Cotton Fitzsimmons, who gave Kansas City Kings their best years, to enter Hall of Fame
The Kansas City Kings didn’t have many good seasons in their 13-year NBA existence. But the best ones produced by the franchise were led by coach Cotton Fitzsimmons.
Sunday, Fitzsimmons, whose NBA career started after spending two seasons coaching Kansas State, was announced as a 2021 member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He won more than 1,000 games in his coaching career, 832 in the NBA.
The Kings arrived in Kansas City for the 1972-73 season. Fitzsimmons took over in 1978 and in his first season led the Kings to a 48-34 record — the best the team achieved in its Kansas City years — and its lone Midwest Division title.
It marked the first of three straight playoff years for the Kings, and four of Fitzsimmons’ six Kansas City teams played in the postseason, highlighted by a 1981 trip to the Western Conference finals. The Kings lost in five games to the Houston Rockets.
Fitzsimmons, who died in 2004, went 248-244 in Kansas City and was the only Kings coach to produce a winning record in KC.
“I’ve always said that to have kept that team winning for as long as I did was the best coaching job I ever did,” Fitzsimmons said in a 1995 interview with The Star.
Fitzsimmons, originally from Hannibal, Missouri, was a junior college All-America player and got made his coaching debut at Moberly Junior College, where his teams won consecutive national championships.
He parlayed that success into the Kansas State job, where he joined Tex Winter’s staff as an assistant in 1967. After that season, Winter left for Washington, and Fitzsimmons took over as the Wildcats’ coach. He went 14-12 in his first season. But in 1969-70, K-State won the Big Eight championship and Fitzsimmons was named league coach of the year.
Fitzsimmons will be the third Kansas State men’s basketball coach in the Naismith Hall of Fame joining Jack Gardner and Winter.
He started his NBA career the next season with the Phoenix Suns. He served as head coach of the Atlanta Hawks and Buffalo Braves before taking over the Kings. After Kansas City, Fitzsimmons coached the San Antonio Spurs and a Suns for a second time.
His final coaching season was 1997. He had become the sixth coach in NBA history to surpass 800 victories, and currently stands No. 16 on the NBA’s career victory list.