By Bob Markus

Some things you take for granted. The sun will rise in the East. It will rain on your drive home from the carwash. Jerry Sloan will not be named NBA Coach of the Year. Sloan has just finished his 20th season coaching the Utah Jazz, an unprecedented feat in a league where "What Have You Done for Me Lately" is the theme song and any coach who lasts even half that long is immediately inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not even the legendary Red Auerbach coached the Boston Celtics that long.

But Sloan, who guided the Jazz to the playoffs for the 18th time in those 20 years, has never been voted Coach of the Year. Not in1995 when he led the Jazz to a 60-22 regular season record. Del Harris won it that year for going 48-34 with the Los Angeles Lakers. Not in 1997 when his club went 64-18 and made the NBA Finals for the first of two consecutive years. Pat Riley won it in '97 with his 61-21 Miami Heat. Not in '98 when Larry Bird's 58-24 record in Indianapolis trumped Sloan's 62-20 in Utah. Certainly not in 2008 when he won a division championship for the seventh time with a team that seemed ready to implode before the season even started.

Perhaps, as one writer has suggested, Sloan has been a victim of his own success. When, in 1988, he took over the coaching reins from Frank Layden--who, by the way, was Coach of the Year with the Jazz five years earlier--Sloan inherited future Hall of Famers John Stockton and Karl Malone. Masterly blending in various lesser stars and mixing it all together with his blue collar defensive emphasis, Sloan took the Jazz to 16 straight playoffs. Many times the Coach of the Year is the one who most exceeds preseason expectations. With Sloan's Jazz, the bar was always set high, perhaps too high.

The bar was not all that high this year after one of Utah's best players, Andrei Kirilenko, openly feuded with Sloan and demanded a trade. After Stockton retired and Malone left as a free agent, the 6-9 Kirilenko became Utah's go-to guy. Refuting the notion that white men can't jump, he was one of the best shot blockers and defenders in the league and the late-game scoring option. Then came Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer, the new Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside and Kirilenko's offensive role was diminished. He didn't like it and said so.

But Sloan convinced him he would be a better player and help the team more if he focused on his defense and worked to improve his shooting. The result was that "he accepted what we were trying to do," said Sloan, and "he had a much better year than a year ago and he's still a very young player." "I kind of changed my priorities," agreed Kirilenko.

For Sloan, the number one priorities have always been defense and hustle. The first player selected by the Chciago Bulls in the expansion draft that stocked the fledgling franchise, Sloan was on the first string all-defensive team four times and on the second team twice. He teamed with Norm Van Lier to form the feistiest back court in league history. Led by the equally intense coach Dick Motta, the pair battled referees and opponents with equal abandon.

Occasionally, I thought, they went too far. After one victory over the Milwaukee Bucks in which two Bulls centers combined to brutalize Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I said as much. The next time I visited the Bulls' locker room, Sloan and Motta both were livid. "That was a horseshit article," Sloan stormed, adding that he would never speak to me again. I pointed out to him that I had previously written a half dozen or so favorable columns over the years and, after considering it for a moment, Jerry calmed down. Not so Motta.

Motta and I had enjoyed an amicable relationship. He and his wife had been in our house and we had been in theirs. But he was, more so than Sloan, more than the hot-tempered Van Lier, the most intense man I'd ever known. The average person meeting Motta for the first time would see a baby-faced, pleasant young man who would never harm a fly. Would he? Well, yes he would. A closer look would show that behind the pleasant openness of that boyish face was a diamond-hard intensity. If the face did not portray it, his hands would. Motta would constantly curl his fingers into claws, relaxing them, drawing them up again so that, combined with the glittering intensity of his stare, it often gave the appearance of an eagle getting ready to tear a rabbit to shreds. I was, therefore, prepared for a tongue lashing when I left Sloan and went to join in the Motta postgame interview.

By then the other writers had left and the two of us were alone. I don't remember exactly what Motta said, but he said it in a low voice and the implication was that he, too, would never talk to me again. He kept that vow for more than a year before approaching me one day and suggesting we start over. But it was never quite the same and the truce lasted only until the day I wrote a column suggesting that he had turned Van Lier into a referee-baiting Frankenstein's monster and then joined the posse out to destroy him.

I compared him to the Jack Lemmon character in "Days of Wine and Roses," a hard-drinking gray flannel suit type, who marries a girl who has never touched a drop. The rest of the movie is dedicated to the proposition that the couple that drinks together sinks together. He turns her on to booze and they both become alcoholics. One day Lemmon ends up in the drunk tank, decides to kick the habit and does. But his wife can't, so he leaves her.

With Motta it wasn't alcohol that was the problem, it was the paranoid conviction that the referees were out to get him. It seemed to me that Motta convinced the already high-strung Van Lier that the officials were out to get him, too. Together they led the league in technical fouls. They would scream and curse at the officials, drop kick basketballs into the balcony, dispute every foul. They could no more break their habit than an alcoholic could resist a second drink. Then came the epiphany for Motta. Perhaps he realized how costly his habit had become. Or perhaps he just grew up a little. In any event he calmed down a little. He began to recognize that look in a referee's eye that told him, "one more word and it costs you fifty."

But Van Lier couldn't stop, remained convinced that every official in the NBA had a personal grudge against Norm Van Lier in particular and the Bulls in general. And Motta turned his back on him and walked away. Van Lier, who remains a friend, loved the column. Motta didn't. We were back to square one. A few years later I was covering a White Sox series in Texas when Motta was named as the first head coach of the expansion Dallas Mavericks. I covered the press conference for The Tribune and Motta gave no evidence that he still held a grudge. The last time I saw him I was having dinner with some friends in St. Elmo's Steak House in Indianapolis, when Motta walked by and saw me through the window. He waved in what I took to be a friendly manner.

No matter my personal relationship with Motta, he was the right fit for the Bulls and particularly for Sloan. When Sloan first came to the Bulls he looked like a knobby-kneed Ichabod Crane, all skin and bone. But underneath was muscle and steel and a palpable drive to succeed. Under Motta, he learned that defense and team play wins games. Not only that, it wins fans. Michael Jordan's six NBA titles notwithstanding, those Bulls teams of the 1970s were the most entertaining I've ever seen. Motta did win a Coach of the Year award and so, later, did Phil Johnson, who was Motta's top assistant with the Bulls.

Sloan is still looking for his, but perhaps it's just as well he hasn't won one. Just two years ago, Avery Johnson of the Dallas Mavericks was Coach of the Year. This year he was fired. His replacement is Rick Carlisle, who was fired by the Detroit Pistons not long after his 2002 Coach of the Year season. And so it goes. Coaches come and coaches go. Except in Utah, where Jerry Sloan will enter his 21st season next fall with a team many feel can win the NBA title. Maybe then Sloan will get his due. But then, again, probably not.