Larry Brown: New Coach of the Charlotte Bobcats

[wreck]

oh no.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Well-traveled Larry Brown has reached an agreement to return to the NBA as coach of the Charlotte Bobcats, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Monday.
The person, speaking on condition of anonymity because an official announcement has not been made, said Brown was expected to sign a contract on Tuesday. The Bobcats have called an afternoon news conference for what they termed a "major basketball announcement."

Fast Facts
​

​

• Larry Brown was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in 2002.
• In an NBA career that has accumulated 1,810 wins and 1,010 losses over 23 seasons, Brown won one championship -- in 2003-04 with the Pistons.
• As a college coach, Brown took UCLA to the NCAA championship game in 1980 and won it all with Kansas in 1988.
• Like Bobcats part-owner Michael Jordan, Brown played under legendary coach Dean Smith at North Carolina.
• He played five seasons in the ABA and coached in the league four more.
-- ESPN Research


The 67-year-old Hall of Famer will be taking over his ninth NBA team, and it will be his first coaching job since a messy exit from the New York Knicks in 2006. Brown will replace Sam Vincent, fired on Saturday after going 32-50 in his one season.

Reached early Tuesday, Vincent said he wasn't surprised that part-owner Michael Jordan decided to bring in a veteran coach.

"Michael never said that he was hiring coach Brown. He just said they were going to make some decisions that were in the best interest of the organization," Vincent said. "So I kind of assumed of going in the direction of hiring a veteran coach and someone who was very popular in the community."

Brown's agent, Joe Glass, refused to confirm or deny that his client was headed to Charlotte.

"I have no information on Larry Brown," Glass said early Tuesday.
Brown won the NBA championship with Detroit in 2004 and the NCAA title with Kansas in 1988. He resigned last week as executive vice president of the Philadelphia 76ers, and Glass indicated Brown wanted to return to coaching.

The move means Bobcats part-owner Michael Jordan has turned to a fellow former North Carolina Tar Heel to try to get the fourth-year Bobcats into the playoffs for the first time. Jordan and Brown both played for former North Carolina coach Dean Smith.

Brown, inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002, is one of five NBA coaches with at least 1,000 victories.
While he's had contentious splits with several teams, he's had success at nearly every job before his poor season with the Knicks in 2005-06.
Terms of Brown's deal in Charlotte were uncertain. But it's likely he will get a much larger salary than Vincent. Having never coached in the NBA before, Vincent made about $1.5 million this season. He has one year left on a two-year contract.

"I wish coach Brown all the success in the world," Vincent said. "I think he'll have a great group of guys and I wish him nothing but the best."
Vincent entered the job last spring confident, saying he'd be "incredibly discouraged and disappointed" if the fourth-year franchise didn't reach the playoffs.

But Vincent struggled to develop a steady rotation and often clashed with players. The Bobcats finished with one fewer win than in 2006-07 under Bernie Bickerstaff, who moved to a front-office position.
Vincent's firing marked the second time in Jordan's checkered history as an NBA executive that one of his coaches lasted only one season. Leonard Hamilton resigned after going 19-63 with the Washington Wizards in 2000-01.

Jordan was eventually fired by the Wizards. He bought a minority stake in the Bobcats in 2006 and took over the decision-making from Bickerstaff.
Now Jordan has turned to the veteran Brown to try to give a boost to the struggling Bobcats, who have also struggled to win over fans. The Bobcats ranked 24th out of 30 teams in attendance this season.

 

[brewer]

Dallas had better not five Avery Johnson or im finding a new team since Paxson will do what i think he will.

 

[Killa]

One last hurrah for the MJ/LB love affair.

 

[wreck]

Dallas had better not five Avery Johnson or im finding a new team since Paxson will do what i think he will.

Avery Johnson to the Bulls?

 

[brewer]

I have a real bad feeling that would happen.

 

[Retburj13]

I have a real bad feeling that would happen.

so go from 1 intense hot-head former nba guard coach to another....

:whip:

 

[RetroVK]

Guy is one of the greatest coaches ever. might just bet the bobcats over whatever the season total is now.

How could you not like this if you are a bobcat fan ?

 

[JumpOnBoard]

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

[wreck]

opinion

Walters: Charlotte just another pit stop on Brown's road Don't expect Bobcat success ... the chemistry's wrong and Larry won't last

OPINION
By John Walters
updated 1:37 p.m. ET, Tues., April. 29, 2008
<script language="javascript"> function UpdateTimeStamp(pdt) { var n = document.getElementById(&quot;udtD&quot; if(pdt != '' && n && window.DateTime) { var dt = new DateTime(); pdt = dt.T2D(pdt); if(dt.GetTZ(pdt)) {n.innerHTML = dt.D2S(pdt,(('false'.toLowerCase()=='false')?false:true));} } } UpdateTimeStamp('633450874435970000');</script>
The Charlotte Bobcats served notice on Tuesday that they are dedicated to recycling. Charlotte is "going green" by hiring Brown.

