Rick Adelman, the Hall of Fame coach who died June 1 at the age of 79, was one of the select few NBA coaches to have not only won more than 1,000 games but to have also twice led teams to the finals. A former point guard turned master strategist, Adelman guided five franchises over 23 seasons as a head coach, compiling a 1,042-749 record that ranked 10th in league history at the time of his death. For all his wins and deep playoff runs, he never claimed a championship.
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Still, he became far more memorable than many championship-winning coaches by dint of having helmed some of the most thrilling, Sisyphean teams the NBA has known — squads that reached the brink of the mountaintop again and again, only to fall short in ways that made their excellence all the more heartbreaking and simultaneously inspiring.
Richard Leonard Adelman was born on June 16, 1946, in Lynwood, California. After earning West Coast Conference Player of the Year honors at Loyola Marymount University in 1968, he was drafted by the San Diego Rockets and went on to carve out a seven-year NBA playing career as a steady point guard for the Rockets, Trail Blazers, Chicago Bulls, Jazz, and Kings. After retiring in 1975, Adelman began his coaching journey at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. He returned to the Blazers as an assistant under Jack Ramsay in 1983 and was promoted to head coach midway through the 1988-89 season.
Adelman’s arrival in Portland coincided with the prime of Clyde Drexler and a roster built for sustained contention. He led the Trail Blazers to the NBA Finals in 1990, falling to Isaiah Thomas’s Detroit Pistons, and again in 1992, when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls prevailed. Adelman’s read-and-react offense — fluid, intelligent, and reliant on player decision-making — fit perfectly with veterans such as Buck Williams and Terry Porter. Those terrific Blazers teams embodied his philosophy: movement without micromanagement, trust in talent, and a relentless emphasis on doing what worked. In Game 1 of the 1992 Finals, Jordan exploded for six first-half three-pointers and delivered his famous shrug—one of the most iconic moments in NBA history — yet Adelman’s squad still pushed the Bulls to six games.
After brief stints with the Golden State Warriors, Adelman landed in Sacramento in 1998 and transformed the doormat Kings into perennial contenders. Adelman guided the Kings to eight consecutive playoff appearances and engineered some of the most entertaining basketball of the era. The 2001-02 Kings, in particular, were electric: a 61-21 juggernaut featuring Chris Webber, Mike Bibby, Peja Stojakovic, and a supporting cast that played with joy and precision. That was the most fun team that I’ve watched in my lifetime — even more enjoyable to watch in some ways than the Splash Brothers Warriors, or the Seven-Seconds-or-Less Suns. Their pass-heavy, up-tempo style turned every possession into a highlight. Yet in the Western Conference Finals against the Shaq-Kobe Lakers dynasty, what had been an exhilarating Kings run became excruciating. In Game 6, an absurdly lopsided free-throw disparity and a string of controversial calls that favored the Lakers robbed Sacramento of a finals berth and, most likely, a championship. The Kings had a title stolen from them. The franchise has never been the same since.
In a sense, Adelman was the modern NBA’s Zelig: never the most important figure of any single era, but a quietly important presence who happened to find himself at the heart of some of the league’s most defining moments. He coached against the Pistons’ mini-dynasty in the 1990 Finals, went toe-to-toe with Jordan’s Bulls dynasty in 1992 (including the shrug game), and battled the Shaq-Kobe Lakers in 2002. Adelman later took the Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady Houston Rockets to the Western Conference semifinals in 2008-09, a season after he had led them on a 22-game winning streak (the third-longest in NBA history at the time). His final stop came with the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he reached his 1,000th career win before retiring in 2014. Across it all, his teams made the playoffs 16 times. He earned three All-Star Game coaching nods and, in 2021, induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Adelman never picked his rosters, yet he consistently coaxed the best from them through quiet communication and authentic leadership. “I never believed you had to be a hard ass,” he once said. “I tried to be myself. Players are going to see right through that if you’re not yourself.”
In an era of outsize personalities and tactical complexity, Adelman proved that understated competence could produce beautiful basketball. He got teams to the brink without ever quite getting them over the top, but the joy he extracted from the game — and the respect he earned from players who bought into his vision — endured far longer than any single ring.
Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.
