Such a Senseless Choice, It Makes Perfect Sense

By HARVEY ARATON
Published: July 20, 2005

THE now highly anticipated union of Larry Brown and Isiah Thomas would be doomed from the start, is sure to be as flammable as the War of the Roses, and can't possibly work. So it probably would.
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Larry Brown, with Chauncey Billups at his side, coaching the Detroit Pistons in their losing effort in Game 7 of the N.B.A. finals last month.
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Brown and Thomas have much more in common than a seat on the Indiana Pacers' bench, where Brown preceded Larry Bird as head coach and Thomas succeeded him. They are equally mercurial, indisputably capricious and impossibly impulsive.

We hear much about Brown's track record, his high hurtling from one coaching position to another, but consider Thomas's fondness for undoing his own decisions. In roughly three and a half seasons as the chief executive of two N.B.A. teams, he has already employed five coaches, with Brown now free from Detroit to be pursued as No. 6.

With the Knicks, Thomas inherited Don Chaney but bungled his exit, embarrassing a good man, who was escorted out of Madison Square Garden after reporting for work on the night of his dismissal. Thomas soured on Lenny Wilkens after 81 games over two partial seasons, and he presided over the untruth that Wilkens had resigned.

Thomas installed Herb Williams as interim coach last January with no guarantees, but he has left a loyal organizational soldier dangling while waiting for Brown to become untangled from the Pistons, a messy divorce that was made final yesterday afternoon.

And that is the larger issue here than the standard Brown bashing, the tired psychobabble of how Larry is always looking for his next, true love.

Take a hard look at the environment that Brown has survived in, thrived in, for more than three decades, at the way teams like the Knicks and even the Pistons - who will apparently be naming their third head coach in three seasons, all hugely successful - operate their businesses. They all aspire to be San Antonio, paragons of continuity, but the players have long-term guaranteed contract leverage, while front-office executives like Thomas and the Pistons' Joe Dumars and even owners like Dallas's Mark Cuban are used to their own flights of whimsy and ego.

That is why Jim O'Brien was gone after one playoff season on the Philadelphia bench, and the hiring of Maurice Cheeks makes three 76ers coaches in the two years since Brown left, and why Rick Carlisle, after winning 50 games twice for the Pistons, was extinguished for Brown.

That is why Byron Scott got the ax from the Nets despite making the finals in consecutive seasons, and why Terry Porter was said to have revitalized Milwaukee as a rookie coach but was gone the next season, and why Paul Silas was short-circuited in Cleveland in Year 2.

That is why Pat Riley, no matter how much he condemns news media rumor mongering now, is a fair bet to replace Stan Van Gundy next winter, if only because that's what Shaquille O'Neal may want.

I've said this before: Brown has fashioned his share of awkward exits, but he has always had an intuitive grasp of the general house rules. He's just managed to play by them better than most.

The N.B.A. coaching rat race being what it is, it is now incumbent upon Thomas to close on Brown, if Brown indicates he's healthy enough to coach next season. Thomas has tipped his hand by waiting this long. What chance would Williams have now to inspire young, impressionable players, who will know too well that he is a clear consolation choice, and with Brown resting in the Hamptons, an afternoon's drive away?

"My own feeling is that I hope Larry just stays home for a year and gets healthy," Donnie Walsh, the Pacers' president, said yesterday in a telephone interview, referring to Brown's bladder surgery complications. That said, Walsh, who goes way back with Brown as a North Carolina guy who hired him - and Thomas - to coach his Pacers, guessed that Brown to the Knicks is inevitable, that thunderstorms will crackle over the Garden but blue skies could eventually emerge.

"I know they have a mutual respect," he said, "and with those kind of personalities, that would mean arguing things out in the office and then going out to dinner."

Brown called the Knicks his dream job last season, but their roster and salary-cap constraints would give most coaches nightmares. Brown is not Riley, however. He is not Phil Jackson, the Yen Master, who, these days, is more about marketing his brand name, authoring his next tell-all best seller.

Less a legacy guy than an incurable gym rat, Brown has taken chances his entire career, signed on with bad teams in big markets, good teams in small markets. He has followed his coaching muse and, of course, the scent of a better payday. As Walsh noted, every team he's worked for got its money's worth.

"They've all been upset when he left because he's a great coach who gives everything he's got," he said.

Walsh finds it funny when he hears that Brown doesn't want to coach young players like those the Knicks are collecting because he wouldn't play Dumars's 2003 prize draft pick, Darko Milicic, in Detroit. What sane man would have put Milicic, an undernourished novice, into a championship equation? "They used to say Larry didn't want older players, that he only wanted kids he could mold," Walsh said.

For the record, guess how old Allen Iverson was when Brown went to Philadelphia in 1997? Twenty-two. The 76ers won 31 games that season - two fewer than the Knicks won in 2004-5 - and never had another losing season under Brown.

Pat Croce, the former Sixers' president and part owner, once told me that working between Brown and Iverson was like running blindfolded through a minefield. He said that while coach and star looked and sounded very different, they were actually much alike. Brown somehow coexisted with Iverson for six combustible years, when all indicators suggested he wouldn't last six months.

In the bizarre world of N.B.A. coaches, it only makes sense that Larry Brown's most turbulent marriage was also his longest. Doubting Thomases in New York, take heed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/sports/basketball/20araton.html