Kings coach Brown pays tribute to former colleague Milojević
Kings coach Brown pays tribute to former colleague Milojević originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Kings coach Mike Brown reminisced about his favorite memories of late Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojević.
The Warriors announced Wednesday afternoon that Milojević died after suffering a heart attack at a private team dinner Tuesday in Salt Lake City.
Brown -- a former Warriors assistant coach and colleague of Milojević, aka "Deki" -- offered his condolences to the late coach's friends and family Wednesday while speaking to reporters after Kings practice in Sacramento.
"My condolences to Deki, his family, his friends and the Warriors organization," Brown said. "He was a great, great man, and I don't even want to talk about basketball stuff because he was a great basketball mind, but great man, and he'll be sorely missed by everyone."
Brown remembered Milojević as a calming presence who was beloved by everyone within the Warriors organization.
"He meant a lot, because we're all kind of like a family, so you have your ups and downs with a lot of different individuals at different times, and he never had an up and down with anybody. It was always ups," Brown recalled. "And that's a unique skill set to have in this business, especially when you command the type of respect that he commanded without getting too high or too low.
"The respect level was very high. That's very, very unique to have that with all the coaches, all the players, the medical people, front-office people. He was just loved by everybody, and he loved back."
When asked what memories of his best described Milojević, Brown smiled in recalling his former colleague's fun-loving personality.
"The first thing -- and people say this all the time about people, and I think it's an overused explanation or term for big guys -- but they'll say 'he's a big teddy bear,' " Brown said. "If you open Webster's [Dictionary], he should be by that term. He is a sweetheart of a giant man.
"He's a big guy. When he played, he was an enforcer, he played with passion. But he's so sweet and so gentle and so intelligent and so approachable, and just a big teddy bear that when you see him, you just want to put your arm around him. For me, that's the first thing I think of when I think of Deki, just his laid-back, happy-go-lucky personality. It's special."
After postponing the Warriors' game against the Utah Jazz on Wednesday at Delta Center, the NBA announced its decision to also postpone Golden State's Friday game against the Dallas Mavericks at Chase Center. Both games will be rescheduled at a later date.
