Slick Watts, N.B.A. Fan Favorite and Headband Pioneer, Dies at 73

Donald “Slick” Watts, an unheralded, undersized, patchy-haired point guard who turned his obstacles into springboards, endearing himself to fans of the Seattle SuperSonics long past the team’s existence and helping to invent the headband as a basketball fashion signature, has died.He was 73.

His son Donald announced the death on social media on Saturday in a statement that did not provide further details.In 2021, Watts had a major stroke, and he spent recent years dealing with lung sarcoidosis, an inflammatory condition.Watts played for the SuperSonics for just four and a half seasons, from 1973-78.

Though he helped lead the team to its first playoff berth, he was not around in 1979 for the team’s first and only finals victory.Still, fans and fellow players held him in a singular regard.In 2012, decades after his retirement — and four years after the team moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder — a Seattle rap duo called the Blue Scholars made Watts’s name the title of a song about the Sonics.James Donaldson, a Sonics center in the 1980s, told The Seattle Times after Watts’s death, “He epitomized the Seattle SuperSonics.”That reputation came from a combination of pluck and generosity.Watts’s basketball origins were modest.

He was an impressive collegiate shooter, averaging 22.8 points per game and shooting 49 percent from the field.But he was just 6-foot-1 and played for Xavier University of Louisiana, a little-known historically Black Catholic university in New Orleans (not Xavier University of Cincinnati).

He went undrafted in 1973.That might have been the end of his basketball career, except for the fact that Watts’s college coach, Bob Hopkins, was a cousin of Bill Russell, the Celtics great then coaching the Sonics.He secured Watts a professional tryout.

The team was already loaded with shooting talent, so Watts devoted himself to passing.Russell offered him a $19,000-a-year contract, paltry by N.B.A.

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