That would be Larry Brown. The 67-year-old Hall of Famer, whose resume is thicker than an Ayn Rand novel and reads like a Rand-McNally atlas, will be accepting his 13th head coaching job in 36 years.

Quickly, then, the demographics of Brown's geographics: He has been an NCAA, ABA and NBA head coach in 10 different states within all four U.S. time zones across four decades. This is a man who belongs in both the Basketball Hall of Fame and the U-Haul of Fame.

Brown is already enshrined in the former — his bust should be rotated monthly to a different room within the Springfield, Mass., edifice — which explains why he keeps finding work. Brown, for most of his career, has been an excellent coach.

Larry Brown is the only person ever to win an NCAA championship (with Kansas, in 1988) and an NBA championship (with Detroit, in 2004). And, while it is rarely noted, he also lost an NCAA championship game (with UCLA, in 1980) and an NBA Finals (with the Pistons in 2005). He won an Olympic gold medal as a player in 1964 and lost face as the U.S.A.'s bronze-medal winning coach in 2004.

What can Brown do for you? Build a winning basketball team.

Then again, Brown is fickle. Capricious. Inexorably itinerant. By this time tomorrow his name will likely be linked to jobs in Dallas, Detroit and Phoenix. You don't have to be Encyclopedia Brown to deduce that.

Larry Brown goes through business cards the way Hugh Hefner does girlfriends, and while these jokes have all been made before, the difference is that lately no one has been sad to see him leave. With Team USA in Athens, Brown criticized the roster selections, of which he had no input (to be fair, I criticized them, too; it was a roster designed more to sell jerseys at the NBA store on Fifth Avenue than it was to win gold) and publicly berated his players.

Following the most ignominious bronzing an American has ever received whilst spending a summer in Greece, Brown returned to the Pistons. And then furtively began stumping for a front office gig with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Instead, Brown returned "home" to New York City, where he was raised, to coach the Knicks. There, in a season where Brown found himself coaching, as he had in Athens, an inexperienced lineup, he alienated players. Brown used 42 different starting lineups during the 2005-2006 season in which the Knicks finished 23-59.

And then, yet again, Brown was gone. Jerry Sloan he is not.

Brown flourishes best in situations in which a general manager is both a shrewd judge of personnel and a decisive boss, making it clear to Brown, one of the best strategists this side of Hubie Brown (speaking of coaching legend Browns), that his job is X's and O's. That was not the situation with the Knicks, nor will it likely be with Charlotte, where general manager Michael Jordan once made Kwame Brown (speaking of well-traveled Browns) the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft.

The Bobcats are young and their general manager is both indifferent and a poor assessor of talent. What made Sam Vincent, whom Jordan hired just one year ago to coach the Bobcats, suddenly not good enough to be the franchise's head coach? On this day when the Miami Heat made Erik Spoelstra, 37, the youngest head coach in the league, the hiring of Brown, the league's second-oldest coach (four months younger than Don Nelson) is even more starkly pronounced as an exercise in regurgitation-via-lack-of-imagination.

If you paid attention in chemistry class, you may recall the term "Brownian Motion." This theory, named after botanist Robert Brown, describes "the random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas." So, there's Brownian Motion and then there's Larry Brownian Motion, which are nearly indistinguishable. For, Brownian motion purports that random forces may cause an object to move in various directions but that ultimately, on average, it should not move anywhere.

Meanwhile, Larry Brown, whose wanderlust has taken him to (deep breath) Denver, Westwood, East Rutherford, Lawrence, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit and Manhattan, is now back in Charlotte, the very city in which his coaching career began, with the ABA Carolina Cougars in 1972.

(Pickers of nit will remind you that Brown's coaching career actually began at Davidson, where he was hired in the summer of '72 ... and then left in the summer of '72 before ever coaching a game. And if that vignette does not scream "symbolic" to you, what will?)

Brown played college basketball at North Carolina. And he embarked on this Family Circus map of a career he's had in North Carolina. There will be some tempted to write that Brown is returning home. But home to Larry Brown has always been that small area between the baseline and midcourt where coaches live. That is the only home he knows.

It was yet another Browne, the musician Jackson, who once penned this lyric in what should be Larry Brown's theme song:

Phone calls long distance
To tell how you have been
Forget about the losses, you exaggerate the wins,
And when you stop to let 'em know,
You've got it down,
It's just another town along the road

The title of that song, "The Road," comes from Browne's classic 1977 album, "Running On Empty." An apt description for what Brown, the itchy-footed hardwood genius, has been doing lately. And in one last turn of dramatic irony, the final song on that album? "Stay."

Wherever Larry Brown is concerned, count on that not to happen.

 

[HUNT]

wowza

 

[B.A.R.]

Yeah, Larry is great with youngplayers(sarcasm)

 

[B.A.R.]

Larry would be a good fit with one of these veteran teams that cannot get over the hurdle to get to the finals...i.e. Dallas

 

[HUNT]

dallas would be perfect...hell phoenix too.

 

[B.A.R.]

I didn't mention Phoenix due to their style...thats made Nash what he is..from a very good PG to a great one