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      What Rudy Tomjanovich Learned by Coaching the Greats

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      Tomjanovich led the Houston Rockets to two championships (Hakeem Olajuwon), briefly coached the Lakers (Kobe Bryant) and oversaw an Olympic team (Kevin Garnett).Even as a noted players’ coach, Rudy Tomjanovich had a hunch Kobe Bryant would need some time to embrace their new partnership.After five years and three N.B.A. championships under Phil Jackson, and having thrived in the read-and-react triangle offense Jackson championed, Bryant was suddenly playing for a lifelong Houston Rocket with different sideline sensibilities.“It was an adjustment for him because I was a play caller,” Tomjanovich said.What Tomjanovich shared with Jackson, if not an offensive philosophy, was a gift for reading superstars and ultimately connecting with them. His time with Bryant was short during the 2004-5 season, when Tomjanovich quickly deduced that the stress of coaching had become damaging to his health, but at least one Laker urged him not to walk away.“Kobe tried to talk me out of it,” Tomjanovich said in a telephone interview, reflecting on his resignation, as well as how he meshed with Bryant, after just 43 games.In the buildup to this weekend’s pandemic-delayed inductions for the Basketball Hall of Fame’s class of 2020, Tomjanovich, 72, has been telling old stories often — most of them, naturally, from his 32-year run as a player, scout and coach in Houston. The class is headlined by Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Bryant, who will be presented by Michael Jordan and inducted posthumously. Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, 2020, that grief-stricken fans and peers, all of the honorees included, are still struggling to process.Tomjanovich coached Bryant and the Lakers for 43 games before stepping down for health reasons.Brian Bahr/Getty ImagesTomjanovich, after twice being named a finalist but not in 2019, earned his place among the 2020 inductees for his coaching achievements in Houston — particularly his championship partnership with Hakeem Olajuwon. The Rockets won back-to-back titles in 1993-94 and 1994-95, first with Olajuwon as the lone All-Star, then as a lowly No. 6 seed after a midseason trade reunited Olajuwon with Clyde Drexler, his college teammate from the University of Houston’s men’s basketball teams known as Phi Slama Jama.Those Rockets teams were routinely dismissed as champions of circumstance, branded as beneficiaries of Jordan’s 18-month hiatus from the N.B.A. to try to transform himself into a Chicago White Sox outfielder. We’ve since learned, through “The Last Dance” documentary series, that Jordan’s iconic Chicago Bulls were not a lock to handle Houston without a big man anywhere near Olajuwon’s level.“I heard it from the horse’s mouth — and that’s Michael,” Tomjanovich said.He said that Charles Barkley, in his first season as a Rocket in 1996-97, arranged a dinner at his home in Phoenix for the Rockets’ coaching staff. There were two very special invited guests: Tiger Woods and Jordan.“It was the first time I really got a chance to talk to Michael,” Tomjanovich said. “Nobody can ever know who would have won, but he said they were concerned that they couldn’t stop Hakeem. It was great to hear it from him.”Bladder cancer brought a cruel halt to Tomjanovich’s three decades in Houston after the 2002-3 season. Yet the way he managed an array of big personalities across 12 seasons as the Rockets’ coach helped Tomjanovich emerge as the Lakers’ choice to replace Jackson — after some flirtations with Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and an attempt to lure Miami’s Pat Riley back to Hollywood. Tomjanovich, then 56, signed a five-year, $30 million contract to coach the Lakers, who traded Shaquille O’Neal to Riley’s Heat four days later.Hakeem Olajuwon was the cornerstone of Houston’s back-to-back title teams in the 1990s under Tomjanovich.Noren Trotman/NBAE via Getty Images“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” Tomjanovich said. “First of all, I was excited that the cancer was gone. I thought, ‘I can’t pass this thing up,’ but then I just felt like I was hurting myself and I had to let it go. I love to coach good players, and Kobe was great. I thought I could do it, health-wise and body-wise, but I couldn’t. People said it was a lot of money to give up, but what good is money if you’re going to make yourself sick?”It was the rare Tomjanovich comeback story without a happy ending. As a player, he survived a vicious on-court punch from Kermit Washington in December 1977 and recovered to reach his fifth All-Star Game in 1978-79. As a coach, Tomjanovich steered the Rockets to playoff upsets of the teams with the league’s top four records (Utah, Phoenix, San Antonio and Orlando) in the 1995 playoffs to win title No. 2, including a second-round rally against the Suns after Houston fell into a 3-1 series deficit.