Lenny Wilkens, former Knicks coach and three-time Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, dead at 88
Former NBA player and coach Lenny Wilkens delivers remarks during his statue unveiling event outside Climate Pledge Arena on June 28 in Seattle. Credit: AP/Lindsey Wasson
By any definition, Lenny Wilkens was a “basketball lifer.” But even that seems inadequate to describe an arc in the game that covered more than half of its history.
Wilkens, who died on Sunday at age 88 in Washington state, rose to prominence as a teenager on the playgrounds and Catholic Youth Organization courts of Brooklyn in the mid-1950s and simply never left.
Along the way, he was inducted not once, not twice, but thrice into the Basketball Hall of Fame — in 1989 as a player, in 1998 as a coach and in 2010 as part of the 1992 Olympic “Dream Team,” for which he was an assistant coach.
He made the NBA’s 50th anniversary team in 1996 and its 75th anniversary team in 2021. He was a nine-time All-Star player, a four-time All-Star coach and the 1993-94 NBA Coach of the Year.
He coached the 1979 Seattle SuperSonics to an NBA championship and the 1996 U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal.
As of 2024, he had coached the most regular-season games in NBA history: 2,487.
Through it all, Wilkens maintained an image of cool, calm class, a vibe that never changed across more than a half-century in the public eye.
When Newsday’s Shaun Powell profiled him in 1994 as he closed in on fellow Brooklynite Red Auerbach for the most wins in NBA history, Powell wrote this:
“He wins quietly. He loses quietly. Whenever he moved from one team to another, he tiptoed. Any verbal conflicts with players might as well be whispered.
“There is very little about Wilkens that screams. Not his tone. Not his gestures. Not even his ties.”
Wilkens was born on Oct. 28, 1937, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he attended Boys High School. He played there only briefly, during which time he was a teammate and friend of future Dodgers star Tommy Davis.
Wilkens later starred at guard at Providence College, captaining the Friars to the National Invitation Tournament final in 1960. In 1996, he had his No. 14 retired by the school, the first Providence player so honored.
From there, Wilkens fashioned a long and productive professional playing career, starting with the St. Louis Hawks, who drafted him sixth overall in 1960, behind the likes of Oscar Robertson and Jerry West.
Wilkens finished second to Wilt Chamberlain in the 1967-68 MVP voting, averaging 20 points and 8.3 assists, but was traded to the SuperSonics the next year. He served as player-coach there for three seasons, starting when he was 32.
In a 1995 Newsday article, Wilkens recalled Sonics general manager Dick Vertlieb approaching him about coaching and saying, “You can do it. I know you can do it.”
Wilkens then said, “I didn’t think so, but I finally decided to give it a try.”
Later, he played for the Cavaliers and Trail Blazers, working as a player-coach for Portland. He retired in 1975 with 17,772 regular-season points, 7,211 assists and 5,030 rebounds.
Wilkens coached Seattle for eight seasons in his second stint there, reaching the NBA Finals in 1978 and winning the Finals in ’79 in five games over the Bullets.
He later coached the Cavaliers, Hawks, Raptors and, finally, for parts of the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons, his hometown Knicks.
What once would have been a dream job turned out to be a frustrating one. He led the Knicks to the playoffs in 2004 but resigned midway through the next season, on Jan. 22, 2005, concluding his head-coaching career.
Wilkens finished with a regular-season record of 1,332-1,155. He was 40-41 with the Knicks.
He later was an executive with the SuperSonics and a local broadcaster in the Pacific Northwest.
Through it all, Wilkens always remained true to himself and true to a personality that forever stood out in a world of big egos and loud voices.
Frank Deford wrote in a 1969 profile of him in Sports Illustrated:
“He is shy, with mournful brown eyes, and is often by himself. Normally he does not raise his voice, being the quietest man ever to come out of Brooklyn, and though Lenny Wilkens is tall in the general population, at 6-1, he leaves no impression on the casual observer.”
"He is never recognized in a crowd," said his wife, Marilyn. "Lenny doesn't like for me to say this, but he just melts in."
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
