The End Of Brown’s Nightmare

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Wake up, Larry. The dream is over.

Larry Brown said taking over as coach of the Knicks would be his dream job a little over a year ago, but it turned into a 23-59 nightmare and culminated in yesterday’s long-awaited firing. General mangler Isiah Thomas takes over as Brown’s replacement, with the hope being that if he has two jobs he’ll only screw up each one half as badly.

I’ll say this for the Knicks – you can’t claim they were impulsive.Owner James Dolan had wanted Brown gone for the better part of two months, but only yesterday did he get around to dropping the ax – after making his lame-duck coach conduct draft workouts and assorted other menial tasks even after word leaked that he’d be fired.

Brown’s dismissal ends a particularly embarrassing chapter in the Knicks’ history. The season was bad enough, as the club nearly managed the difficult feat of simultaneously owning the league’s worst record with the league’s highest payroll, but the postscript was even worse.

Dolan let Brown twist in the wind for two full months in an attempt to extort favorable terms on a buyout agreement, but appears to have failed completely. With no open coaching jobs to tempt Brown’s infamous impatience, it was easy for Larry to wait him out.

And while the Knicks said Brown was fired “for cause” because of his repeated insubordination, and that they don’t plan on paying him the rest of the four years and $40 million remaining on his contract, don’t count on it playing out that way. According to reports, the salary issue ultimately will be settled in an arbitration hearing with NBA Commissioner David Stern, and he’s unlikely to set a precedent that makes it acceptable to whack coaches like this.

Now the ball is in Thomas’s court, which is something I have mixed emotions about.In general, I hate the idea of a general manager taking over as coach, because it’s very hard for him to avoid making hare-brained short-term decisions that ultimately undermine the team. That’s especially true when the GM in question kept making hare-brained decisions even when he didn’t have the added responsibility of coaching.

There are exceptions. San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich has been a glaring one (he’s technically the team president, not general manager, but he has the final say on personnel decisions). But more commonly, it works like it did for Pat Riley in Miami. He brought the franchise to its knees earlier this decade with a series of destructive moves, only to build it back up once he kicked himself into the front office and focused on the long term. Riley didn’t take over as coach again until all the pieces were in place, and only then was he able to win a championship.

Miami’s situation provides another interesting parallel, one that probably hasn’t escaped Dolan: Since Riley was the one who brought in these players, he was the one who could command the most respect from them. Shaquille O’Neal and the gang liked Stan Van Gundy well enough, but Riley was the only one who could convince Shaq to drop 30 pounds, sell Antoine Walker on the program even as he sat out fourth quarters, and get Gary Payton to accept a non-scoring role.

The same goes for Thomas in New York. One of the ongoing battles last season was the undercurrent of mistrust that Brown had for players he perceived as Thomas’s “guys.” It’s why Antonio Davis started for half the season and players like Malik Rose and Qyntel Woods saw so much action – those were players either who Brown pushed for or who, at the very least, Thomas didn’t particularly want.

The change is at least as important in the other direction, too. It’s one thing for Stephon Marbury to disregard Larry Brown, knowing that Thomas would have his back. But since Thomas is about the last basketball exec in America who still believes in him, Marbury has no more excuses. The same goes for Jamal Crawford, Eddy Curry, and Jerome James, all of whom Thomas placed big bets on but Brown didn’t take a shine to.

But can Thomas coach? His record in Indiana was a mixed bag, so that one hasn’t been completely answered. On the one hand, his team seemed to be underachieving, especially in his final season, when the Pacers flamed out in five games in the first round against Boston. On the other hand, we’ve seen in the seasons since that those Pacers had a lot of “issues,” shall we say, and Ron Artest was far less disruptive under Thomas than he was afterward. Additionally, a number of NBA coaches have done better work in their second stop after learning hard lessons in the first.

Yet in a weird way, Thomas is a sensible choice. First, who else would take this job? After the way the Dolan mistreated Brown and the litany of personnel blunders committed by Thomas, few worthy candidates would give this position a second look.

Secondly, it perhaps brings us one step closer to the end of the Isiah era, which can’t possibly come soon enough. When other coaches failed to win with Thomas’s players, he could pin the blame on them and at least make a plausible case to Dolan. But if Thomas fails with his own players? Sayonara, Zeke. Not even Dolan is that gullible … we think.

Unfortunately, Thomas has just enough talent on hand to pull the wool over Dolan’s eyes for another year. He will almost certainly run a guard-oriented system that heavily features Marbury and Steve Francis (if he’s still around), and that will fit the club’s talent better than Brown’s ram-it-into-the-post system of last season.

The talent base should expand, too. The young guys will get plenty of minutes – probably Brown’s biggest failure this past season – and Dolan is likely to sign off on using the mid-level exception to nab another small forward.Throw in the probable trade of expiring contracts of Maurice Taylor and Jalen Rose for added help, and the Knicks can expect to be one of the league’s deepest teams.

They still won’t defend worth a darn, of course, and I’m guessing they’ll still take a lot of horrible shots. But since the coach won’t be actively sabotaging the team and there’s some decent offensive talent, the Knicks could easily win 37 games and make a half-hearted stab at the playoffs.

For Knicks fans, that may be the worst-case scenario. A genuine improvement, culminating in a playoff appearance, would be welcomed on its own merits. Another 23-59 disaster also would be acceptable to most, as at least it would force Dolan’s hand to fire Isiah and get on with rebuilding this mess.

But 37-45? That’s just good enough for Isiah to say he has things on the mend, and thusly to hoodwink Dolan into giving him another year to screw things up further. Unfortunately, my simple application of Murphy’s Law tells me that’s exactly what’s bound to happen.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.


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