Doug Moe, a 3-time All-Star forward in the early years of the American Basketball Association who went on to enjoy a long career in the NBA as a coach, died Tuesday. He was 87.
Moe led his teams to winning records in 12 of his 15 seasons behind the bench with the San Antonio Spurs (1976-80), Denver Nuggets (1980-90) and Philadelphia 76ers (1992-93).
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Moe retired with 1,157 regular season games as a head coach and a 628-529 overall record. In the playoffs, he led both the Nuggets and the Spurs as far as the Western Conference Finals.
Moe was a star forward at the University of North Carolina, which led him to be selected in both the 1960 and 1961 NBA drafts. However, Moe’s involvement in an offer to throw games while in college led the Chicago Packers (the forerunner to today’s Washington Wizards) to not sign him.
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Even though Moe was exonerated, his basketball career went on hiatus. He worked as an insurance salesman, went into the Army, and then went overseas to play professional basketball in Italy.
Given a second chance in the nascent ABA, Moe was an All-Star in each of his first three seasons (1968, 1969, 1970). He would finish his five-year career with the Virginia Squires, Carolina Cougars, Oakland Oaks and New Orleans Buccaneers with averages of 16.3 points and 6.0 rebounds per game.
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Moe spent four years as an assistant coach in the ABA before getting his first head coaching job with the Spurs in 1976-77 — the team’s first year in the NBA after the ABA merger. Moe was named the NBA Coach of the Year in 1988.
After he was fired midway through his lone season in Philadelphia, Moe was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 1997. A Brooklyn native and graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, Moe was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 1998.
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In 2018, the NBA awarded Moe the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award.
“In the 1970s and 80s, Doug Moe established a pace-and-space game that was decades ahead of its time,” said Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, who made the presentation. “Congratulations to a true visionary on this special recognition of innovation and accomplishment.”
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