Brian
June 02, 2005, @ 01:29 PM
Brown story sadly familiar to '83 Nets
They had just taken their seats on the plane at Newark Airport, but the Nets were already flying. They were a team of exuberant kids in those days -- most of them 23, 24, 25, which was young for the NBA -- and they were on their way to a 50-win season, an 11-game winning streak had them believing they could beat the world and the playoffs were just a few weeks away.
Heady times.
Then somebody got on the plane and said, "Coach, there's a phone call for you back at the gate."
Larry Brown picked up the ubiquitous white courtesy phone. On the line was Nets owner Joe Taub, who got right to the point: "You've interviewed with Kansas behind my back," he barked. "That's a violation of your contract. So, choose: You either coach this team for the next two years, or you leave -- right now."
Just like that, Brown left.
"He never said a thing," center Mike Gminski recalled. "We never even saw him again. He just left. We flew to Detroit, met with Bill Blair and Mike Schuler, they told us what happened, and that was it."
"No meeting, no goodbye, nothing," forward Albert King said. "We just couldn't understand how you could coach one team and negotiate with another -- maybe we were naive. Remember, we were all just a couple of years out of college, we still had that one-for-all mentality. It just blew us away. It hurt every last one of us."
It was April 7, 1983. The Nets' season, one of growth and promise, went into a tailspin from which it never recovered. The team lost four of its last six games in the regular season under Blair and was swept out of the first round by the Knicks.
Miserable times.
So as you watched Larry Brown coach the defending NBA champion Detroit Pistons last night in the Eastern Conference finals, while he is reportedly flirting with the Cleveland Cavaliers, you ask yourself: How could he?
And as you watch the Pistons trip over themselves in crunch time as they did in Game 3, and throw the ball all over the gym as they did in Game 2, ask yourself this: Are the players distracted?
The Nets can tell you all about it.
"It's déjà vu all over again," Al Menendez said with a laugh yesterday. "As soon as I saw the Cleveland story, it all came back to me. To a lot of us, probably."
Menendez was the Nets' director of player personnel in those days, and he held the same job during Brown's tenure in Indiana, so he knows the peripatetic coach as well as anyone. Moreover, he knows the impact Brown has on players.
"Every player on that Nets team felt a tremendous loss," he said. "One of Larry's great talents is he makes it feel like a college atmosphere. Our better players were just one or two years in the league, and they were buying into everything. So it was an incredible letdown. They felt deserted, abandoned."
"I just remember that the players were very loyal to Larry and very upset by what happened," Blair recalled yesterday. "But today, I don't know -- players now are a totally different breed. I don't know if it would affect them much at all, even though they're playing for a lot right now. I could be wrong."
Gminski, for one, is certain that he's wrong.
"We've been down this road before," he said. "It can't be good for a team. It certainly wasn't good for us.
"You know, he's the most brilliant basketball mind I've ever been around. But he always has his eye out for something else. He's coaching the defending world champions, and they're in the (conference) finals. Why go through this now? It's completely perplexing to me.
"I know there were some time constraints, I know Cleveland wanted something in place. But my gosh, what a disservice to the team. Everyone was making a big deal about how we finally have a champion that wasn't about individuals or marketing. It's about guys who played together and won and did it 'the right way.' But by doing this ... the timing is really bad. It does a disservice to the Pistons organization."
"Detroit's a veteran team," King said. "But as a player, every time you see Larry, you have to think about it. Until he comes out and denies it, which he does only to a point, then it's true. Tonight, the story of the game won't be about Miami leading the series 2-1. It's about Larry Brown leaving. That's hard to deal with as a player."
The most difficult part to grasp, actually, is the role Brown is purportedly pursuing. He has no peer as a coach. But as a personnel man, he may be more impulsive than Rick Pitino.
Again, you turn to Menendez, who has known Brown to fall in and out of love with players faster than a teenager.
"During that 11-game winning streak (in 1983), Mickey Johnson had the game of his life (32 points), and we crushed the defending champion Lakers at the Meadowlands," Menendez recalled. "And when we walked into the coach's office after that game, Larry said (of Johnson), 'If he's not gone tomorrow, I'm leaving.' We all just looked at each other in complete bewilderment.
"They'll learn that the happiest day of the year in Cleveland with Larry as president won't be Christmas. It will be the trading deadline."
"I'll bet you right now if he takes this job with Cleveland, at some point he'll entertain a trade for LeBron James," Gminski said. "It's often been said that the worst job is to be Larry's GM. I always felt Larry did his best coaching after the trade deadline, because that was his team. He couldn't tinker with it anymore.
"I wish him well. I don't know if any of us find true happiness, but I wonder what he's searching for. You'd think the demons would have all been exorcised last year. He's won an NCAA title, an NBA title, he's widely regarded as one of the best of all time. And yet he still has this Ziggy cloud about him."
