Larry Brown basketball is like to that old saying: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Brown’s career in coaching basketball teams has been going since 1973 when he began in the now-defunct ABA league. Since then he has had terms with eleven different teams and for Larry Brown 2008 saw him begin a new journey with the Charlotte Bobcats after a tumultuous stint with the New York Knicks.
The Larry Brown coaching career launched in 1973 with the ABA Carolina Cougars. In his first season he won the ABA Coach of the Year and racked up an impressive 104-64 record before the team was sold and Brown moved to the ABA Denver affiliate, the Rockets. He won two more Coach of the Year Awards and had a remarkable 251-134 win loss record before he quit, citing burnout–what would become a popular excuse for Brown in his career. The Larry Brown career shifted gears here and went into college ball, taking the helm of the UCLA Bruins. In their first season, Brown drove them into the NCAA Finals, where they were defeated by Louisville. After they were bounced in the first round the next season, Brown went searching for greener pastures–much greener–as the NBA called again.
The New Jersey Nets enticed Brown back into the NBA for a brief two year stint with them. Despite running up another respectable 91-67 win-loss record, Brown did not win a playoff game and decided to interview and accept a position with Kansas before his second season had ended–the Nets fired him once they found out with 6 games to go in 1983. At Kansas, Brown accomplished several feats for the first time in his career. First, he stayed 5 seasons, which was three more than he stayed with any other team. Second, and much more importantly, he won an NCAA championship with star player Danny Manning in 1988. Right after that win, he announced he was going back into the NBA.
The Larry Brown career went through five different NBA teams, staying three years or less with each and without winning a championship: the San Antonio Spurs, the Los Angeles Clippers, the Indiana Pacers and the Philadelphia Sixers. He had a notable finals appearance with the Pacers and with Allen Iverson and the Sixers, losing to the Lakers in back-to-back years with different teams. All of that would change as the coach of the Detroit Pistons, where he met and defeated the Lakers in the NBA Finals in 2004, his first NBA championship. The next season the Pistons lost in the Finals to the Spurs and, of course, Larry moved on.
After he was hired to turn the low performing New York Knicks into a playoff team, in what he called his dream job, things went south quickly for Brown. There was so much tumult and a lack of improvement on the team, that the management fired him from his 5-year contract and paid him a reported $25 million not to coach. For Larry Brown 2008 saw him back in Carolina after all these years, as the coach of the Charlotte Bobcats, a woeful team whose owners include Michael Jordan. He has just completed his first season with the team–one expects there will be less than two to go.
As an electronic scoreboards continue to light up.