The news broke earlier this weekend and is now official: Larry Brown will be taking over as head coach of the Charlotte Bobcats.
Immediate red flag thrown in the air. Why would the Bobcats go to Larry Brown to build an up-and-coming team? This will be Brown’s ninth NBA head coaching gig. With the exception of his 6-year stay in Philly, Brown has never stayed with a team for longer than 4 years. And judging by the debacle in New York, its questionable whether or not Brown can deal with a young team. There is no doubting that Larry Brown is one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game. None whatsoever. But if you look at his greatest successes and his greatest failures you see a pattern. Brown loves veterans. He relies on them. That’s how he got the Sixers to the Finals with Tyrone Hill, Aaron McKie, Mutombo and company. That’s how he won the title with the Pistons. So why hire him to lead an unproven, young and up and coming team when he failed in New York?
I’m assuming they are counting on a couple things. That his being out of coaching for a couple of years has given him that ‘itch’ so to speak, the passion to coach his heart out and not get caught up in petty feuds. They are counting on the fact that they have players who may be young but don’t bring drama like the Marbury’s and Ariza’s did in NYC. They are also counting on the fact that the players will buy into Brown because of his success and that most anything could wash out the horrible taste Sam Vincent left on the franchise.
They’re forgetting one thing: Brown needs this to work. And not only does Brown need this to work, MJ needs this to work. This is the uniqueness of this situation, you have a head coach and a higher-up who need each other. Larry Brown needed this job to restore his legacy. Following Philly and his triumph in Detroit, there was no better story than Larry Brown. You couldn’t help but have rooted for the guy at least once, who else could have left so many franchises hanging and not been publicly admonished? The debacle in New York left a stain on his legacy, one that he has to have privately wondered if he would ever get the chance to wipe off. This is his chance.
MJ needs Larry Brown to work out. He needs a signature move to justify his legacy as an executive. He’s the greatest player to ever play the game and I think that gives him leeway in people’s eyes, because honestly….when has he made a good decision as an executive? He botched the Wizards up so badly he felt the only way he could clean up the mess was to actually play himself. Then in Charlotte he traded for Jason Richardson and hired Sam Vincent to lead the way, getting himself caught up in the ‘Avery Johnson’ young coach. And it worked out horribly. Mainly because of Vincent, but also because MJ didn’t step in and say ‘hey what’s going on here?’ Did he not know Jeff McInnis was starting? That Matt Carroll was buried? That Gerald Wallace was getting years shaved off his career playing the 4? He needs this to avoid being a laughingstock of an exec. He also needs this to work because by hiring Brown he is rolling the dice. MJ is contradicting his words from a year ago about wanting to have a young coach. If this fails…things could get ugly.
The argument is there for either side. Brown is a bad hire for the Bobcats because of his inability to coach young, up-and-coming teams. Brown is a good hire for the Bobcats because of his ability to teach and his passion and love for the game. I for one will say that Larry Brown coaching the Bobcats is a good thing. The man is a Hall of Fame coach, one poor year in New York of all places does not all of a sudden erase what he has done. Seeing how the Knicks have turned out has earned him the benefit of the doubt in my eyes because I’m not sure the best 4 coaches in history, coaching together as if they were the Justice League could have gotten it done there. Not only that, but he’s infinitely better as a head coach than Sam Vincent could ever be. I’ll take old and senile Larry Brown over Sam Vincent, they can’t get much worse. My last reason for supporting this move..Brown wins. In 23 years of being a head coach in the NBA, he’s only had 4 sub-.500 seasons. Think about that for a while.