DENVER – Doug Moe, an ABA original who rose to fame in a chaotic, abusive and sometimes R-rated decade as a coach. denver nuggets Died on Tuesday, in the 1980s. He was 87 years old.
Moe’s son David informed several of the coach’s friends that his father had died after a long battle with cancer, longtime Denver TV personality and Moe’s good friend Ron Zappolo told the Associated Press.
The Nuggets called Mo “a unique leader and individual who led one of the most successful and exciting decades in Nuggets history” in a social media post.
Moe went 628–529 in 15 seasons as a head coach, including his tenure at San Antonio Spurs And philadelphia 76ers. He never won a title – his most memorable performance was in 1985 when his best Denver team lost Los Angeles Lakers In the Western Conference Finals. He was NBA Coach of the Year in 1988.
More than wins and losses, Mo will be remembered for his motion offense and the equally entertaining shows he put on while roaming the bench during his coaching days.
His Denver teams led the league in scoring for five consecutive seasons in the early ’80s, and he rarely played a set play.
He called those guys “rude” (or worse) and used more colorful language to drive home some of his favorite foils – Kiki Vandeweghe, Danny Schayes and Bill Hanzlik stood out.
The coach was dressed in one of his well-worn sports coats, usually without a tie (he had a small stock of “emergency suits” in his wardrobe for big events), his hair tousled and his exaggerated voice barely raspy by the end of most games.
The Nuggets bench, with its 10 rows behind it, was no place for kids, but within a few hours, Moe would hang out at the bar or coffee shop with many of the same players he had cheered for, often wondering to himself where that foul-mouthed guy on the sideline had come from.
Moe said in an interview with The New York Times in 1983, “Sometimes I think my personality is like Jekyll-and-Hyde. I joke around a lot before and after the game, but once the game starts my emotions take over.”
Years before John Elway arrived, Moe was Denver’s biggest sports personality. Sportscaster Zappolo said that behind the game-day fanfare was a cute teddy bear.
Zappolo said, “I don’t know if there’s ever been a more important sports personality in Denver, not only because of how successful he was, but how colorful he was and how kind he was.” “There are a lot of people walking around today who feel like they were Doug’s best friends.”
Douglas Edwin Moe was born on September 21, 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. As a teenager he became well known in New York basketball circles, where he would sometimes visit gyms using fake names to play on teams for which he would not otherwise be eligible.
He teamed up with his good friend Larry Brown at North Carolina, where as a 6-foot-5 small forward they twice earned All-America honors. But Moe’s college career ended early due to a point-shaving scandal that cost him $75 to go to a meet; He refused to throw the game.
After a few years in Europe, Mo again became a package deal with the Browns as he navigated his way through the new and budding ABA. Mo was a three-time All-Star during a five-year career that was ended early due to his persistently ill knees.
His playing days over, he re-teamed with the Browns, serving as his assistant with the Carolina Cougars, and then with the Nuggets at the end of the franchise’s ABA days.
Mo insisted that he never wanted the head coaching job – did not want to work that hard – but Brown convinced him to take the job in San Antonio. With the help of George Gervin, Mo won the division twice and made one Conference Final in four seasons with Spurs.
Moe’s next stop was Denver, where he took over in 1980 after another of his Carolina friends, Donnie Walsh, was fired. The following 10 seasons marked a golden era for the Nuggets, who played in rainbow uniforms and rewrote the record books, but never broke out of the shadow of the Lakers and Celtics dynasties of that era.
Alex English and Vandeweghe went 1–2 in scoring in the 1982–83 season, a feat neither teammate has accomplished since. The Nuggets lost a 186–184 game to the Pistons in 1983, which remains the highest-scoring game in NBA history. Mo won 432 games with the Nuggets and the franchise retired that number by adding Mo’s name to it.
It took more than 30 years for Mo to retire and the Nuggets to move back to San Antonio to become NBA champions.
Strangely, one of Mo’s most colorful coaching coups occurred at the expense of the Nuggets on the last day of the 1977–78 season when he was with the Spurs. In the opening game, Denver, then coached by Brown, outplayed David Thompson en route to a 73-point outburst against Detroit that briefly put him ahead of Gervin in a neck-and-neck battle for the scoring title.
So, that night, Mo told the Spurs to get out of the way of the “Ice”. Gervin scored 63 against the Jazz to win the title by .07 points.
But the pinnacle of Moe’s coaching came with the Nuggets, where his teams became significantly better when Fats Lever and Calvin Nutt arrived via a trade in 1984. But both were injured during the 1985 Conference Finals against the Lakers. The Nuggets lost the series 4-1 in the last three games and Mo never got close to it.
Although the Nuggets’ focus was on offense, Mo spent considerable time preaching defense—emphasizing that it was the Nuggets’ ability, not their scoring, that would make the difference between victory and defeat.
Once, angry at the lack of effort during a major loss in Portland, he ordered his team to stop putting effort on defense and allow the Blazers to make layups at will in the final minutes to set a franchise scoring record for a single game. The fine and suspension came just weeks after he was fined for throwing water on an officer.
However, for the most part, Moe made his career by not taking himself too seriously – a wry counterbalance to the lackluster Pat Riley and Laker Showtime teams that had dominated the NBA’s Western Conference for a decade.
Moe even punctuated one of his worst moments – getting fired by the Nuggets in 1990 – by wearing a Hawaiian shirt and popping open champagne at a press conference while his wife, whom he called “Big Jane”, watched. A day to celebrate, he insisted, because now he would get paid for doing nothing.
Mo ended his head coaching career with an unsuccessful stint in Philadelphia that lasted less than a season before returning to Denver in assistant roles, including a return to the bench as an assistant to George Karl.
When Mo was asked to explain why he was coaching again, he said, “Because I’m stupid, or something.”
Far away from.
And despite his insistence that he did nothing more than throw the ball there, there was always a well-trained, much-rehearsed method behind the madness of his overdrive passing game.
Zappolo said, “There will never be another sports personality like Doug Moe.” “He really was a one-of-a-kind person.”