“That’s how we got one of the greatest quotes ever in basketball,” Robert Horry, one of Tomjanovich’s Houston stalwarts, said on Monday. “Don’t ever underestimate the heart of a champion.”That defiant rebuttal to Rockets skeptics, from a beaming Tomjanovich after Houston completed a 4-0 N.B.A. finals sweep of O’Neal’s Orlando Magic, became his signature line.He is still working in the league, hired in December by the Minnesota Timberwolves as a front-office consultant. He referred to his induction as “the cherry on top of it all” and said that coaching gave him what he craved most other than championships in his final years as a player.A new identity.“I heard that for a while and it was getting old — ‘Oh, you’re the guy who got punched,’” Tomjanovich said. “It was really good to push that in the background.”Tomjanovich didn’t coach Duncan, but said he would never forget the dread he felt upon seeing him as a rookie in San Antonio, teaming with David Robinson. “The first time they threw him the ball, I watched how he caught it and where he positioned it under his chin and how he looked to the middle,” Tomjanovich said. “I got sick to my stomach.”He did briefly coach Garnett and, not surprisingly, clicked with another star. Tomjanovich coached the United States at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Garnett was one of his loudest leaders. Two scares against Lithuania, including a semifinal that the Americans easily could have lost, will surely stay with members of that team, since U.S.A. Basketball, to that point, had not lost with N.B.A. players.“I’m telling you, that was a big, big boulder that you’re carrying around,” Tomjanovich said. “You don’t want to be the first.”Perhaps he and Garnett will have a chance to share a relieved laugh about it at some point during Saturday’s festivities. Every moment of levity is bound to be relished on what figures to be, at various points, an unavoidably somber evening.From left, Robert Horry, Clyde Drexler and Tomjanovich won a championship with the Houston Rockets in the 1994-95 season as the No. 6 seed.Scott Halleran/Getty ImagesHorry, the role player supreme, has as much reason to watch as anyone. He won two of his seven championships alongside Duncan in San Antonio and regards Tomjanovich as “the best coach to play for.” He also played for Jackson and Gregg Popovich, but rates Tomjanovich at the top “because he had a feel for the players and a feel for the game.”“I only still talk to one of them,” Horry said, referring to Tomjanovich.Yet Horry added that he was unlikely to tune in, as much as he wanted to celebrate Rudy T’s big moment, and it was clear why. For all we anticipate with this starry class — what sort of speech we get from the spotlight-shy Duncan is one prime example — it’s still so hard to get past the unjust and unfillable hole in the whole occasion without Bryant able to take his rightful turn on the podium.Bryant joined the Lakers at 17, grew up over the course of 20 seasons in Los Angeles on the biggest of N.B.A. stages and, after such a long and prosperous career, had his life cut tragically short. As a regular analyst on Lakers broadcasts, Horry said he feels that sting every time the team’s network runs what it calls “Mamba Moment” highlight tributes to Bryant, his teammate on the Lakers’ three-peat championship teams from 1999-2000 to 2001-2.Horry’s daughter, Ashlyn, had a rare genetic condition and died at 17 in 2011. He said he thinks often about Vanessa Bryant, Kobe’s wife, and “having to talk about not just losing a daughter but a husband, too.”“It’s too sad,” Horry said.The plan here is to revel as much as possible in Saturday’s joys, like the overdue recognition for a decorated coach like Tomjanovich, while bracing for the sadness we will all understand.The Scoop @TheSteinLineCorner ThreeThe Miami Heat had a shorter off-season than any other Eastern Conference team after their run to the 2020 finals stretched into October.Steven Senne/Associated PressYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be condensed or lightly edited for clarity.)Q: In last week’s newsletter, you wrote that no one foresaw that three of last season’s final four teams would be in danger of landing in the playoff play-in tournament. That is demonstrably untrue. I am no N.B.A. prophet, but I was published in your newsletter before the season started saying that it was tremendously unfair to ask the four best teams from the season before to return to play after as little as 71 days off. I can only assume that many other voices expressed similar concerns. — Avary Mitchell (McKinney, Texas)Stein: I have never disagreed for one second with what you wrote in December. The truncated turnaround from last season to this season was always going to be roughest on the Lakers, Heat, Celtics and Nuggets — and, yes, unfair in a lot of ways.But I don’t remember anyone saying that they expected any of those teams to slip all the way to No. 7 in its conference.I reread your letter, and the same holds for you. There’s a difference between denouncing the disparity in teams’ off-seasons and predicting that the defending champion Lakers would finish seventh in the West.Injuries and Covid-19 disruptions have been a major factor for the Lakers, Heat and Celtics, on top of the unfairness, but all have still managed to slip further in the standings than any of the worst-case-scenario pundits were projecting when the season began.Q: You have been writing