike Bibby, the Kings ran a motion offense that proved nearly unstoppable for much of the early 2000s. They peaked in 2002, when they won 61 games and pushed the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers to seven games in the Western Conference Finals before losing their shot at the championship in overtime of the series finale.
The Kings never reached that peak again, with Webber suffering a serious knee injury in the 2003 playoffs. Adelman left the Kings in 2006, and his similarly offensively potent Houston Rockets had similar luck. In 2009, they pushed the eventual champion Lakers to seven games in the second round without superstar Tracy McGrady for any of the series or co-star Yao Ming for four of the seven games. His career ended with three seasons in Minnesota that did not include a playoff berth.
Adelman retired as one of the most accomplished coaches in NBA history without a championship ring. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2021, and the offensive principles he pioneered throughout his coaching career have survived all the way into the modern NBA.
