Larry Brown last season became the first coach to win an NBA championship–his first–after he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Now does Brown try to become the first NBA coach to win a title after a leave of absence during the season?
Some are wondering.
The Brown-coached U.S. team of NBA players began Olympic play with a humiliating loss Sunday to Puerto Rico and meets Greece on Tuesday. It is a much-flawed, much-discussed squad, weakened by the defections of and disinterest from so many top NBA players. It is young and inexperienced in terms of international play.
Against that backdrop, and with anti-American sentiment in Europe roiling, Brown has tried to assemble a team and continue a legacy from a roster that seems to have been put together with marketing in mind as much as winning. It’s a stressful, pressure-packed assignment for one of the game’s great coaches.
This is the fourth time in the last six years Brown has spent the summer coaching a USA Basketball team in international competition. Three times he has been the head coach, and two of the assignments came after his NBA teams had played into late June in the NBA Finals, including this year’s Detroit Pistons.
It’s a workload unprecedented in professional sports.
Though he looks younger, Brown turns 64 next month and many of his friends are wondering whether he will begin to burn out, noting the extraordinary amount of time he puts into his job. The possibility of a midseason departure has been discussed before, most often when he was with the 76ers and jousting with erratic Allen Iverson.
Though it’s clear Brown is in charge of this team and doesn’t have to defer to players’ whims, there is considerable pressure to maintain the U.S.’ dominance in basketball.
“I look at this as an honor,” Brown said shortly before the team arrived in Athens. “In ’99, [coach] Rudy Tomjanovich got sick and I coached the qualifying team. In 2000, I went to the Olympics [in Sydney as an assistant to Tomjanovich] and the day I got home I went to training camp. And in 2001 we went to the Finals [with Philadelphia].
“But this is my job, this is what I do. Considering all the great coaches we have in our sport, for me to be given this opportunity, I look at it as not only a great challenge but an unbelievable honor.”
In his way, Brown is a true patriot.
It’s why USA Basketball calls on him so often–he was an assistant on the 1980 team that boycotted the Moscow Games, and played on the 1964 team that won gold in Tokyo.
Brown is not only a terrific coach (more than 1,300 wins) and teacher, he’s remarkably generous and unselfish with his time, participating in numerous staff meetings and press functions to support the U.S. team. This while developing and refining an unlikely championship team in Detroit.
He coached the Olympic qualifying team in Puerto Rico last summer, the Pistons through the long NBA season and now this immature Olympic team. It would not surprise Pistons management if Brown were to start the season late or take a few months off.
“I don’t look at this as a strain,” Brown said during the U.S. training camp. “This is what I love to do. The biggest strain I have is to make sure it’s a positive experience for [the players].”
