Finally 4 Dantley: Coveted honor comes tonight

In the final 14 seconds of a 1986 game at Phoenix, during Dantley's last of seven seasons with the Jazz, a young Karl Malone missed 3-of-4 free throws in an eventual two-point Utah win. Layden blasted Malone, who would join John Stockton in succeeding Dantley as a franchise icon, from the sideline, prompting Malone, as lore has it, to shout back that he wasn't "a mule or dog." Dantley stood up for Malone in the locker room, action Layden considered traitorous. Layden wound up fining Malone two pennies (because he got in his two cents' worth) and Dantley $3 (or 30 dimes, the equivalent of 30 pieces of silver, which according to the Christian Bible is the amount of a bribe given to the apostle Judas to betray Jesus).

Twenty-plus years later, some see the bizarre event as one of the most comical in Jazz history — but not Dantley, whom Layden sent home to Salt Lake City from Phoenix at the time. "It's not funny to me," he said.

Yet that's not it.

Nor, Dantley suggests, is it because of a tale Miller — who has said he waited, in part, to get Stockton's and Malone's numbers retired first — has publicly told as recently as February.

It has Dantley supposedly telling Malone not to dive onto the floor or into the stands for loose balls because he might get hurt and/or it might make Dantley look bad.

"That's not true at all," Dantley said. "I never told a player what to do at all as far (as) diving for a loose ball. Hey, I dove for a loose ball on the Boston Celtics — almost got killed, unconscious. So, I never told him (Malone) that. Even if I did tell him that, is that very big? I mean, if that's the only thing I did bad, I feel pretty good. But I never told him that."

What it is, Dantley believes, is his prolonged 1984 holdout — something virtually unheard of at the time for even NBA players, and one which ended only after he received a three-year contract extension.

"The only thing the Utah Jazz can say about me, about what I did, was 'held out,"' he said. "That was it. Other than that, I had no problems."

In another breath, Dantley hastens to ponder a point: "How many times did Karl Malone hold out?" he asks. "No problems with him. ... With me it was a problem."

The difference, longtime Jazz loyalists will say, is that Malone never did actually hold out.

He may have whined and moaned about money matters and other issues of perceived disrespect with some degree of regularity until finally hitting the jackpot with a generous late-career deal, but Malone — whose own number was retired shortly after his NBA career ended, long before that of Dantley, as was the case as well with fellow NBA Finals teammates Stockton and Jeff Hornacek — never failed to honor a contract.

Dantley, though, did — and he seems quite cognizant of the fallout that fact caused.

"You know, that's what started everything," he said, referencing a relationship with Layden that, though repaired now, soured at the time. "Had I not held out, I might have ended my career there.

"Who knows?"

Perhaps no one knows for sure.

What Dantley does recognize, though, is that buried beneath the silver, and beyond the loose balls, a holdout notwithstanding, his days with the Jazz weren't all bad.