Sharman Comes Back for Seconds at the Hall

Bill Sharman, who led a star-studded Laker team to its first Los Angeles championship in 1972, is making a return trip to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame -- this time as a coach.

Sharman on Monday joined John Wooden and Lenny Wilkens as the only men to be enshrined both as player and coach.

“It’s just an unbelievable honor,” Sharman said after the 2004 class was announced at a news conference here hours before Monday’s NCAA championship game.

Sharman, a former star at USC and later with the Boston Celtics, made the Hall of Fame as a player in 1976. He joins a 2004 class that includes Clyde Drexler, Lynette Woodard, Jerry Colangelo, the late Maurice Stokes and Drazen Dalipagic.

This year’s class will be enshrined Sept. 10 in ceremonies at the basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

As a coach, Sharman will be remembered most as the man who, in 1971-72, finally delivered the goods for the title-starved Los Angeles Lakers.

Sharman coached the Lakers to a then-record 69-13 season and NBA Finals victory over the New York Knicks. The 1971-72 Lakers had an NBA-record 33-game winning streak and are considered by many the greatest NBA team ever assembled.

The lineup included Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Gail Goodrich. Elgin Baylor was in the team photo but retired early in the season because of injuries.

“He said, ‘Bill, I just can’t play up to my standards,’ ” Sharman recalled of Baylor.

Painfully, at least to some, it took a former Celtic to push the Lakers to the championship, although Sharman noted he was raised in California and attended USC.

“I know everyone was certainly happy and relieved that we finally broke through,” Sharman said. “I think it was more a relief for the people that had been there, like Jerry West.”

The Lakers had many near misses in the 1960s and early 1970s -- making the NBA finals seven times between 1962 and 1970 without winning a championship -- but Sharman’s 1971-72 squad was truly a team for the ages.

Only once that season did the Lakers fail to score more than 100 points and in one game, they defeated San Francisco by 69 points, the widest margin in league history.

“And what was vivid in my mind during the 33-game winning streak is that only two of the games were close,” Sharman said.

Sharman paid a price for his historic season. He lost his voice before the playoffs and was told by doctors to stop talking.

“No way I couldn’t talk in the playoffs,” he said. “I thought my voice would come back, but it never did come back.”

More than 30 years later, Sharman still speaks with a rasp.

Sharman, who won the title in his first season as Laker coach, said he’d signed a five-year contract thinking the franchise was in a rebuilding mode with Chamberlain and West on the down sides of their careers.

“When I got there, a lot of people said those guys were over the hill,” Sharman recalled. “I believe Gail [Goodrich] was the only starter under 30.”

Sharman said his only regret was getting to the Lakers too late.

“I would have loved to have that team together about seven or eight years earlier,” he said.

The Lakers returned to the NBA Finals in 1973 but, hampered by injuries, lost to the Knicks.

Sharman became Laker general manager in 1975-76 and, in 1979, presided over the coin flip that enabled the team to draft Magic Johnson.

Sharman is the only man to have won a championship and been named coach of the year in three leagues -- American Basketball League, American Basketball Assn. and the NBA.

He led the Cleveland Pipers to the ABL title in 1961-62 and Utah to the ABA championship in 1970-71.

In 11 seasons in those leagues, Sharman compiled a 509-379 record with a postseason mark of 62-42.

He is credited with introducing the concept of the game-day shoot-around to the NBA.

The others elected: * Drexler starred at the University of Houston before playing 15 NBA seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers and Houston Rockets. He is one of only three players in NBA history with 20,000 points, 6,000 rebounds and 6,000 assists.

Drexler said the biggest thrill of his career was being a member of the 1992 United States Olympic squad known as “the Dream Team” that included Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan.

“The Dream Team was phenomenal, but just playing 15 years in the NBA was a highlight,” Drexler said.

* Woodard was a four-time All-American at Kansas and is considered one of the greatest female players of all time. She was co-captain on the gold medal-winning 1984 Olympic team and the first woman elected to Kansas’ Athletic Hall of Fame.

* Colangelo, at 28, became the youngest general manager in professional sports with the Phoenix Suns. Now chief executive and chairman of the Suns -- and managing general partner of baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks -- he has been named NBA executive of the year four times (1976, 1981, 1989 and 1993).

* Stokes was NBA rookie of the year in 1955-56. His life and career were cut short when he fell and struck his head on the court during an NBA game in 1958. The injury left him permanently paralyzed. He died at 36 in 1970.

* Dalipagic was the premier international point guard of his era. He was named European player of the year three times and earned 12 medals in European, world and Olympic competition. In 1980, he led Yugoslavia to the gold medal at the Moscow Olympics.

Among the list of 16 nominees not elected this year were college coaches Gene Keady of Purdue and Jim Calhoun of Connecticut and ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale.