The Bulls championship dynasty of the 1990s was the shimmering gold NBA skyscraper of the game that was both marveled over and held in reverent awe for its towering impressiveness.
Less remembered are the workers who dig the foundations for the great edifices of our lives, though they are no less important because no one succeeds without powerful supports. Generally they have moved on to other needs before the tower is topped off. So they’re not there amidst the shouting and celebration, though certainly in spirt and contribution.
Like Doug Collins, the Bulls head coach from 1986 through 1989 when the Bulls and Michael Jordan began stacking the wins and the legacy that produced their NBA glories. In each of Doug’s first two seasons with the Bulls, the team increased its win totals by double digits, a pattern which would repeat for Collins’ teams as head coach of four NBA franchises.
Doug Collins wasn’t around when the Bulls won their six NBA titles. He also wasn’t there for the championship season after making four consecutive All-Star teams for the Philadelphia 76ers as the NBA’s best shooting guard. Doug didn’t get to wear the gold medal in the 1972 Olympics despite converting what experts have called perhaps the two most pressure free throws in the history of basketball. This all before the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame recognized Collins, the former No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft who represented turnarounds like perhaps no one ever in sports, with the Curt Gowdy Award for broadcasting excellence.
And now the Hall of Fame, with its announcement Saturday at the Final Four in Phoenix, has dutifully doubled down by including Collins for basketball immortality and enshrinement in the 2024 Class of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Collins, 73 this summer, is entering in the category of contributor, which he perhaps ideally defines through his excellence on every level of basketball from the then amateur game as an Olympian, and then as an All-Star professional, a decorated head coach and an award winning broadcaster and ambassador for the game given his many clinics and speaking engagements. The Class of 2024 will be enshrined during festivities in Springfield, Massachusetts on August 16-17.
“Doug Collins’ basketball accomplishments are special,” said Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf. “Doug did enough to be an Olympic basketball star. He was one of the NBA’s best guards and an All-Star four consecutive seasons before knee surgery prematurely ended his playing career. He then became a premier NBA coach who coached an All-Star game and a Basketball Hall of Fame Gowdy Award winner for his broadcasting and TV game analysis. But Doug, who is a dear friend, also holds a special place in the hearts of Chicago Bulls fans and the franchise as the coach who started the climb toward the great dynasty of the 1990s by leading the Bulls and Michael Jordan to the franchise’s first 50-win season and conference finals appearance in more than a decade and later returning as an adviser and mentor to Bulls staff and coaches in the Tex Winter tradition. The Bulls congratulate Doug and are proud to have been a part of his legendary Hall of Fame career.”
It’s a long and sometimes torturous road to basketball’s Mount Olympus, and Doug Collins has exhibited the heart and experienced the heartache along the way.
But it’s truly special for the two-iron thin summer corn stalk of a kid, a small town sheriff’s son from Downstate Benton. He didn’t even start on his high school team until he was a senior, accepted the first full basketball scholarship to modest Illinois State University, which only moved to Division I after he was enrolled.
Doug, however, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of ultimate sporting success. Still, sometimes no matter how talented you are, the fates can conspire against you.
Like when Collins in the tragic 1972 Olympics for USA Basketball with the USSR running out the clock for the win stole a cross court pass and dribbled full court for the winning basket. He was mauled and mugged before he could get there, laid out by a burly Russian bear of a man amidst also the Cold War drama of the day. Collins recovered with three seconds remaining to march to the free throw line and gently swish both free throws. For the win?
Everyone thought so but the officials, who famously stopped the game and repeated the final USSR possession multiple times until the Russians finally completed a full court pass for the “win.” The USA team never would accept its fraudulent silver medal.
Collins then became the No. 1 selection in the 1973 NBA draft to the losingest team in NBA history, the nine-win Philadelphia 76ers. Which actually began Collins’ unprecedented record as basketball’s premier turnaround expert.
In his first season, the 76ers almost tripled their win total. By Collins’ third, he led the team in most points scored. And by his fourth season, the 76ers were in the NBA Finals and Collins was the NBA’s leading shooting guard, the 1970s version of Klay Thompson though better with the ball, shooting more than 50 percent overall in an era when centers got the most and best scoring opportunities. But after four consecutive All-Star appearances, Collins suffered a serious knee injury in an era when it meant the end of your career. He played fewer than half the games two more seasons and retired in 1981. The 76ers won the NBA title with mostly the same group of players minus Collins in 1983.
In fate and near fortune, Collins barely missed being a Bull in 1973.
The NBA draft wasn’t as noteworthy then as teams worried about losing top prospects to the ABA. So the 76ers had agreed to trade their No. 1 pick in that 1973 draft to the Bulls for center Clifford Ray and guard Bobby Weiss. The Bulls were set to select Collins, but the trade was called off when Ray failed his physical and required knee surgery. The Bulls ended up drafting Iowa center Kevin Kunnert, who was quickly traded for Princeton’s John Hummer. That didn’t work, either.
Collins, just 35 meanwhile in 1986, was named Bulls head coach with the team coming off a 30-52 record in Jordan’s injury-marred second season. The Bulls then won 40 games, and then 50 games, and then in Collins’ third season as Bulls coach to the sixth game of the conference finals in 1989 before the team moved on to Phil Jackson as coach. Again, two years later the Bulls won their first of six championships.
But Collins remained a winner, and carried his epoch abilities and competitiveness it to wherever he went.
In perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment in NBA coaching, Collins took over three more previously losing teams after the Bulls in the Detroit Pistons, 76ers and Washington Wizards. Each of those teams like the Bulls improved by double digit wins in Collins’ first season, Detroit and Washington by 18 wins and the 76ers by 14. Collins was NBA Coach of the Month multiple times and coached the All-Star team when he was in Detroit and the team led the league in wins at mid season. The Pistons finished with 54 wins after having won 28 games just two years earlier.
When Michael Jordan began his famous basketball comeback with the Washington Wizards in 2001, he asked only for Collins to be his coach. The Wizards came within one game of doubling their previous season’s win total in Collins’ first season there. And in 2008 when the so called Olympic Redeem Team restored the gold medal to the US, LeBron James asked Collins, then broadcasting for NBA, to join the team’s gold medal winning celebration for his mentorship with the 2008 team and the inspiration from his 1972 efforts.
“I wished I could have been a Hall of Fame player,” Collins once told me, “but injuries cut short my career. I’ll admit sometimes I cared too much. But that has driven me to do the things I have done because I did care. The essence for me always has been a teacher, a coach. Coaching might be dismissed at times, but I am a product of coaches. The word coach to me is special, like doctor. It’s about respect and admiration and got me to where I am.”
Which now appropriately is a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
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