a lot about the Nets’ recent signing of the former CSKA Moscow guard Mike James. I want to ask you about the guard from my country who recently joined CSKA: Gabriel Lundberg. He does not have a Luka Doncic pedigree, but he was the driving force behind Denmark’s upset of Lithuania in November. Does he have an N.B.A. future? — Martin Ronnow Lund (Denmark)Stein: Thank you, Martin, for what (I think) will be recorded as our first question from Denmark.I’ve done some checking on Lundberg, since I admittedly don’t have much of a file on him, and it’s fair to say that N.B.A. teams are well aware of him now. At 26, he has made a storybook progression from playing in the Spanish second division as recently as the 2017-18 season to emerging as a force with a European powerhouse like CSKA. The performance (28 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists) you referred to against Lithuania certainly registered in front offices here, even though Lithuania didn’t have access to its N.B.A. players.There will be questions about his size (6-foot-4) as a shooting guard and his one-on-one skills, but I am told he plays with great confidence — to go with his great back story. Perhaps he can be the first Dane to really break through in the N.B.A.; helping a James-less CSKA reach the EuroLeague final four ensures he will be well scouted.Lars Hansen was the first Danish-born player to be drafted and had a brief stint with Seattle in the late 1970s, but he moved to Canada at a young age and represented Canada in the 1976 Olympics. David Andersen, who had a Danish father, had stints with Houston, Toronto and New Orleans in the N.B.A., but he was born in Australia and played internationally as an Australian. The Nets drafted the Copenhagen-born Christian Drejer with the 51st overall pick in 2004, but Drejer never played in the N.B.A.Q: I read your recent newsletter on the play-in games format and, as a fan, I love it. I also love the Knicks. The last several years have been rough, but I want to know: Is Tom Thibodeau going to win the Coach of the Year Award? — (Peter Thurlow, Ridgewood, N.J.)Stein: My official unofficial ballot, which I publish every season just for posterity, will headline next Tuesday’s newsletter. As a reminder: The New York Times does not participate in league award voting in any sport, but I still like going through the exercise of breaking down each race just for discussion purposes.While saving my extended commentary on coach of the year and the other categories until then, I can share that I was indeed leaning toward Thibodeau entering the final week of the regular season because of his unquestioned influence in establishing the Knicks as this season’s foremost overachieving team. To actually win it, though, he’ll have to beat out the league’s only two coaches (Utah’s Quin Snyder and Phoenix’s Monty Williams) likely to wind up in the 50-win club in this 72-game season.Numbers GameCarmelo Anthony keeps climbing the career scoring leaderboard, at a time when many thought he would be out of the league.Steph Chambers/Getty Images5Since Portland’s Carmelo Anthony made his debut in the N.B.A. in 2003-4, five players have moved into the N.B.A.’s top 10 in career scoring: No. 3 LeBron James (35,318), No. 4 Kobe Bryant (33,643), No. 6 Dirk Nowitzki (31,560), No. 8 Shaquille O’Neal (28,596) and No. 10 Anthony (27,337). The five players displaced from the top 10 in that span, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, were John Havlicek, Dominique Wilkins, Oscar Robertson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Elvin Hayes.30Russell Westbrook is the N.B.A.’s new career leader in triple-doubles in the regular season, after surpassing Oscar Robertson’s record 181 on Monday in Atlanta, but he still has some ground to make up to match Magic Johnson’s record of 30 postseason triple-doubles. Westbrook has 10 playoff triple-doubles — two more than Robertson’s eight. LeBron James, with 28, is Johnson’s closest pursuer on the postseason list.2In April 1970, after successfully blocking a trade to Baltimore, Oscar Robertson was dealt to the Milwaukee Bucks from the Cincinnati Royals for the modest return of Flynn Robinson and Charlie Paulk. Robinson and Paulk spent only one season each in Cincinnati, and the Royals, just two seasons after the trade, moved out of Ohio to become the Kings and a team with two home cities: Kansas City, Mo., and Omaha.15Dallas’s Luka Doncic and Philadelphia’s Dwight Howard lead the league with 15 technical fouls each, followed by Russell Westbrook (14). Doncic and Howard each remain one technical away from a one-game suspension, but there would be no carry-over if a 16th tech was accrued in the final game of the regular season. Slates are wiped clean for the playoffs, with seven technicals in the postseason resulting in a one-game suspension.22-9Since Damian Lillard’s debut season in 2012-13, Portland has won 22 of its 31 games against the Los Angeles Lakers, according to Elias. It’s the Lakers’ second-worst record against an opponent in that span, better only than a 7-28 mark against the Los Angeles Clippers. The Trail Blazers’ home win Friday over the Lakers gave them a huge edge in the race to secure the sixth seed in the Western Conference and to avoid the playoff play-in round next week.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      Tamika Catchings Is Taking Her ‘Superpower’ to the Hall of Fame