:0uch:
They had just taken their seats on the plane at Newark Airport, but the Nets were already flying. They were a team of exuberant kids in those days -- most of them 23, 24, 25, which was young for the NBA -- and they were on their way to a 50-win season, an 11-game winning streak had them believing they could beat the world and the playoffs were just a few weeks away.
Heady times.
Then somebody got on the plane and said, "Coach, there's a phone call for you back at the gate."
Larry Brown picked up the ubiquitous white courtesy phone. On the line was Nets owner Joe Taub, who got right to the point: "You've interviewed with Kansas behind my back," he barked. "That's a violation of your contract. So, choose: You either coach this team for the next two years, or you leave -- right now."
Just like that, Brown left.
"He never said a thing," center Mike Gminski recalled. "We never even saw him again. He just left. We flew to Detroit, met with Bill Blair and Mike Schuler, they told us what happened, and that was it."
"No meeting, no goodbye, nothing," forward Albert King said. "We just couldn't understand how you could coach one team and negotiate with another -- maybe we were naive. Remember, we were all just a couple of years out of college, we still had that one-for-all mentality. It just blew us away. It hurt every last one of us."
It was April 7, 1983. The Nets' season, one of growth and promise, went into a tailspin from which it never recovered. The team lost four of its last six games in the regular season under Blair and was swept out of the first round by the Knicks.
Miserable times.
So as you watched Larry Brown coach the defending NBA champion Detroit Pistons last night in the Eastern Conference finals, while he is reportedly flirting with the Cleveland Cavaliers, you ask yourself: How could he?
And as you watch the Pistons trip over themselves in crunch time as they did in Game 3, and throw the ball all over the gym as they did in Game 2, ask yourself this: Are the players distracted?
The Nets can tell you all about it.
"It's déjà vu all over again," Al Menendez said with a laugh yesterday. "As soon as I saw the Cleveland story, it all came back to me. To a lot of us, probably."
Menendez was the Nets' director of player personnel in those days, and he held the same job during Brown's tenure in Indiana, so he knows the peripatetic coach as well as anyone. Moreover, he knows the impact Brown has on players.
"Every player on that Nets team felt a tremendous loss," he said. "One of Larry's great talents is he makes it feel like a college atmosphere. Our better players were just one or two years in the league, and they were buying into everything. So it was an incredible letdown. They felt deserted, abandoned."
"I just remember that the players were very loyal to Larry and very upset by what happened," Blair recalled yesterday. "But today, I don't know -- players now are a totally different breed. I don't know if it would affect them much at all, even though they're playing for a lot right now. I could be wrong."
Gminski, for one, is certain that he's wrong.
"We've been down this road before," he said. "It can't be good for a team. It certainly wasn't good for us.
"You know, he's the most brilliant basketball mind I've ever been around. But he always has his eye out for something else. He's coaching the defending world champions, and they're in the (conference) finals. Why go through this now? It's completely perplexing to me.
"I know there were some time constraints, I know Cleveland wanted something in place. But my gosh, what a disservice to the team. Everyone was making a big deal about how we finally have a champion that wasn't about individuals or marketing. It's about guys who played together and won and did it 'the right way.' But by doing this ... the timing is really bad. It does a disservice to the Pistons organization."
"Detroit's a veteran team," King said. "But as a player, every time you see Larry, you have to think about it. Until he comes out and denies it, which he does only to a point, then it's true. Tonight, the story of the game won't be about Miami leading the series 2-1. It's about Larry Brown leaving. That's hard to deal with as a player."
The most difficult part to grasp, actually, is the role Brown is purportedly pursuing. He has no peer as a coach. But as a personnel man, he may be more impulsive than Rick Pitino.
Again, you turn to Menendez, who has known Brown to fall in and out of love with players faster than a teenager.
"During that 11-game winning streak (in 1983), Mickey Johnson had the game of his life (32 points), and we crushed the defending champion Lakers at the Meadowlands," Menendez recalled. "And when we walked into the coach's office after that game, Larry said (of Johnson), 'If he's not gone tomorrow, I'm leaving.' We all just looked at each other in complete bewilderment.
"They'll learn that the happiest day of the year in Cleveland with Larry as president won't be Christmas. It will be the trading deadline."
"I'll bet you right now if he takes this job with Cleveland, at some point he'll entertain a trade for LeBron James," Gminski said. "It's often been said that the worst job is to be Larry's GM. I always felt Larry did his best coaching after the trade deadline, because that was his team. He couldn't tinker with it anymore.
"I wish him well. I don't know if any of us find true happiness, but I wonder what he's searching for. You'd think the demons would have all been exorcised last year. He's won an NCAA title, an NBA title, he's widely regarded as one of the best of all time. And yet he still has this Ziggy cloud about him."
:0uch: