HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Mark Heisler

Where to start?

I’ve been writing about Larry Brown as long as I’ve been covering the NBA, which goes back to 1969.

Larry was in the ABA then. One of my good friends, Mike Littwin, then a young writer starting on the Virginia Squires, met him before I did. Mike was doing the rookie thing, walking in the door, seeing the guys, and thinking, “What, now what?”

At that point, Larry, who was a veteran point guard, walked up to him, introduced himself, and said if there was anything he could do to help, just ask him.

No, it’s no coincidence that every writer I know loves Larry. We all know he’s nuts but we love him, to a man.

I’m Jewish, so for me he was like the Sandy Koufax of basketball. I met him in 1977 when the Denver team he was coaching joined the NBA, and got to know him in the ‘80s when he coached the Clippers. After that, I essentially wrote a feature every time he changed teams, or every three years, give or take.

Not that the stories were all the same – I hope – but they were all about Larry, and the pattern never changed.

It didn’t take me long to get it down pat. When he left the Clippers and went to Indiana, I could break any stay with any team down into its constituent parts, which I called the Five Stages of Larry Brown: Arrival, Early Struggle in Which He Tries to Trade Everyone Starting With His Star Player, Triumph, Frustration, and I’m Out of Here.

By Triumph, I mean, Triumph Equal to or Beyond Anything They Could Imagine, like taking a UCLA team with four freshmen in rotation to the NCAA Finals; winning an NCAA title with a Kansas team that was 15-13 at mid-season; taking the 76ers who were 22-60 when he got there, to the NBA Finals; stunning the Shaq-Kobe Lakers to take the Pistons to an NBA title.

Conrad Brunner, who was covering the Pacers when Larry got there and later went to work for the team, told me it held true, every step of the way.

By then, I knew most of Larry’s friends, like Donnie Walsh, the Indiana president, who had been on Frank McGuire’s staff when Larry played at North Carolina, who then served on Larry’s staff in Denver, and finally hired him in Indiana.

Donnie told me the story of Larry’s first job, at Davidson, which  doesn’t appear on his resume – because he left before even conducting a practice, upset that they wouldn’t re-carpet his office.

“I told him, ‘You’ll never get another job,’” said Donnie, only missing by 12.

It was Donnie, who summed up Larry’s personnel moves in one sentence: “If you followed the logic of the deals he wants, you would trade all your players, and wind up getting them all back.”

Oh, by the way, all that meshugas – Yiddish for Larry Brown – works.

If you haven’t noticed, the Charlotte Bobcats, whose franchise record is 33 wins, are in a strange new place at this time of the year… a playoff race… it just shows Larry still has it, even at age 68.

This is really important for him because his last stop, and by far his biggest splash, was in New York, where he lasted a year, went 22-60 and was fired by corporate boss James Dolan, who was used to the losing but had never seen anyone who ignored his orders and kept telling the truth about the team, as Larry did.

Larry being Larry, he did it in style, once conducting a roadside press conference with the beat guys, who had been barred from the practice facility by the team.

Showing how crazy that episode was, the Knicks then tried to claim Larry had breached his contract, which said he had to have a team official present when he talked to the press.

Some jobs, you’re better off losing, no matter how spectacularly you go down in flames.

Not that anything else has changed much. This has been your basic Larry Brown season

The pre-season started with a horrific loss in the exhibition opener, after falling behind Orlando, 41-9, in the first quarter, after which Larry said he didn’t think they’d win in the entire pre-season, which turned out to be true.

By that time, he didn’t think they might win any games in the regular season, either.

It wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t that good. They were floundering at 7-16 but then Larry’s teams always fall on their faces out of the gate his first season. As Mike Gminski, who played for Brown in Philadelphia, told the Charlotte Observer’s Rick Bonnell, the first thing Larry does is practice everyone until they drop. They start the season with their legs dead, until they recover, at which time, they’re in better shape than everyone else.

Larry will also want a trade for some guy no one would look at twice, like Eric Snow, who turned out to be the answer to the question: Who can you pair with Allen Iverson?

This time, Larry got the Bobcats to unload their star, Jason Richardson, sending him to Phoenix for the Suns’ Boris Diaw and Raja Bell.

GMs all over the NBA were going, “Why didn’t I call Charlotte first?” when the Bobcats did a 180, almost from the day Diaw arrived.

Using him as a point forward – kind of his own Magic Johnson – Brown turned the Bobcats, with their non-shooting small forward, Gerald Wallace, and their non-playmaking point guard, Raymond Felton, into a coherent unit.

