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Lionel Hollins, according to Jack Ramsay

Lionel Hollins was born in Arkansas City, Kansas, and moved with his family to Los Angeles briefly before settling down in Las Vegas. He attended Rancho High School, where he was a three-sport star in football, baseball, and basketball. He was named to the All-State basketball team and received a scholarship to Arizona State University, where Ned Wulk was coach. Wulk employed an up-tempo, NBA-type offense in which Hollins thrived.

Hollins played two years at ASU, averaging 17 points, and led the Sun Devils into NCAA tournament competition. After losing to UCLA in the NCAA Western Regional playoffs, he played in the Aloha Classic, a popular post-season event in Hawaii that was well attended by NBA scouts. Hollins was outstanding, finishing second to David Thompson in the MVP voting. Portland’s Stu Inman was among those who expressed interest in Hollins as a pro prospect and indicated that the Blazers intended to draft him. Hollins became a Blazer on the sixth pick of the first round in June 1975.

Hollins’s entry into the NBA was slowed by an emergency appendectomy shortly before the season began. His first start was at Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks and their stars Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe, two of Lionel’s idols. Lionel remembers his knees shaking waiting for the opening tip and the game as “a disaster,” he said. “Earl must have had 18 points against me in one period. It shook my confidence. I played myself right back to the bench.” But Hollins recovered well enough to be named to the NBA All-Rookie first team that season, averaging just under 11 points a game and showing strong defensive skills. I was coaching Buffalo at the time and remembered Hollins as a slashing, driving left-hander with a somewhat erratic jumper, but also as a tough long-armed defender who could hound his man in the backcourt and challenge his jump shot from the perimeter. I liked his game but didn’t realize at the time that I was going to have the chance to coach him.

At my first training camp with Portland the following fall (1976), Hollins and Dave Twardzik showed themselves to be a good guard combination from the first workouts. They pressured the ball well and had good instincts for executing switch-and-recover tactics in the opposing backcourt. On offense, they learned the nuances of the new “turnout” offense that I installed before any of the other players—a good thing, since it was the guards who got the offense started.

I felt good about the group of guards going into the season. Johnny Davis, a lightning quick rookie point guard out of Dayton University, and Herm Gilliam, a veteran hot-shooting 2-guard acquired in the off-season from Seattle, backed up Twardzik and Hollins. Larry Steele, a holdover swing man, known mostly for his ball thievery, gave the team depth and versatility.

Hollins was a complete player—one who could pressure opposing guards full court, shut down the high-scoring 2-guards of the league, and be a consistent scorer on offense. He ran the floor on the fast break with excellent speed, drove hard to the basket, scored or made good passes to open teammates, and had unlimited stamina. However, he was not a consistent jump shooter, and his aggressiveness often resulted in low percentage shot attempts.

In a game at Milwaukee early in that championship season, Hollins forced shots and had some careless turnovers in the first period. I took him out of the game and told him to settle down, slow his game a notch, and let the shots come to him. I put him back in the game at the start of the second period and he played better, although Portland didn’t win the game. Years later, when he was coaching his own NBA team, he reminded me of that game and how my approach to him in that situation had helped him mature and become a more confident player.

The Blazers were going to need that confidence in the first round of the playoffs later that season in a decisive Game 3 against the Chicago Bulls. Portland led by two points and had ball possession with about 30 seconds left to play in that game. The Bulls had time to get the ball back after Portland’s possession, so the Blazers needed to score. I took a time out and watched the players as they approached the bench. Hollins was the only player who looked at me. The others looked into the stands or down at the floor, which indicated that they didn’t want to take the important shot. So I set up a play for Hollins to drive off a side-court screen and shoot, even though he hadn’t shot the ball well to that point in the game. Lionel hung his defender (John Mengelt) on the screen, drove to the free throw line, pulled up, and buried an open jumper. It was the game clincher. Herm Gilliam asked me after the game why I had chosen Hollins to take the shot when he hadn’t been shooting well. I told Herm, “Lionel was the only player who showed me that he wanted the ball.”

Hollins vividly remembered the competitive nature of that training camp in 1976. “The big guys—Bill (Walton), Luke (Maurice Lucas), Lloyd (Neal), Moses (Malone), and Robin Jones—were really banging each other hard. The guards pressured each other on every possession. Bobby Gross, Larry (Steele), and Wally Walker (first-round draft pick from Virginia) tried to outrun each other. It was the best training camp I was ever involved in,” he said years later.

Like the rest of us, Lionel had the goal of just making the playoffs before the1976–1977 season began. But after beating the Bulls in the first round, “I felt we could beat anybody,” he remembered. And the 1976–1977 Blazers did just that. “One of my best memories of that team was the way it brought the whole city together,” he recalled. “Blazermania was everywhere. It was a great feeling to be part of that.”

Hollins averaged 14.7 points a game that regular season and led the team in steals (166). He was named to the NBA’s All-Defensive First Team in 1977 and to the Second Team the following season. Hollins was traded to Philadelphia in 1980 and later played for San Diego, Detroit, and Houston before retiring in 1985. Not surprisingly, Hollins became an NBA coach, starting as an assistant to Cotton Fitzsimmons at Phoenix in 1988. After spending seven years in that capacity, Hollins became an assistant coach to Brian Hill with the Vancouver (B.C.) Grizzlies when the franchise joined the NBA in 1995 and continued with them after the franchise moved to Memphis.

Hollins became full-time head coach of Memphis in the fall of 2009 and continued in that capacity going into the 2010–2011 season. He was regarded by the owner, Michael Heisley, the Grizzlies players, and throughout the NBA as a no-nonsense, knowledgeable, and effective coach.

Portland Trail Blazers, 1977-1978. OHS Research Lib.