Lenny Wilkens, a three-time inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the second-to-last man to ever serve as a player-coach in the NBA, died Sunday at the age of 88, the NBA announced. The cause of death was not announced.
Considered one of the greatest players and coaches in league history, Wilkens was a nine-time All-Star in 15 seasons, in which he averaged 16.5 points and 6.7 assists for three teams. A defensive stalwart who took pride in locking down the opponent’s top guard, Wilkens, at age 36, averaged 1.3 steals per game for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1973 (the year the NBA started tracking steals).
Wilkens remains the third-winningest coach in NBA annals, compiling 1,332 wins in 32 seasons, with one championship directing the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979. He trails only Gregg Popovich and Don Nelson for the most regular-season coaching victories.
Wilkens was named to the NBA’s 50th anniversary team in 1996 and to the 75th anniversary team in 2021. He was also honored as a top 10 and top 15 coach as part of those anniversary celebrations. Wilkens was elected to the James Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1989 and as a coach in 1998, and was honored for the gold medal he won as an assistant with the Dream Team in 1992. Wilkens was Team USA’s coach for the 1996 Olympics, winning gold in Atlanta.
Wilkens is the only player-coach in NBA history to hold dual roles at the same time for two teams, for the SuperSonics from 1969 to 1972 and for the Portland Trail Blazers in 1974-75. There has only been one other man, the Boston Celtics’ Dave Cowens, to serve as a player-coach after Wilkens.
“Lenny Wilkens represented the very best of the NBA,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement Sunday. “But even more impressive than Lenny’s basketball accomplishments, which included two Olympic gold medals and an NBA championship, was his commitment to service — especially his beloved community of Seattle, where a statue stands in his honor. He influenced the lives of countless young people as well as generations of players and coaches who considered Lenny not only a great teammate or coach but also an extraordinary mentor who led with integrity and true class.”
Seattle SuperSonics guard Lenny Wilkens defends New York Knicks guard Walt Frazier at a matchup in 1971 at Madison Square Garden. (Manny Rubio / USA Today via Imagn Images)
Wilkens was born Oct. 28, 1937, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. He grew up a Dodgers fan who once delivered groceries to one of the greatest baseball players of all time, Jackie Robinson. Wilkens’ father died when Lenny was 5, and his mother made certain Lenny grew up in the Catholic faith, with him serving as an altar boy at Holy Rosary Church on Chauncey Street.
Basketball was an afterthought for the young Wilkens, who, in his freshman year of high school at Boys High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was the 15th boy on a 15-player basketball team. The Wilkens family needed money, so Lenny quit the basketball team and took a job at Anastasio’s grocery store, which is how he met Robinson.
Wilkens later returned to basketball and secured a scholarship from Providence College coach Joe Mullaney, who knew of Wilkens because of a letter from the Rev. Tom Mannion of Holy Rosary Church. Mannion mentored Wilkins and wrote a letter recommending Lenny for a basketball scholarship to another priest, who happened to be the athletic director at Providence. Mullaney offered him a scholarship after Mullaney’s father watched Wilkens dominate a tournament for high school-aged players in summer 1956 in the Flushing borough.
Freshmen were not permitted to play varsity basketball at Providence in the late 1950s, so Wilkens sat behind Mullaney “to watch him to see what he was doing, what he was seeing, what he was looking for,” Wilkens told The Athletic in a 2022 interview.
Wilkens didn’t know it as a young man, but his time spent observing Mullaney was an apprenticeship that would serve him well later in life. Wilkens grew to 6 feet 1 and 180 pounds and became a two-time All-American as a player at Providence. By the time the St. Louis Hawks selected Wilkens with the sixth pick of the 1960 NBA Draft, he had scored 1,193 points and led the Friars to their first two NIT appearances in school history. Wilkens would later become the first in school history to have his jersey number retired, and he was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006. He developed a tight handle of the ball with his left hand and could shoot from the midrange, get to the basket and become keenly aware of his surroundings — whether it was how to find a passing lane or to create an opportunity when one did not exist.
