Former Utah guard spots up for shot at mentoring youngsters.

Jeff Hornacek is doing now what he always figured he one day would.

Coaching.

Photos

• 

	Join the Discussion
	Post a Comment

Back in December of 1997, when the shooting guard was part of the Jazz’s holy trinity, alongside John Stockton and Karl Malone, helping them toward their second appearance in the NBA Finals, Hornacek sat at his kitchen table, the finger-painted artwork of his young kids hanging on the refrigerator and a chewed-up rubber dog bone on the counter, and predicted exactly that.

"Maybe down the road, I’ll coach a high school team," he said. "Maybe college."

Close.

As Hornacek considers the Jazz roster now, Ty Corbin’s assistant says: "We’ve got … what, four guys who are 20 and under, and two others who are 21 or 22. Hopefully, I can give them a few helpful hints on how to play at the NBA level."

One of those youngsters, rookie guard Alec Burks, says that’s exactly what Hornacek is accomplishing: "He’s a great mentor to me. He helps me every day, working on my shot, working on spots to get to, on angles, and all that. He’s teaching me and has been a big help."

Good for Burks.

He may not remember watching Hornacek play. He might not know the unlikely route taken by his mentor to become the player he once became, the coach having been a walk-on in college, having been an unlikely second-round pick in the NBA Draft, having taped his left thumb to his hand because it was interfering with his shot, spinning it off target, and working through that and limited athletic ability to wind up with 15,000 points and 5,000 assists in a 14-year playing career. And it might be easy for him to dismiss the coach, based on Hornacek’s less-than-imposing physical stature, but that would be a mistake, and Burks knows it.

Even the veterans pay close attention to what Hornacek deals and dishes, perhaps because his jersey hangs in the rafters, maybe because he could still whip any of them in a game of H-O-R-S-E.

"He helps us a lot because he knows basketball," says Paul Millsap. "He’s got the experience, been around the league awhile."

Long enough to have seen and heard and lived through just about everything that can be seen and heard and lived through on an NBA team, from going up against Larry Bird in the regular season to battling Michael Jordan in the Finals to dealing with being traded to a crappy team.

Before Hornacek played for the Jazz, while still in Phoenix, he heard Bird tell the Suns bench what he was going to do before he did it. The Celtics were trailing the Suns by two points with two seconds left. Coming out of a timeout, Larry Legend walked by the Suns players and warned them that he was about to come off a pick to hit a game-winning three.

"He proceeded to do exactly that," Hornacek told me. "Afterward, Larry came back over to our bench and said, ‘I told you guys that somebody should have guarded me.’ "

When Hornacek was traded from a strong Phoenix team, the club that took him as the 46th pick in the 1986 draft, to a sorry Philadelphia team, it left him devastated. His wife, Stacy, once described it this way: "One of the only times I’ve ever seen Jeff cry."

He was thrilled when the Jazz traded for him in 1994, an acquisition that led to a long run in Utah and the epic Finals showdowns with Jordan’s Bulls. Years past them, Hornacek said: "I’ll always look at that second Finals as the one we should have gotten."

Point is, Hornacek has been where the young Jazz presently only aspire to be.