Arizona Wildcats: Top 30 athletes in school history

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Sean Elliott is a name very familiar to Wildcats fans.

Sean Elliott led the 1988 team to the Pac-10 Championship and the final four in his junior year under head coach Lute Olson. Elliot still holds the school record for all-time leading scorer averaging 19.2 points per game for a total of 2,555 points. His 1988 team included notable Alumni such as Steve Kerr, Kenny Lofton, and Harvey Mason Jr. Kerr and Elliott would later play together for the San Antonio Spurs.

Elliott won the Wooden Award, the Adolph Rupp Trophy, the NABC Player of the Year and the AP Player of the Year in 1989. After an excellent senior year, he also broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time PAC-10 career scoring record. Arizona retired his No. 32 jersey that is hanging in McKale Center.

While in college, Elliott played in the 1986 FIBA World Championship for the US national team and won a gold medal.

He played in the NBA for 11 seasons, all but one for the San Antonio Spurs and that came in the middle of his NBA career. In Elliott’s NBA career, he played in 742 games averaging 14.2 points, 2.6 assists, and 4.3 rebounds per game. Elliott is fourth in three-point attempts (1,485) and is the fifth all-time franchise leader in three-point field goals made (563).

Memorial day, May 31, 1999, Elliott and Steve Kerr played together on the San Antonio Spurs and in their quest for the Spurs first Championship title. But first they had to win the Western Conference. To do that, they had to play fellow Wildcats alumni Damon Stoudamire and his Portland Trailblazers and in game 2 of the Western Conference Finals, after Elliott had made already made five 3-pointers, but the sixth one went down in history as the “Memorial Day Miracle.”

The Spurs went on to win the last two games against Portland for a four-game sweep, and then later beat the New York Knicks in the 1999 NBA Finals to win their first NBA Title, four games to one.

Elliott’s Twitter profile states the following “Spurs TV analyst, NBA champion & 2x All-Star, proud father & husband, car & wine geek, tortured golfer.” What a life!

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