Lenny Wilkens, a smooth playmaker who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach, died Sunday. He was 88.
In a 15-year playing career, Wilkens was an All-Star nine times and twice led the league in assists. Gifted with extraordinary court sense, Wilkens was a player-coach for four seasons, three with the Seattle SuperSonics and one with the Portland Trail Blazers, before moving fulltime into coaching. He led the Sonics to the 1979 NBA title and was Coach of the Year in 1994.
Wilkens won 1,332 games — third-most all time — as coach of the Sonics, Trail Blazers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Hawks, Toronto Raptors and New York Knicks before he retired in 2005. He coached 2,487 games, the most in NBA history. He also won an Olympic gold medal as coach of the 1996 U.S. team.
He is one of only five men to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer as both player and coach, joining John Wooden, Bill Sharman, Tom Heinsohn and Bill Russell.
«Lenny Wilkens represented the very best of the NBA — as a Hall of Fame player, Hall of Fame coach, and one of the game's most respected ambassadors,» NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement Sunday. «So much so that, four years ago, Lenny received the unique distinction of being named one of the league's 75 greatest players and 15 greatest coaches of all time.»
A slight lefthander, barely 6 feet tall, Wilkens grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in New York. His father was a chauffeur who died when he was 5; his mother worked in a candy factory. Wilkins didn't play for his high school team until his senior season. His parish priest wrote to the athletic director at Providence College asking that Wilkens be considered for a
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