Butch van Breda Kolff

Willem Hendrik "Butch" van Breda Kolff (October 28, 1922 – August 22, 2007) was an American basketball player and coach.

Biography

Early life and career

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, he played college basketball for New York University and later spent four seasons playing for the New York Knicks of the NBA (1946–50). In 1967 he became head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, and guided them to the NBA finals in 1968 and 1969 losing both times to the Boston Celtics. Van Breda Kolff also coached the Detroit Pistons, Phoenix Suns and New Orleans Jazz, compiling an 266-253 record overall.

Born in 1922, van Breda Kolff gained an affection for the sport of basketball while growing up in Montclair, New Jersey. He later attended Princeton, where he played basketball for Franklin “Cappy” Cappon, and then to New York University. Signed by the New York Knicks of the Basketball Association of America just after World War II, he turned in a relatively unimpressive tenure as a professional player. In the four years he played in the BAA and the NBA, all with New York, he shot just .305 from the field, .669 from the line, and averaged 4.7 points in 175 contests. More impressive was his hustle and tenacious spirit, which got him elected team captain.

After putting in four undistinguished years as an NBA player during the late 1940s, Butch van Breda Kolff carved out a legendary career as a college and professional coach. He is one of only four men to have coached both an NCAA Final Four team (Princeton, 1965) and an NBA Finals squad (the Los Angeles Lakers, 1968 and 1969). (The others are Larry Brown, Jack Ramsay, and Fred Schaus.) Van Breda Kolff compiled a professional and collegiate coaching record of 769-588.

Van Breda Kolff would also spend time running a women’s professional team and later coaching a high school team in Picayune, Mississippi.^[1] “Coaching is coaching,” he once told a reporter. “Give me 10 players who want to work and learn the game and I’m happy. I don’t count the house.”

Within two years of leaving the NBA in 1950, van Breda Kolff took over as head coach at Lafayette College, where he remained from 1952 to 1956. He then coached for Hofstra from 1955 to 1962, and Princeton from 1963 to 1967.

Pro coaching career

Van Breda Kolff's success in college attracted the attention of the NBA. The Lakers hired him in 1967, and in his first season guided the team to the NBA Finals, where they lost to the Boston Celtics in six games. In his second campaign there, his team—with Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, and Wilt Chamberlain—notched a 55-27 record and reached the Finals again. It was that championship series that left the most bitter coaching memory in van Breda Kolff’s mind. He took tremendous flak for benching Chamberlain, with whom van Breda Kolff feuded terribly, in the final minutes of Game 7 against Boston. The Lakers lost by two points, and van Breda Kolff resigned shortly afterward.

He then went on to Detroit, where he coached the Pistons for just over two seasons. In 1970–71 he guided the team to a 45-37 mark, Detroit’s first winning season in 15 years. But he left the team 10 games into the next season. He coached the Phoenix Suns for the first seven games of the 1972–73 campaign, before being fired and replaced by Jerry Colangelo, then did a stint with Memphis of the American Basketball Association in 1973–74. From 1974 to 1977 he coached the New Orleans Jazz, taking over in the middle of the 1974–75 season and departing with a 14-12 record partway through the 1976–77 campaign; while he was coach, he pushed for New Orleans to relinquish the rights to Moses Malone in exchange for a #1 draft pick, and then traded that pick and two other #1s to the Lakers for Gail Goodrich. This turned out to be one of the worst decisions in NBA history, not only because Moses became a superstar (although two other teams also traded him before he broke through with the Houston Rockets), but Goodrich suffered an Achilles' tendon injury that would end his career in 1978, and the Jazz's #1 pick in 1979 (the first overall choice) was used by the Lakers to select Magic Johnson. While in New Orleans, he also coached the New Orleans Pride, a women’s professional squad. He left the professional ranks for good in 1976, taking with him a career NBA coaching record of 266-253 and a .513 winning percentage. 1976 also marked the year his son Jan entered the NBA with the New York Nets, after spending two seasons in the ABA. Beyond the NBA, the coach known as "VBK" and "Bill" by the fans, had two tenures as the men's head basketball coach at both Lafayette College and Hofstra University, in the 1950s-60s and the 1980s-90s as well as a stint at Princeton University in the 1960s. At Princeton, he coached the 1964–65 Tigers, led by Bill Bradley, to the NCAA Final Four, where they finished third.

Coaching style

An uncompromising, straightforward, no-nonsense man with a big heart and a pinch of wry humor, van Breda Kolff often clashed with other strong egos. His love of the game was beyond question, though in connection to the Chamberlain Finals incident, his strong personality sometimes got the better of him. After leaving the Jazz, he remained in the Crescent City and returned to the college coaching ranks with the University of New Orleans, where he spent two years. In 1985, Lafayette, the team he had coached 30 years earlier, asked him to return to work more of his magic there. Van Breda Kolff stayed four seasons at Lafayette, before leaving to coach Hofstra once again. His second stint with the Flying Dutchmen lasted five seasons and ended after the 1993–94 season. In 28 years as a college coach, he compiled an impressive 482-272 record.

Death and Legacy

Van Breda Kolff died August 22, 2007 at a nursing home in Spokane, Washington after a long illness.^[2]

As long as he was in contact with basketball, van Breda Kolff was happy, for the sport was as essential to him as air or water. “All I know is life isn’t much different than that game on the court,” he said in an article in the New York Daily News in the early 1980s. “If it’s run right—with precision, with good, honest effort—it’s a thing of beauty. I know what it looks like and that’s what keeps me going.”

References