Paul Silas, an NBA star player who later was the head coach of the Charlotte NBA franchise on two different occasions, has died. He was 79.
Silas coached both the Charlotte Hornets and the Charlotte Bobcats, leading the Hornets to four straight winning seasons in the Queen City from 1998-2002. He also played for 16 years in the NBA and was known for his rebounding prowess and his durability.
Silas won three NBA championships as a player with Boston and Seattle and exactly 400 games as an NBA head coach counting playoff contests. His son, Stephen Silas, now serves as the head coach of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
“Paul was an incredible leader and motivator who served as our head coach on two occasions,” Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan said in a statement. “He combined the knowledge developed over nearly 40 years as an NBA player and coach with an innate understanding of how to mix discipline with his never-ending positivity. On or off the court, Paul’s enthusiastic and engaging personality was accompanied by an anecdote for every occasion. He was one of the all-time great people in our game, and he will be missed.”
After his second and final stint as Charlotte’s head coach ended following the 2011-12 season, Paul Silas and his wife, Carolyn, remained a frequent presence at Hornets’ home games. Current Hornets head coach Steve Clifford said that when he first got the Charlotte job in 2013 that Silas repeatedly reached out to try to help him.
“He went out of his way to develop a friendship and was great in guiding me through being a first-time head coach,” Clifford said of Silas Sunday. “He used to sit right behind the bench. He used to come to practice a lot. He took me to lunch a lot and give me advice, about everything from X’s and O’s to leadership…. The other part for me was he was such a great player, and a lot of his career was with the (Boston) Celtics. I’m from northern New England, and so for my family, I mean, he was a god. He was larger than life.”
While he was the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Silas also directed the rookie season of future NBA superstar LeBron James. Silas remains the last coach to direct the Hornets to a playoff series win, in 2002. A cause of death wasn’t immediately available.
Silas could be a stern presence in the locker room — he once had a physical confrontation in 2012 with an underachieving Bobcats player named Tyrus Thomas — but was beloved outside of it due to his genial nature and sense of kindness. When the Bobcats told him he wouldn’t return as head coach after he directed the ignominious 7-59 season of 2011-12, Silas held a farewell news conference, then stuck around to shake every reporter’s hand afterward.
George Shinn, the Charlotte Hornets’ original owner, both hired and fired Silas as a coach.
“I loved his attitude,” Shinn said in an interview Sunday. “Paul Silas was a brilliant coach and a great competitor. He handled players so well. For a tough guy like Anthony Mason, he treated him tough, which was the way Mason treated everybody. But after a difficult conversation, Paul would put his arm around him.”
When the Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, Shinn kept Silas as his head coach. But then the owner fired Silas after the 2002-03 season, even though New Orleans had gone 47-35 that season.
Silas then showed up unannounced at the front door of Shinn’s home in New Orleans.
“He had never been to my house at that point,” Shinn said, “and suddenly I peeked outside and there was this mountain of a man coming to the front door. It was Paul. It made me really nervous. But I went to the door, and he couldn’t have been sweeter. Paul said, ‘I want you to know everything is fine with me. I don’t agree with you, but I understand this happens sometimes in the NBA, and I want you to know I still love you.’ ”
Wrote basketball great Magic Johnson on Twitter: “Paul made a huge contribution to the game of basketball and will be sorely missed!”
I live in Denver, N.C., not too far from Silas and the dream home he built on Lake Norman, and the man did love basketball. I coached several recreational teams in a local league over the years, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for Silas to walk into the gym and sit in the bleachers, watching 10-year-olds try to advance the ball past half-court without turning it over.
I remember walking up to him once during one of those games and sitting with him for a while as we watched two young teams combine for a shooting percentage of about 15%. Silas grinned at me, chuckled in that deep baritone and said, “Isn’t this great?”
Silas was also a volunteer assistant coach in that rec league for several years with a neighbor who was the head coach, when Silas was between gigs and just wanted to be around the game. He once coached my oldest son in that league, and my son said Silas harped on rebounding above all else.
“Nothing made Coach Silas happier than a good box-out,” my son, Chapel Fowler, remembered.
Once, when Silas was showing his young charges how to correctly execute a jab step, one of his NBA championship rings fell off and clattered onto the court. The boys, somewhat in awe, picked the ring up and gave it back to him.
The coach liked to tell the story of the time he once slipped up and used profanity during one of those games at the East Lincoln Community Center.
“I was on the bench the other day and my neighbor was up coaching,” Silas told me in 2010, “and then something happened on the court. I didn’t like it and all of a sudden the kids started yelling, ‘Mr. Silas said a bad word! Mr. Silas said a bad word!”
In terms of serious basketball, Silas also told me once the best team he ever coached in Charlotte was the 2001 Hornets squad, which was led by Baron Davis and Jamal Mashburn. That Charlotte team won a first-round playoff series, then led its second-round, best-of-7 series three games to two over Milwaukee.
Game 6 was in Charlotte. The Hornets had a 10-point lead at halftime — and lost it. They also lost Game 7 in Milwaukee, but Silas always thought that Charlotte team should have gotten to what would have been the franchise’s only Eastern Conference finals ever.
Always a classy bedrock in Charlotte, Silas didn’t complain when management gave him so little talent to work with during the 7-59 season of 2011-12 (which set an NBA record for worst winning percentage in a single season). When fan support evaporated toward the end of the Hornets’ original tenure in 2002, Silas often coached in half-full arenas — even for playoff games. But he always went out of his way to praise the fans who showed up rather than criticize those who had abandoned ship.
The 6-foot-7 Silas grew up in a multi-family household in Oakland, Calif., for a while living in the same house as some younger cousins who would later achieve recording fame as the Pointer Sisters.
In college at Creighton, Silas was one of the best rebounders in collegiate history, once averaging more than 20 rebounds per game for an entire season. He once played a brief one-on-one game at Creighton in 1964 with a boxer then named Cassius Clay. The future Muhammad Ali showed up at a Creighton practice being held in Miami with a camera crew in tow and shot a few layups over Silas, although Silas was instructed, he said, not to block them.
As a coach, Silas’s players usually liked him. He got his chance at a head-coaching job in Charlotte when then-coach Dave Cowens stepped down abruptly after a 4-11 start to the 1998-99 season. Silas, a Hornets assistant, took over on an interim basis, went 22-13 during the rest of that shortened season and earned the top job.
“He’s all business on the court,” former Hornets player Bobby Phills once said of Silas. “And he’s a big guy. But he’s a teddy bear in the heart.”
When Phills died in 2000 in a car accident, Silas had to shepherd the team through a period of mourning and did so gracefully. Silas spoke at Phills’ memorial service, wiping away tears.
“We mourn the passing of former NBA All-Star and head coach Paul Silas,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Paul’s lasting contributions to the game are seen through the many players and coaches he inspired, including his son, Rockets head coach Stephen Silas. We send our deepest condolences to Paul’s family.”
In 2002, The Charlotte Observer asked Silas what trait he most admired in a person.
“Honesty,” he said. “If you’re honest, then everything else falls into place.”
Charlotte Observer staff writer Roderick Boone contributed to this story.