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      Catchings, a 10-time W.N.B.A. All-Star, said her hearing loss helped her have greater court awareness and better anticipate her opponents’ moves.Over time, Tamika Catchings reached an understanding about her lifelong hearing impairment. If it had once led to childhood taunts and later to some communication breakdowns with her college basketball coach, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, Catchings came to realize that her impairment wasn’t an impairment at all.Rather, it was her “superpower,” as she put it.She is certain she compensated for her “moderate to severe” hearing loss with a court awareness that was second to none — that she was more capable of discerning all that was happening around her and, crucially, more apt to anticipate what was about to happen. That was particularly true on defense, she believed, and who’s to argue? While her other career numbers — 16.1 points, 7.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game — reflect all-around excellence, she won the W.N.B.A.’s Defensive Player of the Year Award five times in her 15 seasons with the Indiana Fever. Five years after her retirement, as she prepares to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday, she still holds the league’s career record for steals.So, yes, a superpower.Scientists have a name for it when a person deficient in one of the five senses sees the others sharpen: cross-modal plasticity. It happens automatically, not through any conscious effort. The body understands there’s a need, and adapts.In her 2016 book, “Catch a Star,” Catchings recounted a time in elementary school when she and her sister, Tauja, were engaged in a one-on-one game in the driveway of the family’s Illinois home. Things grew heated, as they often did.“He still drives me crazy, every once in a while,” Catchings said of her father, Harvey, who played 11 years in the N.B.A. “But you know what? That’s my dad.”Wade Payne/Associated PressThat’s when their father, Harvey, not far removed from an 11-year N.B.A. career, emerged from the house and demanded that the girls relinquish the ball. While Tauja repaired to her room, Tamika remained in the driveway, dribbling and shooting an imaginary ball — just going through “a silent drill in her head,” her mother, Wanda, said.Harvey was incredulous. Tamika, he says now, “took it to a whole different level.”She would, in time, lead two different high schools to state championships. She would win a national title early in her college career and a W.N.B.A. title late in her professional career. She would win four Olympic gold medals. As a pro, she would win the awards for rookie of the year and most valuable player and be named to 12 all-league first or second teams.This weekend, in a ceremony postponed from last August because of the coronavirus pandemic, Catchings, now 41 and an Indiana Fever executive, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame as part of a heavyweight class that also includes the N.B.A.’s Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant.She is the first women’s player from the University of Tennessee to be enshrined, news that gave her pause. Surely, she figured, another Lady Vol had made it, given Summitt’s success over a 38-year run that ended in 2012, four years before her death.But no. Maybe that shouldn’t be as big a surprise as it might seem.“I just had ‘it,’” Catchings told reporters after she learned of her induction in April 2020. “I had the drive, the passion, the determination, the focus, the attitude, the will.”Her story is a family story. It started with Harvey Catchings, a journeyman center who played for the 76ers, Nets, Bucks and Clippers before spending a season overseas.Harvey and Wanda Catchings’s children arrived early in Harvey’s career — a son, Kenyon, in 1975, Tauja two years later and Tamika not quite two years after that. Harvey taught them the game at a young age, regularly convening no-nonsense workouts. Kenyon and Tamika took to this approach. Tauja, not so much.“They tease me,” she said, adding, “Mika and our brother absolutely loved basketball, and I was kind of eh — I could take it or leave it.”Tamika was, in fact, “like an addict” when it came to the game, as her father once told The New York Times.She didn’t always appreciate her dad’s tutelage. As she put it in her book:For a lot of years, I couldn’t get Dad to hear me. His “coaching” made me feel, once again, like I didn’t fit in, that I wasn’t acceptable. I felt silenced. For a long time, I just took it all in and stuffed it, all the hurt and frustration and confusion about how to get him to see I could play the game well my own way.Ancient history now, in her eyes.