Sloan 2nd in Coach of Year balloting

HOUSTON — It's official.

Many had thought after Utah finished the 2006-07 NBA regular season with 51 wins that this might be Jazz coach Jerry Sloan's best shot at finally winning Coach of the Year honors from the league, but according to media-balloting results officially released Tuesday morning he did not.

As multiple newspapers in Canada previously reported would happen, Toronto's Sam Mitchell won the Red Auerbach Trophy.

Mitchell won with 394 points, including 49 first-place votes and 43 second-place votes from a panel of 128 writers and broadcasters working throughout North America.

Sloan wound up second with 301 points on a 5-3-1 points system, including 39 first-place and 28 second-place votes.

Last year's winner, Avery Johnson of regular-season league-leader Dallas, finished third with 268 points and received 28 first-place votes.

Sloan's counterpart in the Jazz's ongoing first-round NBA playoff series, Houston's Jeff Van Gundy, placed fourth with 134 points. He garnered 10 first-place votes.

No other coach finished with more than 22 points, and Phoenix's Mike D'Antoni was the only other candidate to receive a first-place vote, getting two.

Mitchell is the sixth coach in the Raptors' history. He guided Toronto to an NBA-best 20-game improvement (27-55) over the 2005-06 season. Toronto trails New Jersey 1-0 in a first-round playoff series.

During a 13-year playing career that ended in 2002, Mitchell was held in high regard around the league as a student of the game. Following two seasons as an assistant, he was hired as the Raptors' coach on June 29, 2004.

"He's done a great job with the ball club," forward Morris Peterson said Monday. "He's really grown a lot over his first couple of years coaching. If anybody in the NBA deserves it, it's him. He's proved a lot of people wrong."

Houston is up 2-0 on Sloan's Jazz in their best-of-seven series, which resumes Thursday night in Utah.

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Contributing: Associated Press