The secret of good Curry
Knicks coach Brown tries to make New York's center consistent
By Barbara Baker
Newsday
Salt Lake Tribune

GREENBURGH, N.Y. - Eddy Curry knows what it's like to lose game after game. His Chicago Bulls started 0-9 last season before rebounding to get to the second round of the playoffs.
''You try to find the good things,'' Curry said when asked how a team overcomes that kind of start. ''You have to realize that the season isn't over, and that there's 82 games.''
The Knicks have played 3/82nds of their season and are still looking for their first win as they open a six-game West Coast trip tonight in Portland. New coach Larry Brown is madly shuffling lineups like a new deck of cards, and one card that Brown hasn't quite figured out how to play is Curry.
By various turns in the three losses, Curry has been dominating and sloppy, and he got into foul trouble the last two games. On Sunday against Golden State, foul trouble wasn't all that kept him on the bench. Despite a strong showing early in the game that included scoring six straight points, Brown sat Curry down for good when he picked up his fourth foul with 3:16 left in the third quarter.
This week, Brown has launched what could be called Project Curry as he began to search for ways to make the 6-foot-11 center more effective.
''I took out an old Chicago tape of him Monday and looked at it,'' Brown said Tuesday. ''We broke down all the plays that they ran for him, trying to see how they used him and what was very successful for them, so we can try to put him in that kind of position here.''
At the end of practice, Brown was out on the court working alone with Curry for a good 15 minutes.
''We want him to get a little more aware of how people guard him on the post and what he can do to be more effective and work on his post defense a little bit more,'' Brown said. ''Some of the things that we're asking our big guys to do now, they've never done before, and it might not be fair to them - like front the post and get out on pick-and-rolls. But he's real receptive to what I tell him.''
One glaring problem Brown saw on tape is that Curry is not in the same shape as he was at midseason with the Bulls. Both of them attribute that to the center's missing the last 19 games and the playoffs last season and not doing any summer work as doctors tried to determine the seriousness of his heart problem.
''Looking at the film, I realized it more and more,'' Brown said of Curry's being out of shape. ''But he's so willing to learn and he's really coachable, and I think with that in mind you have to put him in similar situations to what he was in there.''
One situation no one wants to replicate is the Bulls' 0-9 start last year. Curry said he thought the Knicks had a good mindset heading into the trip.
''I think team-wise, we're coming together,'' he said. ''We're looking at what we can do to have a successful trip.''