“Yeah, it was a little crazy at times,” she says now, and laughs. “He still drives me crazy, every once in a while. But you know what? That’s my dad.”Catchings won four Olympic gold medals and the W.N.B.A. awards for rookie of the year and most valuable player.Tom Pennington/Getty ImagesLooking back, she said he might have pushed her to “a level that I might not have been able to get to on my own.” When she was in seventh grade, she scrawled on a piece of paper that it was her intention to play in the N.B.A. — not the W.N.B.A., as it did not yet exist — and taped it to her bedroom mirror.As a sophomore, she combined with Tauja to lead Stevenson High School, in Lincolnshire, Ill., to a state title. But the next year the family reached a crossroads. Harvey and Wanda divorced after 22 years of marriage, and Wanda decided to move to Texas, where the family lived when Tamika was in elementary school. Kenyon was at Northern Illinois University, his promising basketball career having ended in high school because of a health issue.But what of the girls?“As much as we’d already moved, it’s my senior year — I’m not moving,” said Tauja, who later played at the University of Illinois and overseas. “And I wanted to stay with my dad, too.”It was another matter for Tamika, who reluctantly headed to Texas with her mother. She won her second state title, at Duncanville High School, near Dallas, in 1996-97, a tribute not only to her growth, but also to her burgeoning superpower.When she was young, she watched TV with the sound off to learn how to lip-read. But elementary school bullies targeted her because of her clunky hearing aids, and in third grade, she chucked them into a field, never to be found.It wasn’t until she arrived at Tennessee in 1997 that she resumed wearing hearing aids regularly. Summitt noticed early in Catchings’s freshman year that she wasn’t immediately picking up on instructions and recommended the devices — smaller ones this time.Catchings, right, with Coach Pat Summitt in 2000, is the first woman who played at the University of Tennessee to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.Delores Delvin/The Nashville Tennessean, via IMAGNThat was the year Catchings helped deliver an undefeated 1997-98 season and the sixth of Summitt’s eight national titles. Two years later, Tamika was named Naismith College Player of the Year, setting the stage for all that followed: the Olympic golds, the individual honors and a W.N.B.A. championship in 2012.Her drive was like that of Bryant, whom she met in Italy when their fathers, once teammates on the Sixers, played there. But she was most like her father. After each of her professional seasons, she asked for his advice. He told her something he had been acutely aware during his career: that somebody is always gunning for your job, so it’s vital to stay hungry, to just keep pushing.In August 2019, the roles were reversed. Harvey Catchings was the one in need of support, and Tamika was the one offering it. By then, he was 68, had settled near Houston and had just undergone a heart transplant.At his bedside, Tamika Catchings said, she challenged him in much the same way he once challenged her.“I told him, ‘This is God giving you another opportunity to live life, so what are you going to do with it?’” she said.Harvey Catchings, who lost nearly 70 pounds during his hospital stay, soon regained most of the weight — and with it, his stamina. He’ll be at his daughter’s side when she is inducted into the Hall this weekend.Yet she wasn’t certain this day would come. She went for a drive the afternoon of April 3, 2020, the day the finalists for the Hall of Fame would find out if they were selected, “just to get all this angst out.”Then the call came from John Doleva, the Hall of Fame’s president and chief executive.“I started to scream,” she said. “I took my hands off and was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m driving.’”She quickly regained her composure, once again aware of where she was — and, as always, where she was heading. More

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      Elgin Baylor, Acrobatic Hall of Famer in N.B.A., Dies at 86

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      Foreshadowing the likes of Michael Jordan, he was a star with the glamorous Lakers and was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years.Elgin Baylor, the Lakers’ Hall of Fame forward who became one of the N.B.A.’s greatest players, displaying acrobatic brilliance that foreshadowed the athleticism of later generations of stars, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 86.His death, at a hospital, was announced on Twitter by the Lakers. The team did not specify a cause.In his 14 seasons with the Lakers, first in Minneapolis but mostly in Los Angeles, with another pair of Hall of Famers, Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain, as teammates, Baylor played with a creative flourish that had never been seen in pro basketball.He was only 6 feet 5 inches — relatively short for a forward even then — but he played above the rim when he soared toward the basket. His ability to twist and turn in midair on his way to the hoop previewed the freewheeling shows put on by stars like Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.When Baylor arrived in the N.B.A. in 1958, an All-American out of Seattle University, the pros usually scored on one-handed set shots or running hooks. Baylor added a new dimension.