Sloan will be snubbed again

Jerry Sloan will be snubbed, again.

Despite taking a team hardly anyone expected to be a playoff contender to within two wins of the postseason, the 16-season head coach of the Jazz once more will be denied NBA Coach of the Year honors.

Jazz owner Larry H. Miller can't be happy about it, either.

"If he doesn't win Coach of the Year this year," Miller said as Jazz players cleaned out their lockers late last week, an overachieving 42-40 season having just concluded, "it's a flat-out travesty."

Or a cold, harsh reality.

Memphis coach Hubie Brown is fully expected to claim the award when results of voting by a nationwide panel of sportswriters and broadcasters who cover the NBA are announced today.

On Tuesday, in fact, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal reported Brown is the winner — for transforming a Grizzlies club that went 28-54 in 2002-03 to one that went 50-32 in 2003-04, qualifying for the playoffs while registering its first 50-win season in franchise history.

Still, Miller's heart is with Sloan, who worked despite the burden of his wife Bobbye's ongoing fight with pancreatic cancer.

"It has nothing to do with feeling sorry for him or for Bobbye," Miller said. "It has to do with the job he's done with this team.

"He should have won (Coach of the Year) two or three years in the past, in my opinion, (and) didn't. And I don't think he should have any carry-over capital with that," the Jazz owner added. "But, flat-out this year — Hubie Brown did great; I respectfully acknowledge that — but Jerry's performance with this team was a quantum leap over everybody else."

With NBA all-time steals and assists leader John Stockton having retired at the end of the '02-03 season and Karl Malone, the league's No. 2 all-time scorer, having left Utah to join the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent last July, expectations for the Jazz were lower in '03-04 than they have been in any season since well before Sloan guided the franchise to back-to-back NBA Finals appearances in 1997 and '98.

Yet Sloan's young, rebuilding team stayed in contention for a postseason berth until the final week of the regular season — despite season-ending injuries to captain Matt Harpring and big men Curtis Borchardt, Ben Handlogten and Keon Clark.