Jeff Hornacek
According to Basketball-Reference, Jeff Hornacek’s nicknames are Horny and Scarecrow. Both seem unfortunate. Perhaps the latter is one of those attempts to name the self. Jeff shows up in a new town in front of all his new teammates and says, “Hey, everyone, you can call me Scarecrow,” and the leader of the team looks him over with avid skepticism, “Isn’t your name Hornacek? We’re gonna call you Horny.”
Horny played 14 years in the NBA, and the above scenario, if it ever happened at all, is likely to have happened three times. The first possible nicknaming may have occurred when he was drafted to the Phoenix Suns prior to the 1986-87 season. If so, then veteran scorers Walter Davis and Larry Nance were the players most likely in control of the nicknaming ceremony.
Hornacek averaged 5.3 points per game that year, playing less than 20 minutes per outing. By the time he had played his last game for Phoenix and the Suns were ready to trade him for Charles Barkley, he would be a 20.1 points per game scorer, averaging 38 minutes a night. A lot can change over the course of six years, and while Barkley pushed Phoenix into the 1993 Finals, one can imagine Hornacek’s Suns outplaying Barkley’s 76ers in a seven-game series.
Horny played only 132 games in a Philadelphia uniform, not even two full seasons worth of games. The team was miserable. All its players were either too young or too old. Most of them would be better served as service parts for other teams. Many of them would not be long for the league.
When Philadelphia traded the shooting guard to Utah for Jeff Malone and a first-round draft pick, surely Karl Malone and John Stockton did not call Jeff Hornacek “Horny,” or maybe they did in the way children sometimes stumble innocently and unawares into awkward innuendo.
Hornacek’s scoring numbers in Utah do not stand out from his production in Phoenix or Philadelphia, at least not through the per game lens, but if gauged per 100 possessions, then his most productive seasons were clearly had in a city on the banks of a Great Salt Lake.
In his first season with the Utah Jazz, the team lost to Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets. The Rockets would go on to win the second of their two titles that year. In year two, the team would reach the Western Conference Finals before being bested by the Seattle SuperSonics.
While John Stockton still held a higher position on the franchise totem pole, Hornacek gave the team as much reason to believe it could still contend for a title. In fact, Hornacek and Stockton shared an identical VORP rating of 4.2 that year, and by the 1997-98 season was over, Hornacek would own a rating of 3.5 to Stockton’s 2.2.
When the Utah Jazz posed the biggest threat to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, Karl Malone was clearly the Jazz’s best player, but claiming John Stockton was his sole running mate isn’t so easy. Maybe instead of being referred to as Horny or Scarecrow he should be called the Invisible Man. His name wasn’t on the marquee, and he isn’t cursed to stand forever in the shoes of Bryon Russell.
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