“You could not stop Elgin from driving to the basket,” the Hall of Fame guard Oscar Robertson recalled in his autobiography “The Big O” (2010), adding, “You sure couldn’t out-jump him, or hang in the air any longer than he did.”“Elgin,” Robertson wrote, “was the first and original high flier.”Baylor’s sturdy 225-pound frame complemented his finesse. He could muscle his way to the basket, and he followed up his missed shots by maneuvering to score over bigger players. He was also an outstanding rebounder and passer.Baylor driving to the hoop against Tom Sanders of the Boston Celtics, the Lakers’ perennial nemesis, in the 1962 championship series. Boston won, as it so often did against the Lakers. Associated PressBaylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977.But Baylor had little success when he turned to coaching and front-office positions. He coached three losing teams with the New Orleans Jazz (now the Utah Jazz) in the 1970s and later spent 22 mostly frustrating seasons as the general manager of the Los Angeles Clippers.In the days when the N.B.A.’s TV coverage was limited, Baylor had never viewed a pro game before he played in one.“I had never seen anyone else do my moves,” he told Terry Pluto in the N.B.A. oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “It starts with talent; you have to be able to jump. But more than that, things I did were spontaneous. I had the ball, I reacted to the defense.”And he had a nervous facial twitch that sometimes made defenders think he was setting off in one direction only to find him heading the other way.As the center Johnny Kerr put it, “You didn’t know if it was a head fake or what was going on.”Baylor, second from right, as coach of the New Orleans Jazz in 1979. With him, from left, were Kent Benson of the Milwaukee Bucks and Tommy Green and Jimmy McElroy of the Jazz.Associated PressElgin Gay Baylor was born in Washington on Sept. 16, 1934. He was a high school basketball star, then played for one season at the College of Idaho and two seasons at Seattle University, leading his team as a senior to the 1958 N.C.A.A. tournament final, a loss to Kentucky.The Minneapolis Lakers selected Baylor as the league’s overall No. 1 pick in the 1958 draft. He took them to the 1959 N.B.A. final series, where he averaged nearly 25 points a game in a losing cause, the Lakers being swept by the Celtics. He was named rookie of the year.The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960, the year West arrived to provide an outside game to go with Baylor’s all-around skills.Baylor was eventually hampered by knee surgery that diminished his spring, but he remained an offensive force. He retired after his injuries limited him to two games in 1970-71 and just nine at the outset of the 1971-72 season, when the Lakers went on to defeat the Knicks for the championship.“Winning that championship was marred for me by the sad, conspicuous absence of Elgin Baylor,” West recalled in his memoir “West by West” (2011), written with Jonathan Coleman. “The guy that shared all the blood, sweat and tears wasn’t there to realize what it felt like.”Baylor averaged 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds for his career and played in 11 All-Star Games.He was fired as the Jazz coach in 1979. He became the head of basketball operations for the Clippers, essentially their general manager, in 1986.The Clippers made the playoffs only four times in Baylor’s tenure, which ended before the 2008-09 season opened. The Clippers said he had resigned, but he filed a lawsuit in March 2009 against the Clippers’ owner, Donald T. Sterling, and the N.B.A., maintaining that he had been fired as a result of age and racial discrimination.The lawsuit contended that Sterling had described Baylor as “a token” and that he had wanted the team to be composed of “poor black kids from the South” with a white head coach. The N.B.A. was accountable, according to the suit, because league officials knew of a large salary disparity between other general managers and Baylor, an African-American.A jury decided in the Clippers’ favor, concluding that Baylor had lost his job because of the team’s poor showings.But in April 2014, the N.B.A. imposed a lifetime ban on Sterling shortly after a recording obtained by TMZ caught him making racist comments in a conversation with a female acquaintance. The team was sold to the businessman Steve Ballmer in August 2014.Baylor is survived by his wife, Elaine; a daughter, Krystal; two children from a previous marriage, Alan and Alison; and a sister, Gladys Baylor Barrett.Long after Baylor’s playing days ended, his reputation endured.Tom Heinsohn, the Hall of Fame forward on Celtic teams that bested Baylor’s Lakers, marveled at his feats.“Elgin Baylor as forward beats out Bird, Julius Erving and everybody else,” Heinsohn told Roland Lazenby in his biography “Jerry West” (2009), referring to the Celtics’ Larry Bird. “He had the total game: defense, offense, everything, rebounding, passing the ball.” (Heinsohn died in November at 86.)Bill Sharman, the Celtics’ sharpshooting guard who coached Baylor in his brief, final season, was even more succinct, telling The Los Angeles Times back then, “Elgin Baylor is the greatest cornerman who ever played pro basketball.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More