At 90, Lindsay Gaze OAM is still coaching coaches

• Gaze turns 90 today after four Olympics coaching the Boomers and 35 Tigers years
• He is in the Naismith, FIBA and Australian Basketball Halls of Fame
• The NBL's Coach of the Year award is called the Lindsay Gaze Trophy

When seven-time Lindsay Gaze NBL Coach of the Year Brian Goorjian’s Sydney Kings limped into the 2025 FIBA Break at 7-6 in NBL26, he felt there was only one coach he needed to see – and it wasn’t about Xs and Os.

That coach was Lindsay Gaze OAM, who turns 90 today.  

"Really, really a lot of thought," Goorjian revealed.

"When we went into the break, I had this itch – I wanted to see Lindsay and fly back to Melbourne and see him.”

It was right before 73-year-old Goorjian would coach his 850th NBL game and the Kings were in search of their identity and consistency.

"When I sat down with him, and he talked about (Lanard) Copeland, his son (Andrew), (Mark) Bradtke, (Warrick) Giddey – he lights up like a Christmas tree. I walked out of there and thought, my energy’s in the wrong place.

"Right now, as a coach, you walk around the door, and the guy that lost is in a room by himself going like this, because if you lose, you’re going to get fired.

"It’s not about that. It’s about the relationships and the development and the players you’ve coached.

"I started thinking about these guys, what good guys they are, and the enjoyment of spending time with them instead of getting buried in the negative and on the computer.

"More coffees. More talks. More one-on-one. More high road. What am I doing if I’m not enjoying this, if I’m not building those relationships?

"I’ve got guys now I coached who are 60. You go to the Summer League, and you see general managers, head coaches – Jamahl Mosley (2002 NBL Sixth Man) – guys who’ve gone on and done great things, and you were part of that.

"If you’re not smelling the roses in that form, you don’t belong in it.

“That meeting with Lindsay gave me a real lift and got my head back where it should be."

Gaze coached his last professional basketball game in 2009, and he can add another championship to his three-time Hall of Fame resume (Naismith, FIBA and Australian).

The Kings rattled off a 17-3 record, finished on top of the NBL ladder and won the NBL26 championship. How long the catch-up lasted is unknown, but its impact on Goorjian’s perspective and approach in his 40th year of elite coaching was profound.

Once a coach, always a coach.

When Gaze became Basketball Victoria’s first general manager in 1958, there were just 2,000 registered players; when he retired as a basketball administrator 47 years later, that number had grown to 200,000, with dozens of Australian championships at every level of representative basketball.

Between his 33rd and 34th birthdays, he became the head coach of the Melbourne Tigers in 1970, when the club was still in the Melbourne Basketball Association, and he did not relinquish the role for 35 years. The last 22 of those came in the NBL, where he was the Tigers' inaugural head coach when the club entered the national league in 1984, and where he won championships in 1993 and 1997. He was named Coach of the Year in 1989, 1997 and 1999, and he still sits second on the league's all-time list for coaching wins, where the only man ahead of him is Goorjian.

The Olympic record is the one that is hard to get past.

Gaze was in the Australian squad for the pre-Olympic qualifying tournaments in Bologna in 1960, Yokohama in 1964 and Monterrey in 1968. That first trip to Bologna made his the first Australian basketball team to travel overseas to play for a place at the Games.

Australia got through only once, for Tokyo in 1964, and he played there. Then he moved to the bench and coached the Boomers at four straight Olympics: Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984, with his son Andrew in the squad he took to Los Angeles.

Put those together and Gaze was part of every Australian Olympic basketball campaign, as a player or as the coach, from 1960 to 1984. He coached Australia at four World Championships as well: 1974, 1978, 1982, and 1994.

The family lived at the basketball, and that is not a figure of speech.

As general manager of the Victorian Basketball Association, he was housed in the official residence attached to the back of the Albert Park stadium, which is where Andrew, now 61, grew up, and it has never been much of a mystery why his boy turned out the way he did.

Lindsay coached him for the whole of his NBL career, more than 600 games, in a father-and-son partnership routinely described as the longest in world sport. They retired on the same day in May 2005, Andrew from playing and Lindsay from coaching, a year after the two of them had bought into the club as part owners.

The honours arrived in their own time. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 1985 Australia Day Honours, for service to basketball, and he went into the Australian Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004 as both a player and a coach. The FIBA Hall of Fame inducted him in 2010, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame followed in 2015, with the formal induction on Friday, September 11, 2015.

In 1992, Gaze was named Victorian Father of the Year, an award Andrew would win himself in 2004.

His last professional job was not in Australia at all. At 72, he went to China and coached Tianjin Ronggang in the CBA for the 2008-09 season, three years after everyone had watched him retire.

The NBL's Coach of the Year award is the Lindsay Gaze Trophy, and when Goorjian won his record seventh of them for NBL26, months after flying to Melbourne to sit with the man himself, Goorjian was collecting a piece of silverware with his host's name on it.

Happy Birthday, Mr Gaze – your contribution to basketball in Australia is unparalleled, and every player, coach and fan is eternally grateful.