Lenny Wilkens fought for every last bit of his basketball glory

By the time he finally made it all the way back home, the Knicks were already in the early throes of a two-decade death rattle. Lenny Wilkens never complained, because he was always happiest when he had a team to coach, players to teach, basketball wisdom to share.

“It’s been a long trip to get back where I started,” Wilkens said in a long interview on Jan. 15, 2004, the day he was hired to coach the Knicks, a day before his new team would beat one of his old teams, the Seattle SuperSonics, 108-88, one of the 1,332 wins he would accumulate as an NBA coach, still the third-highest total in the league’s history.

Wilkens’ death was announced by NBA commissioner Adam Silver Sunday, and he was justly celebrated as one of the seminal figures in basketball history. He was runner-up to Wilt Chamberlain for the 1968 MVP. He coached the Sonics to their only NBA title in 1979.

He is one of only five people — Bill Russell, John Wooden, Tom Heinsohn and Bill Sharman are the others — to earn enshrinement to the Hall of Fame as both player and coach. So much of that career was spent away from here, in Seattle and Providence and elsewhere.