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crzymdups
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Joined: 5/1/2004
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http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060623/COLUMNIST03/606230362/1108/SPORTS01
Brown has already held up Knicks
By IAN O'CONNOR
THE JOURNAL NEWS
this article presents an interesting rundown of the Dolan/Brown meeting yesterday morning...
This is the perfect ending for Larry Brown, a pink slip and a notice that he will not get another nickel beyond the $10 million he has already stolen from his hometown team. The Knicks are putting him in David Stern's court, which means they will make Brown fight for the balance of his $50 million deal before the only man in America who appreciates him less than the Garden suits who fired him.
Stern isn't blowing any $40 million goodbye kiss Brown's way, and you can take that to your friendly neighborhood bank. The commissioner is torn on the sore subject of Brown, and the conflict goes like this
He can't remember if he's angrier at the coach for negotiating with the Cavaliers smack in the middle of last year's Pistons-Spurs Finals, or for trashing his Olympic players and selection committee elders during the Summer Games meltdown in Greece.
Payback is a hitch, Larry, a snag in the arbitration process that leaves you to face the wrong judge and jury. Stern will look at Brown and see Mark Cuban times 10.
Don't worry, Brown won't have to sell the house in the Hamptons. He scored $13 million from Detroit during the 2004-05 year, including the buyout package. Over the last two seasons, he's earned $1 million for every victory he claimed in his dream (on) job of running the Knicks.
So at 23-59, Brown leaves New York as a disgrace to his own Hall of Fame career. He was so overmatched by the magnitude of the market, you would have thought he was raised in Boise, not Brooklyn.
Caveat emptor to the next rich fool who signs him up. Brown has now lorded over the biggest disasters in Olympic and NBA history, and everyone who helped bring him to the Garden is walking around looking 3 feet tall.
In the end, Brown was even outsmarted by James Dolan, an owner who doesn't lead the league in outsmarting people. Dolan called Brown into an early-morning meeting before yesterday's pre-draft workouts, put his successor-to-be, Isiah Thomas, on one flank, and a self-preserving executive, Steve Mills, on the other, and squeezed the coach out of a larger-than-life payday.
Dolan presented Brown with all sorts of conditions he needed to meet to keep his job, conditions the owner knew wouldn't be met. He wanted Brown to stop holding trade talks with other teams, to stop disparaging his roster, to stop announcing his benchings in the media before informing the involved players, and to stop blessing Thomas' moves before ridiculing them a week or two later.
It was like asking Brown to stop breathing.
As it became clear that this zebra wasn't willing to change even a single stripe, Dolan ending the meeting by firing Brown with cause, by claiming the coach refused to honor basic employee requirements, and by telling him the Knicks wouldn't pay him any more cash until ordered to do so by Stern.
"We hired (Brown) last summer with the expectation that he would be with the Knicks for a long time," Dolan said in a statement. "Sometimes decisions work and sometimes they don't."
They never work for Dolan's Knicks, so why should the decision to move Thomas to the bench be any different? He did a B-minus job coaching the Pacers, three full grades higher than Brown earned coaching the Knicks.
But Dolan isn't installing Thomas because he believes he's the best man for the job — he's putting him there to offset the money he's already wasted on Brown, Lenny Wilkens, and other broken-down parts Thomas brought in to expedite a rebuilding process going nowhere fast.
Chances are, Isiah will win 30-33 games next season, claim improvement, and survive until the middle of the following season, when the numbers catch up to him. If nothing else, Thomas doesn't get to be Scott Layden anymore. This is one tough guy from Chicago who's done hiding behind all those tall New York buildings, deking and ducking like a soft suburbanite.
Isiah's problems are Isiah's problems now, and as the coach, he'll have to answer for them every possession, every night. Knicks fans searching those ominous clouds for silver linings have to hope Thomas will be motivated to debunk the notions of another Larry, Bird, who thought Isiah was a lightweight and dumped him from the Pacer payroll.
Either way, Brown won't be around to drain any more millions out of this lost cause. The self-proclaimed "dead man walking" was finally put out of his misery, finally told that management would no longer suffer his flip-flopping on the likes of Steve Francis and Jalen Rose.
Brown can go coach high school ball now, and rip a bunch of 16-year-olds to the student paper. Or he can go find another NBA sucker out there, another narrow-minded desperado, because there's never a shortage of those.
But before then, Larry Brown can go to David Stern and read him prepared remarks on why he deserves that $40 million left on his deal.
You can call it a legend fighting for his contractual rights. I'll call it a man making his Hall of Shame induction speech.
[Edited by - crzymdups on 06-23-2006 11:15 AM]
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Seriously, if someone told a coach to "act like you're senile or insane for a year," I can't think of one thing they'd do differently than Brown. Starting whatever player was playing in their home town was a classic!