_{Main photo: Bob Kloppenburg (courtesy Sonja Kloppenburg Blummer)}.

The man in a sweatsuit that matched his graying hair was crouched in the corner of our practice court and well known to me. But not my girls. I’d forgotten to tell my middle-school basketball club team that we’d have a special visitor that evening.

Early in the session, one of my players sidled up to me and in a loud whisper made an observation in the insensitive way young people sometimes do.

“Hey coach,” she said, “there’s a weird old man kind of barking and making grunting noises.”

This was Bob Kloppenburg, not weird or grunting but spitting instructions like the rhymes the girls liked to blast in their Walkmans back in that day.

“Hit-fist-white-closeout-switch!”

This was the mantra of Kloppenburg’s SOS pressure defense, as recited, sometimes against his own will, by its mastermind. My late, great friend went quietly, passing in his sleep, at 96 years old, on the morning of April 16, 2024. But Bob Kloppenburg isn’t truly gone because his words and ideas continue to percolate in my head like balls in a bingo cage.

I am a true believer in Bob Kloppenburg and his SOS pressure defense. And I know I’m not alone, especially in the basketball world, which Kloppenburg influenced, regardless of level or gender. His fingerprints are on programs stretching from far-flung countries and high schools to Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels UNLV teams to the NBA and the Seattle Storm’s 2020 WNBA championship.

Folks in my hometown of Seattle know Kloppenburg from his nine years as a Sonics assistant (plus four glorious games as an interim head coach in 1992). I covered that stretch, plus eight more seasons, for The Seattle Times. I wrote an extensive piece about Kloppenburg and the evolution of his defense, aptly headlined, “Defender of the Faith.”

That story presaged the most impressive SOS defensive season I ever witnessed. I equated that Sonics team with a wheat thrasher because it whirled and separated the ball from so many handlers. Nate McMillan led the NBA in steals with 3.0 a game, the Glove, Gary Payton, was 7^th with 2.3, and ultra-athletic Kendall Gill was 14^th with 1.9 and the Reign Man, Shawn Kemp, was 17^th with 1.8. That team led the league in steals, turnovers produced (an eye-popping 20.3 a game), and average margin of victory.

The 1993-94 Sonics also won a league-best 63 games. Unfortunately, they ultimately made NBA history by becoming the first No. 1 seed to lose in the first round of the playoffs to a No. 8. The enduring image of that team was not the rip-and-run, but of an ecstatic, weeping Dikembe Mutomo, supine on the Seattle Coliseum floor, holding the basketball aloft after an overtime Denver Nuggets upset.

Kloppenburg was gone a year later. As he’d seen a time or two before, a head basketball coach equated late-season flameout with the physical toll exacted by the SOS pressure. The Sonics let off the gas, but Kloppenburg had a lot left in the tank.

Still, Kloppenburg was too humble and gentle (when not delivering a stream-of-consciousness SOS play by play, that is) to proselytize or promote his defensive doctrine. There’s where I, among so many others, came in. I absorbed a lot of the defense by being around it so much, but I also studied it and talked it through with Kloppenburg.

Kloppenburg would boast to his fellow assistants about my grasp of basketball tactics, but coaches on the college or pro level had a hard time believing that sportswriters were capable of understanding a sport beyond a very basic level. Even my late friend, Les Habegger, the former Sonic assistant and general manager, challenged me during one of our monthly breakfasts. After I demonstrated at our table with utensils, sugar packets, and salt and pepper shakers, Habegger said I probably knew the defense better than he did.

When I left the Times for the internet, and it was ethical to befriend former subjects and sources, I set up Kloppenburg and Ernie Woods on their original HoopTactics website on a startup sports media network called Rivals.com. Shortly after, I started talking to Kloppenburg about installing SOS with my middle-school girls basketball club team and he came out to help. That team of mostly small but fast Asian girls called the Dragons, about which I later wrote for ESPN, mastered the defense enough to play at the 2001 AAU Nationals, where they won two games.

I later helped Joyce Walker work on the defense at Garfield High School. A few years before that, Kloppenburg invited me to a coaching clinic headlined by him and Tex Winter, originator of the triangle offense utilized by the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls. There, I also met Kloppenburg’s son, Gary, who would lead the Storm to its 2020 title.

At the clinic, Gary Kloppenburg talked me into implementing Winter’s triangle. He assured me that the high-school freshman girls that I was about to coach could handle it. Improbably, that year I ran arguably the most innovative offense and defense of the generation – with 15- and 16-year-old girls.

Honestly, if a Kloppenburg had suggested that I jumped off the Aurora Bridge, I wouldn’t be writing this today.

It says something that the elder Kloppenburg didn’t talk me out of intellectually scrambling a group of young high-school girls with a double dose of triangle offense and SOS defense.

I don’t think I’m posthumously outing Bob Kloppenburg when I say that I helped convince him that, from an aesthetic and coachability standpoint, the women’s game was better than the men’s. During the last couple of decades, over coffees and breakfasts with him and his delightful wife Gayle, he’d repeat that the women played a superior brand of basketball and were a coach’s dream.

“They’re more fundamentally sound,” he’d say.

Bob Kloppenburg clearly was a man ahead of his time.