Rick Adelman, who over seven years improbably catapulted from coaching a community college basketball team to twice steering the Portland Trail Blazers to the N.B.A. Finals, but whose most memorable game was a heartbreaking defeat that spawned charges of a league conspiracy, has died. He was 79.
The NBA Coaches Association announced the death on Monday in a statement on social media that did not cite a cause or say where he died.
Over 23 seasons with four teams, Adelman led the star players Clyde Drexler in Portland, Chris Webber in Sacramento and Yao Ming in Houston. His teams made the playoffs 16 times and won at least 50 games 11 times. He is one of 11 coaches in league history to have won 1,000 or more regular-season games.
A 6-foot-1 guard who started for Portland in the Trail Blazers’ inaugural 1970-71 season, Adelman played for five N.B.A. teams over seven years. After retiring in 1975, he set his sights on coaching high school basketball or at the lower levels of the college game.
He logged six successful seasons at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Ore., until Jack Ramsay, the Trail Blazers’ coach, hired him in 1983 as an assistant.
“Jack took a chance — that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Adelman told The St. Paul Pioneer-Press in 2013.
After 47 games in the 1988-89 season, he became interim head coach after Mike Schuler was fired. Though the Blazers subsequently went 14-21 and were swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Los Angeles Lakers, several players, appreciating Adelman’s no-drama personality, supported his return on a one-year contract.
“I wasn’t all of a sudden going to become a my-way-or-the-highway type of guy now that I was a head coach,” Adelman told The New York Times in 1990.
In Adelman’s first full season, the Blazers, led by Drexler, went 53-29 and stormed through the Western Conference playoffs before losing in the 1990 league finals to the Detroit Pistons in five games.
“We had a team that was ready to win, a special group,” Adelman said when he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021.
Portland again advanced to the finals two years later against the Chicago Bulls. The series was deadlocked at 2-2 but Michael Jordan’s 46 points helped the Bulls win a pivotal fifth game in Portland before his team sealed the title in Chicago.
Adelman failed to match the championship won by Ramsay’s Blazers in 1977, but he departed Portland in 1994 with a higher regular-season winning percentage than his mentor.
After three losing seasons with the Golden State Warriors, Adelman lifted the Sacramento Kings to the playoffs in the 1998-99 season, which was shortened by a labor dispute. That result came after a disappointing 27-55 finish in 1997-98.
He hired Pete Carril, known for his Princeton offense, which stressed fundamental body and ball movement, as an assistant. Adelman’s tailored version was called “corners,” which provided players’ broad license to improvise by reading the defense.
“It was basketball nirvana and Rick was the ringleader,” the guard Doug Christie told NBA.com in 2021. “His ability to deal with players, his ability to allow you to be you — inside of a structure — was different from what I’d experienced.”
Imposing, slick-passing players like Webber, a forward, and the center Vlade Divac made the Kings as much fun to watch as they were prolific. Their home arena, fueled by capacity crowds and the sound of ringing cowbells, was one of the most challenging venues for visiting teams.
The Kings were one win away from playing for the championship in Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference finals, playing against the Lakers. Los Angeles was awarded 27 free throws in the fourth quarter — two more than the Kings shot all game. After the Lakers escaped elimination with a four-point victory, the outcry was fierce, with fans and sports journalists saying the outcome was a result of referee incompetence or even outright corruption.
Lawrence B. Pedowitz, a former federal prosecutor, concluded in a 2008 report commissioned by the N.B.A. that the game was merely “poorly officiated.”
Adelman fumed over the foul disparity but worried his players would carry their frustration into Game 7 back in Los Angeles, which the Lakers won in another close game.
Speaking on a podcast with Christie, his former Kings player, in 2021, Adelman said he had “no regrets” but still believed “we were the better team.” Had they advanced to the finals, he said, the Kings surely would have beaten the New Jersey Nets, who were swept by the Lakers.
Richard Leonard Adelman was born on June 16, 1946, in Lynwood, Calif., the youngest of five children born to Leonard and Gladys (Olsen) Adelman. His parents, who hailed from North Dakota, were teachers.
Adelman played at Pius X High School in Los Angeles and at Loyola Marymount University before being drafted in the seventh round of the 1968 N.B.A. draft by the San Diego Rockets. His best pro season was Portland’s first, when he averaged 12.6 points and 4.7 assists.
In 1993, Adelman and his wife, Mary Kay (Fournier), who had four biological children, took custody of two more after her sister was killed in a car crash.
Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Adelman’s brother Clete was a small-college coach. One son, David, is the coach of the Denver Nuggets. Another son, R.J., worked as a coaching assistant in the N.B.A.; a daughter, Kathy Naro, as a high school girls’ coach; and Patrick, one of Mary Kay’s sister’s children, as a high school boys coach.
R.J. Adelman died in 2018 after being struck by a car while crossing a street in Houston.
Adelman seldom sought the spotlight but made appointed rounds after his Hall of Fame election. “I didn’t expect it,” he told the Portland-area sports journalist Kerry Eggers. “I didn’t know the criteria.”
To his delight, 1,042 regular-season victories, two trips to the finals and one derailed by a chorus of referee whistles sufficed.