Wilkens’ lone NBA Finals appearance came as a rookie in 1961 in a five-game loss to the Boston Celtics. He made five All-Star teams as a member of the Hawks, including his last season there in 1967-68, when he, for the first time, posted averages of 20 or more points and eight or more assists. He was also runner-up to Wilt Chamberlain for NBA Most Valuable Player.
After his near miss as an MVP candidate, St. Louis traded Wilkens to Seattle, an expansion team that had just come into existence in 1967, as punishment for refusing to sign a contract he thought was too cheap. Wilkens dominated on the Sonics, averaging 19.5 points and 9.0 assists over his four seasons — the last three of which he also served as coach. He led the NBA with 9.1 assists per game in 1970 and saw his average increase in the next two years.
Seattle traded Wilkens to Cleveland after the 1971-72 season, where he reached his ninth and final All-Star team with averages of 20.5 points and 8.4 assists at age 35 in 1973. In Wilkens’ final season as a player in 1974-75 in Portland, he also served as a coach and averaged career lows in points, rebounds, shots and minutes. It was a transition season for Wilkens into his second Hall of Fame career.
Members of the U.S. basketball team gather around coach Lenny Wilkens at the end of a practice before the 1996 Olympics. (Tim Zielenbach / AFP via Getty Images)
Wilkens spent one more season coaching the Blazers, and then, after a year off, took over his former team in Seattle, instantly guiding the Sonics to the finals in 1978 before capturing his first and only NBA title the next season. Wilkens won 478 games in 11 years coaching Seattle (counting his first stint as player-coach), and in 1986 returned to Cleveland for a magical run that included 316 wins in seven years. Perhaps Wilkens’ only mistake during his Cleveland years was coaching during the era of Michael Jordan, who often broke the hearts of Wilkens’ otherwise talented, successful Cavs teams.
Wilkens was the only coach Brad Daugherty, a five-time All-Star in Cleveland, ever played for in the NBA. Daugherty said Wilkens was unflinchingly respected in the Cavs’ locker room, for his sterling resume as a player, the professionalism he demanded of players and the calm, even-handed way he had of getting his point across.
“I think he is underrated as a player and a coach, in the history of the game, just period,” Daugherty told The Athletic. “He was brilliant.”
Daugherty also said Wilkens spent a lot of time at practice on the court, showing guards Mark Price, Steve Kerr and Craig Ehlo precisely how to dribble around screens, where to come off them when they were set away from the ball and how to defend when one was set on them.
“We had a bunch of guys injured. This would have been around 1990 or ’91, and he jumped into the scrimmage, and he could still play,” Kerr recalled of his time being coached by Wilkens.
The Golden State Warriors held a moment of silence for Wilkens before their Sunday night game against the Indiana Pacers.
“What I remember most is just the dignity,” Kerr said before the game. “He was such a dignified human being. And a great leader through this kind of quiet confidence. He’d been through quite a bit in his life, in his childhood, just in America and dealing with being a Black man in America, and he shared some of that with us. For him to forge the career that he did in the game, and to make the impact that he did on so many people, pretty impressive.”
Wilkens left the bench in Cleveland for the same position with the Atlanta Hawks in 1993. In his first season coaching the organization that drafted him, he won his first and only honor as NBA Coach of the Year, directing the Hawks to 57 wins and a berth in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Atlanta reached the playoffs in all but Wilkens’ final season there, in 2000.
Wilkens then went on to coach the Toronto Raptors and New York Knicks before his resignation from the Knicks in 2005 put an end to his coaching career.
“Lenny was — what an amazing man,” said Rick Carlisle, Pacers coach and current president of the National Basketball Coaches Association. “A great coach. Hall of Famer as a player and a Hall of Famer as a coach. And he was also an 18-year president of the coaches association and got a lot of great things done during that period of time. When I came into the league as a head coach back in 2001, this guy couldn’t have been more gracious to young coaches, and he was always a great competitor.”
— The Athletic’s Nick Friedell contributed to this story.
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