Final delivery: Jazz honoring legendary champion today

Another is the fact that Malone and Stockton together never did win their much-coveted rings. Division titles? Yes. Western Conference titles? Two. NBA championship? No. Not with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls around. Not a one.

Sloan maintains he can live with it. He has for some time, and that will never change.

"Championships and all those things aside, he was a championship guy," the Jazz coach said of Malone, who remains in close contact. "A lot of guys won championships. But not many put as much work into it as he did. That's the tough part about it for a guy that wanted to win one."

Miller, with time on his side, seems to be getting over it as well.

"I don't think you can measure what he's meant," the Jazz owner said. "You look at he and John together, they're joined at the hip in NBA history. Certainly in Jazz history. If you tried to quantify it, I don't know what terms you'd put it in. But, clearly, he brought the organization stature — he and John combined, of course — that it had never had before.

"To have those two guys play as long as (they) did, and miss as few games as they did, and win the things that we won — although we'd all like to have won a championship — to take us to the Finals twice . . . it's not only difficult but impossible to really comprehend what he meant to the franchise."

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E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com

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