They lost the first two games with Diaw, and then won 21 wins of their next 38, as he averaged 15 points, 6.0 rebounds and 5.1 assists.

In early March, a six-game winning streak carried them to 28-35, 1½ games behind No. 8 Chicago. Two losses later, they’re still one of six teams within a half-game vying for the last playoff slot, so this race is just starting.

Of course, it could also constitute the Triumph phase of Larry’s stay.

The Bobcat organization, if you want to call it that, is headed by absentee owner Bob Johnson, who may not be as bad as George Shinn, who had a sex scandal, alienated city officials trying to get a new building, and carpet-bagged off to New Orleans, but is no prize, either.

Johnson adopted a sky-high ticket scale to take advantage of their new downtown arena, turning the entire region off.

Charlotte is lot different than when the Hornets became their first major league team. With the NFL Panthers there, and all the bad will after years of setting NBA attendance records with the Hornets, the city is still cool to the Bobcats. Even with this season’s pleasant surprise under a Tar Heel great, they’re No. 26 in attendance.

Taking heavy losses, Johnson puts little back into the team. Brown would have been there last season, except they wanted to go with a cheaper, $1.5 million model, instead, so they hired Sam Vincent, who went 32-50 and lasted the one season.

Felton, who came on big-time this season, may not be back. He’s a free agent and they have young DJ Augustin, even if the one is ready and the other isn’t.

Let’s just say, Larry didn’t last long with a lot more supportive ownership than he has now, Michael Jordan or no Michael Jordan.

And Mike ain’t around much himself. So who knows, this might not be Larry’s last stop?

Earlier this season, after his Boy Scout troop stunned the mighty Lakers in Staples Center, I told Larry, “You can coach for another 68 years.”

It wasn’t literally true. He won’t live that long.

Aside from that, he could, however.

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Seems like old times.

This is where I came in, with the U.S. dominant and its Olympic team playing its rear end off.

The first Games I covered were in 1984 in Los Angeles when Bob Knight drove his college players as only he could. With their star power – Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Sam Perkins – and that level of effort, the world was overmatched. The talk then was that it, along with the 1960 team with Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, were the best there ever were.

The 2008 U.S. team was like the pro version of Knight’s team, with the same effort and even more star power. That was fortunate for the Americans because when they got into that shootout at the end with Spain, they needed every bit of firepower they had.

Even in 1984, things were changing, although no one knew how much.

As good as Knight’s team was, there was someone out there capable of playing with them – the USSR – but it boycotted.

Four years later at Seoul, the last Soviet Olympic team with Arvydas Sabonis, Sarunas Marciulionis and a cast of jump shooters whipped John Thompson’s U.S. squad fair and square. That did it for U.S. college players, who bowed out in favor of the NBA stars who were supposed to put the U.S. back on top forever, starting with the Dream Team’s triumph at Barcelona in 1992.

It turned out to be forever or 10 years, whichever came first.

Boris Stankovic, the far-sighted head of FIBA who made it possible for the professionals to participate, turned out to be even farther-sighted than he knew.

“Now NBA players are dominating,” said Stankovic at Barcelona, “but one day – not in my lifetime but one day – the world will catch up.”

Stankovic is still going strong and if the world hasn’t caught up, it has definitely closed the gap.

It wasn’t long before the Americans couldn’t just show up and accept everyone’s surrender. If they couldn’t shoot, had no chemistry and/or weren’t together long to prepare for the international game, they were in trouble. As U.S. scout Tony Ronzone, the Pistons’ director of basketball operations said in Beijing last week, “And that’s all we sent.”

At the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis, the pros representing the U.S. lost their first game, to Argentina. For good measure, they then lost to Yugoslavia and Spain, too.

Then came the Athenian Nightmare in 2004, when nine members of the team that qualified the preceding summer bailed amid scare stories about terrorism. Larry Brown wound up with a makeshift team with Stephon Marbury at the point, Lamar Odom and Richard Jefferson at forward… And lost three more games.

Then the U.S. got serious, with Jerry Colangelo setting up an ongoing program and Coach Mike Krzyzewski making sure his team had plenty of time to prepare for the 2006 Worlds in Saitama, Japan, where they… lost?

Greece stunned them in the semifinals as point guard Vassilis Spanoulis ran pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll down the stretch and the U.S. broke down completely.

