Sloan on Bogut, Skiles

OKLAHOMA CITY — Before the Jazz play Oklahoma City tonight, a couple of lingering items from their loss at Milwaukee on Friday night …
As previously chronicled in a Jazz notebook that ran in Sunday’s paper, Jerry Sloan really is a big Andrew Bogut fan.
What didn’t make it was Sloan’s take on why it’s taken Bogut, the former University of Utah center, some time to develop into the force-of-power big man that he is now with the Bucks.
“A lot of people (in college) may not be exposed to the type game you play in this league, where you have to get up and you have to guard people,” Sloan said. “So many guys come in our league, and they never had to guard anybody. All they had to do was just play one end of the floor.
“Players that have to come in and learn how to do that, sometimes it takes a while — because you lose your confidence, you’re trying to defend, you can’t score, you think backwards on every play and it’s tough to overcome that for a while. But tough guys usually succeed if they stay after it.”
Speaking of tough guys, Sloan also is a fan of Bucks coach Scott Skiles, who some say has a career that somewhat parallels that of Sloan — not a superstar but super-hyper as a player, yet patient as coach when it comes to developing his team.
And it all ties back to Bogut.
“He (Skiles) played hard, and seemed to have an idea of what he was going out there, made other people better,” the Jazz coach said. “You know, it’s not how high you jump — it’s what you do when you do jump.
“They’ve been pretty patient with his people,” Sloan added. “Usually guys like that and myself — people never thought we had enough patience to coach basketball to start with.”
To be as patient as Skiles and the Bucks have been with Bogut, Sloan said, “That coach had to know something was going on with him.”

-30-