Perhaps no one, though, appreciated Malone more than Sloan — who watched the insecure boy from Summerfield, La., grow into a man who grew accustomed to frequently having his way.

"We gave him a little direction, but the rest of it was up to him," Sloan said. "We didn't force him to work out in the weight room for an hour-and-a-half after practice every day. He wanted to do that. He wanted to be better.

"You can make all the suggestions in the world, but if a player doesn't want to do it, you can't make 'em. And a lot of players watched him do that. I think it helped them realize there's a lot of hard work involved in playing this game. A lot of guys may have star quality, but they don't have star work ethic. That's the difference."

A champion

Malone's star, Sloan suggested Friday, is by no means dimmed by the fact he and Stockton never did win their much-coveted rings.

"Because he gave us everything," Sloan said.

"Now, he might get upset with things that are going on off the court" — Malone and Miller often made headlines with their back-and-forth bickering, only to hug and make up time and time again — "but when he stepped on the floor and played for us, you can look around this league, and look for a long, long time — I've been in it since 1965 — and there's not a handful of guys that played as hard as he did for as long as he did. Every single day.

"You can say, 'I've got a championship ring,' or, 'I've got this, I've got that,' " Sloan added, "but there are a lot of guys who never played as hard as he did that have rings. I don't think that makes them champions any more than him."

Nor does Sloan think Malone, who loves to hunt and fish, should be pushed prematurely into deciding what he will to do next, whether it's coaching in the NBA or continuing to harvest lumber on his Arkansas ranch.

"He's still got a gun hanging over his shoulder," Sloan said. "He needs to fire that a few times, and get that out of his system a little bit."

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E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com