His star has shone for years, despite his archaic ways. Even while Larry Brown was in the throes of controversy and tumult, unemployment was never a concern for him.
But with Brown’s dismissal as coach of the New York Knicks on Thursday – a second consecutive departure from a team under acrimonious circumstances – the stature of a Hall of Fame coach who guided the 76ers to the 2001 NBA Finals has disintegrated before our very eyes. It is crumbling into dust as you read this.
After years of winning, wearing out his welcome, relocating, then winning again, Brown finally may have reached the expiration date on his career. If not, the “illustrious” label habitually attached to that career certainly is gone. July hasn’t even arrived, marking the one-year anniversary of his return to Gotham, and Brown officially is out of a job, dismissed by Knicks president Isiah Thomas, supposedly a longtime friend.
Brown was unwanted by James Dolan, the man in charge of his latest team, and maligned by yet another basketball-crazed city, this time his hometown. His reputation is virtually in tatters, arguably beyond repair.
What else can be said when you’re a coach with Brown’s acclaim and you go from being bought out after taking a team to Game 7 of the NBA Finals one season only to be kicked out the door just 11 months later by a team with a 23-59 record, mainly because of your mouth?
“Sometimes decisions work and sometimes they don’t,” Dolan, the Madison Square Garden chairman, said Thursday in a news release.
And now, the once-incredible thought that Brown might never again work as a head coach is being pondered.
Outside of the Knicks organization, nobody knows the extent of the disdain Dolan and Brown feel toward each other. All anyone knows is that neither is particularly fond of the other, that feelings have reached the same point with Brown and Thomas and most of the Knicks players, that despite labeling himself a “dead man walking” weeks ago, Brown essentially forced his firing because he refused to quit.
That’s similar to Brown’s stance with Bill Davidson, the Pistons’ managing partner, and Joe Dumars, Detroit’s president of basketball operations, last season.
So, now, that raises the question: If Brown couldn’t coexist with a team he led to an NBA championship, and a year later he can’t manage and coach a team in desperate need of his expertise, who is left for him to coach?
What executive, what owner is willing to put a franchise in the hands of a coach fixated on “playing the right way,” stuck in his ways like few others, apparently averse to adaptation and allergic to huge egos?
Basically, he’s the antithesis of Pat Riley, whom players praise ad nauseam.
Considering the health problems that have plagued Brown and his magnetic attraction to drama, retirement appears to be the best thing.
I never thought the day would come when I’d say that, but I’m saying it now.
