New assistant coach Jason Terry brings 'instant respect' in return to Wildcats

One scan of Jason Terry’s résumé and it’s obvious his recruiting credibility is off the charts.

Officially named an Arizona assistant coach Thursday, the former Wildcat star has NCAA and NBA championship rings. Was an NBA lottery pick. Spent 19 years in the league. Earned a total of $108 million. And his jersey hangs on the McKale Center walls.

In short, he’s done the kinds of things that every recruit hopes to have for themselves. As UA coach Sean Miller said in a statement, “his basketball journey is one that so many players dream of.”

Plus, Terry has strong hometown roots in Seattle, one of the West’s most fertile recruiting grounds, and secondary ones in Dallas, where his peak seasons were spent with the Mavericks.

But to understand how much Terry might help the Wildcats even more in retention — a constant issue for a program that annually turns over half its roster — you have to go back to December of 1996, into the office of then-coach Lute Olson.

Terry had been a starter on the perimeter, along with highly regarded freshman Mike Bibby at point guard and hot-shooting small forward Michael Dickerson. But the Wildcats’ on-court leader, Miles Simon, had become available after missing the fall semester because of academic eligibility.

Somebody had to sit down.

Former Wildcat Jason Terry scored 18,881 points in his 19-year NBA career, in which he played for six teams and made 2,282 3-pointers, the No. 7 mark of all-time.
David J. Phillip / The Associated Press

But before Olson could delicately try to deal with it, Terry walked into his office.

“He sat down on (Olson’s) couch and said ‘I’ll come off the bench,’” said then-UA associate head coach Jim Rosborough. “He certainly could have contested with Miles or Bibby or Michael Dickerson.

“But I think he was smart enough to know he was going to play plenty of time and he was, without question, the best sixth man in the country.”

The rest of the story is well-documented in Arizona basketball history. The Wildcats won the national championship … and Terry averaged a starter’s minutes, 30.5 per game, while also keeping everyone else happy with their roles.

A.J. Bramlett, Terry’s roommate and longtime friend since then, remembered how the two discussed that December evening in their dorm room how it might play out.

“I thought it was a smart decision because we knew our team and our personalities,” Bramlett said.

“Miles wasn’t going to come off the bench and Mike D wasn’t either so he had to make that decision, and it was the right decision.

“The key was he went to coach Olson first and took the initiative.”

Miller wasn’t available for comment but in a UA-produced video, the Arizona coach called Terry “the epitome of unselfishness” for accepting that sixth-man role in 1996-97.

“He was a big reason why Arizona won the national championship,” Miller said. “I love his passion for the game.”

Miller also noted that Terry turned from a sixth man into a star as a senior in 1998-99, which is the other story Terry might someday tell current players about how patience can sometimes work to your advantage.

Terry averaged 21.9 points as a senior, becoming an All-American and a player of the year by some media outlets..

Former Arizona Wildcat, Jason Terry, watches the scoreboard as the Wildcat video is played before the start of a game against USC game at McKale Center in Tucson on Feb. 19, 2015. Photo by: Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star
Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star

“His mindset and the confidence he had in himself was always at a star level,” Bramlett said. “He just made that transition when we needed it.”

That June, Terry became a lottery pick in the 1999 NBA draft and he kept playing until 2018, after which he coached and ran a Dallas-area girls club team and served as an assistant general manager for the G League’s Texas Legends.

Imagine that: Four years in college — something that is considered a failure in today’s game — turns into an NBA career that’s far longer and more lucrative than many one-and-done players ever have.

Still, in today’s era, talking an NBA prospect into sticking around for four years isn’t likely. Arizona has lost six freshmen to the NBA draft over the past four seasons alone. But maybe Terry can convince a Wildcat or two to look hard at the long term.

“He garners instant respect because of his résumé and what he’s done,” Bramlett said. “Guys are going to listen to him and his message is always positive. He’s shown in his NBA career even in coming off the bench that it can work. It benefited him more than anything.”

Simply by arriving at Arizona, Terry also appears to have put two tense issues with the program behind him.

Terry earned a UA jersey retirement by being named the national player of the year in 1998-99 by Sports Illustrated, CBS and the Basketball Times, but Arizona did not honor him for 16 years after an NCAA investigation found Terry accepted $11,500 from agents while playing for the Wildcats as a senior.

The NCAA’s finding prompted Arizona to forfeit $45,363 in NCAA Tournament revenues while vacating its 1999 NCAA Tournament first-round loss to Oklahoma.

In 2000, the school made an agreement with the then-Pac-10 Conference to ban Terry from the UA Sports Hall of Fame, with a provision that his jersey would not be retired.

But about a decade later, on the advice of then-AD Jim Livengood, Rosborough said he traveled to a golf event in Dallas to let Terry know there might be a chance to reverse the agreement if he paid the $45,363.

Terry gave it a shot and repaid the money.

“It came down to the (Pac-10) athletic directors to see how they could get it cleared up,” Rosborough said. “It took a while. But to my knowledge, it wasn’t that Jason didn’t care. I think he felt horrible about the whole thing from the beginning and wanted to get it cleared up but they had the ban on it.”

By 2015, the same year Terry finished up his UA degree in general studies, the school raised his No. 31 jersey.

But three years later, tensions surfaced between Terry and the UA program for a different reason.

After ESPN reported in February 2018 that Miller discussed a $100,000 pay-for-play scheme, Terry tweeted: “it’s time to clean house and bring home our own bloodlines to carry on Lutes Legacy.

“We have too much pride, too much tradition to allow outsiders to tear down what we built.”

4-3-97. 10; Olson talks things over with Jason Terry during the NCAA Tournament game against Providence.
Mary Chind

However, Terry told a Phoenix radio station in April 2019 that he strongly supported Miller and that “we’re in good hands,” and in August 2019, Arizona’s basketball program tweeted out a photo of Miller, Terry and women’s golf coach Laura Ianello smiling together at McKale Center.

But while Miller spoke glowingly of Terry in his statement, saying he would “impact and energize our current players as well as our recruiting efforts in a major way,” Miller is also hiring an assistant coach who does not have college coaching experience, something Miller has never done since he took over the Wildcats in April 2009.

Terry’s résumé — and references — suggest he can hop over that gap pretty easily.

“There’s no doubt having been there and one that doesn’t qualify you as a great teacher,” says UA radio analyst Ryan Hansen, who was a manager and operations director during Terry’s UA playing days. “But seeing his ability to communicate and relate to teammates, and then at the end of his career with the Milwaukee Bucks, he was a coach on the floor. ...

So “what makes you excited about him is his ability to relate to his peers, his coaches and to his peers as a mentor, to take guys under his wing and say ‘This is a marathon. This is a basketball career. Don’t get so far ahead of yourself. Take these little steps.’

“I think he has the potential to be extremely beneficial to us in a lot of different ways.”