That was how far the world had come. Even if the U.S. players parked their attitudes, put in the time and took it seriously, they weren’t guaranteed anything if all the pieces weren’t there. Indeed, there was one piece of the puzzle missing but it – he – arrived the next summer in the person of Kobe Bryant.

Out the summer before after knee surgery, Bryant came joined the team for the 2007 Tournament of the Americas, determined to make an impact on defense. This was a suprise for anyone who didn’t know Bryant but he had seen the game against Greece – which aired at 3 am on the West Coast – which was all he had to see.

On the very first possession of his Bryant’s first game against Venezuela, he pounced on point guard Greivis Vasquez, a rising freshman at Maryland who had missed a triple-double by one rebound in his first game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Bryant tipped the ball away, dove on the floor after it and when Vasquez got it back, jumped up, stole Vasquez’s next pass and started a fast break the other way.

“That’s the clip Coach K always uses, Kobe diving on the floor,” says Ronzone. “You’re talking about an MVP player in the NBA who just made a statement to USA. basketball… And what that did is it took our defense to another level. What you’re seeing is something that started last summer in Las Vegas, which is amazing.”

Even the Dream Team wasn’t known for its defense but for its firepower and star power.

If the 2008 team resembled Knight’s, it’s no coincidence. Knight was once Krzyzewski’s mentor; Krzyzewski even broke down game film for him at Los Angeles. Kryzewski’s team would be one of the smallest teams the U.S. had sent in decades with no seven-footer and only Dwight Howard and Chris Bosh over 6-9. It was also probably the most athletic they ever sent with Howard and Bosh able to get out on shooters.

This team was more than just good. In a refreshing change, it was nice.

After years of arrogance and macho that turned the world off as fast as the Dream Team turned it on, Colangelo and Krzyzewski set out to show the U.S. could regain its preeminence without looking like an And 1 Mixtape.

The horror show had started in the 1994 Worlds at Toronto where the so-called “Dream Team II” with its Young Guns, put on an Ugly American Clinic. Bristling at comparisons to the Dream Team whose play they couldn’t begin to match, the Young Guns, notably Larry Johnson, Derrick Coleman and Shawn Kemp, showboated, rubbed it in opponents’ faces and talked trash.

That deal where the opposing teams wanted their pictures taken with the Dream Team? That ended at Toronto.

“I don’t know if vile is the right word or disgusting,” said Australia’s Andrew Gaze. “There should be at least some pleasure in playing the game, some dignity.”

Replied Johnson: “I didn’t come here to make friends. I’ve got enough friends.”

All it took was some leadership and all of that went away.

“I really do believe from everything I know from people I respect, the people in the world thought the American teams didn’t respect them,” says Colangelo. “Didn’t respect them as teams, as individuals, arrogant, that kind of thing. And that had to end….

“From those first meetings with players, I said, ‘Look, this is what people think of us. We have to change this. We have to come in with a whole new attitude. We have to show respect for our country, show respect for our team, show respect for our opponents. And anything less than that’s not going to fly.’”

Old foes like Gaze and Lithuania’s Sarunas Jasikevicius who had bristled at their old arrogance, noticed the difference.

“I think they’ve been outstanding, the way they’ve conducted themselves,” said Gaze, doing TV at Beijing. “They may be coming from a fairly low base from some of their predecessors in the way they’ve gone about it….

“I think they’ve really taken on the challenge, not only to resurrect the reputation of what goes on the court but what goes off the court.”

Nevertheless, as great as this U.S. team was, Spain stood up to it in the finals even while giving up 118 points, scoring 107, taking the formidable U.S. defense apart, highlighted the driving dunk Rudy Fernandez threw down in Howard’s mug.

I’m pretty confident Spain would have beaten the 2000 U.S. team that night. (Of course, it would have beaten the 2004 team. Like, who didn’t?) The 1996 team with Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley might have been in trouble.

Unfortunately for the game, which gains immeasurably from real drama in the Olympics – even if it doesn’t go over so well in the U.S. – FIBA is about to change things again.

By 2012 in London, the conical lane will be gone and the three-point line will have been moved back from it’s present 20-6, one foot longer than the college line to 22-2.

Insiders say FIBA is doing it to get one set of rules worldwide, in the sure knowledge the NBA won’t be changing its rules. The international rules evened things out, minimizing the impact of all that U.S. athleticism, enhancing the importance of the international teams’ shooting prowess.

Not only isn’t anything broken, it was really getting interesting, so why are they trying to fix it?

Anyway, there’s no doubt the U.S. is back. For how long remains to be seen.

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