The Genius The National Basketball Association trading deadline looms, and Brown is mulling the opportunity of a lifetime — the chance to obtain all-star center Dikembe Mutombo and possibly make a run for an nba championship. He's behind the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, on his way to practice, and he's worried. It's not that Brown is sweating the logic of the move. Though the Sixers have the best record in the league, power forward Theo Ratliff — the most important player Brown will have to surrender in a Mutombo trade — is injured. I don't know if we can hold the fort until Theo gets back, Brown keeps thinking. More than that, Brown is overwhelmed with the strategic possibilities of having Mutombo in the Sixer lineup. Brown has just coached the seven-foot-two Mutombo in the all-star game, and he smiles when he thinks of how he was able to surround the dominating center with a lineup of "little guys" like Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury against the big men of the Western Conference. If Brown makes the trade, he'll be able to do the same thing with the Sixers. Still, Brown is worried about how his team will react if he makes the deal. He parks in the garage across from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine gym, where the Sixers practice. Once on the gym floor, Brown pulls aside three of his leaders: Iverson, Aaron McKie and Eric Snow. He's about to do something few coaches would ever do. "This is just between us," Brown begins, "but I want to tell you what we're thinking of doing, and I want your input." What he doesn't tell them, as he spells out the details of the trade, is that he is giving them veto power. If just one of them objects strenuously, he plans to nix the trade. McKie is the first to respond. "Coach," he says, "you know I'm going to be loyal to the guys who got us in this position. But that's personal, that's not about basketball." "I wouldn't expect anything else but loyalty from any of you," Brown says. He looks at Iverson. In the past, the guard has complained about not being consulted on personnel moves. As recently as mid-December, he was angered when, without warning, Brown waived his best friend on the team, Vernon Maxwell. But now Brown is paying him the respect of seeking his counsel. "Coach, I love Theo," Iverson says, "but if you think this is going to make us better, I guess you gotta go for it." "Well, you never know, Allen," Brown says. "But I keep coming back to the fact that we don't have Theo now, and who knows when we get him back and how he'll be when we do?" Eric Snow, who is Ratliff's best friend, looks up. Brown knows his reaction is key. "If we don't have Theo, Coach, and we don't know when we're getting him back," Snow says, sighing, "I can't stand in the way of this." Twenty-four hours later, with his leaders' blessing, Brown makes the deal. Sitting at his locker before Mutombo's home debut, McKie thinks back to the pre-practice confab. "It meant a lot that Coach came to us, that he involved us in the decision," he says. This is something Larry Brown hasn't always been known for. "In the past," McKie says, "it was more like Coach might just as well have gone up to a club box seat and yelled down orders at us." Several weeks before the big trade, after a closer-than-expected home win over the lowly Chicago Bulls in mid-January, Brown summons his coaching staff to a College of Osteopathic Medicine conference room at 9 a.m., two hours before practice. He arrives sipping a Starbucks Grande and promptly barks an order to assistant coach Randy Ayers, who starts a tape of the game playing on the TV against the wall. "Count Theo's touches," Brown says. The previous night, Ratliff had complained that he wasn't getting the ball enough. On the screen, Iverson is a blur in the open court, swooping underneath the Bulls' basket for a reverse layup that brings the crowd to its feet. It is such a breathtaking move that even in this room, grizzled basketball lifers like Ayers and fellow assistants John Kuester, Maurice Cheeks and Herb Brown — Larry's older brother — shake their heads in wonder. "Unbelievable," mutters Kuester. But Brown spots something the others miss. "Yeah, it's a phenomenal move," he says, "but look at George Lynch on this play, and look at Theo." The tape is rewound. Sure enough, Lynch and Ratliff are even with one another under their own basket when the sequence begins. But as Iverson motors off, only Lynch can be seen trying frantically to catch up. Just as Iverson scores, Lynch bounds into the lane, in case there's an offensive rebound. But Ratliff — the same guy who complained about not getting enough touches — hasn't even reached midcourt. "Every player legitimately wants to be involved," Brown says after Ayers counts nine touches for Ratliff in the opening quarter. "But sometimes they don't realize they are getting opportunities. My response to big guys who complain they're not getting the ball is, run on the break and get offensive rebounds, and your share will be there. They don't want to hear that, though. "I watch Karl Malone at 38 years old, and he runs on every play," Brown continues. "Because he wants the ball. You know what Coach Smith would say?" Brown affects the nasally voice of the legendary Dean Smith, his coach at UNC and his mentor: "'Theo, you must have been tired. I don't know why I didn't take you out. You should have given me the tired signal.'" The coaches laugh, as they do whenever the generally dour Brown breaks into an impression. (His Toni Kukoc is especially sharp.) But it's a telling moment. Brown's impulsiveness is legendary; it's often said that he falls in and out of love with his players. While coach of the Denver Nuggets in 1978, he traded for the Sixers' George McGinnis, only to try to rescind the deal after McGinnis's first lackadaisical practice. Now, just weeks before the Mutombo trade, Brown seems to be souring on Ratliff, a player he once thought highly of.  No one doubts Brown's basketball genius; the question has always been his interpersonal skills. Can he push his players without alienating them? "Theo's a great kid," Brown says later that day, weeks before the trade. "But if you say something to him in front of his peers, he'll break like a piece of glass. Toni has an answer before you've finished making your suggestion. And Allen and I can say anything to each other when we're alone, man to man. But he's got so much pride, you've got to watch what you say to him in front of the team. He's always telling me, 'Coach, you gotta get on me, 'cause if the guys see you get on me, they'll know you'll get on them.' And I tell him, 'You can say that, but you can't handle me getting on you. You're like me — you've got a loose wire.'" Brown is on his ninth team in 29 years; the story of his career is the story of his life, a story of abruptly severed relationships. There is the father who died when Larry was seven, the three marriages, the long and mysterious estrangement from his brother Herb — a recently repaired split that developed because both coaches (Larry then with Denver, Herb with Detroit) coveted Marques Johnson in the 1977 NBA draft. (Neither got him.) And there is the long pattern of Brown cutting and running from jobs. He has never stayed in one place longer than five years; once, he actually left a team, the New Jersey Nets, on the eve of the playoffs, informing management that he was accepting the head coaching job at the University of Kansas. "Larry's a great builder, but not a finisher," says an nba coach. "He builds teams up, and then when they're ready to kill his ass, he leaves." After Brown abruptly walked away from the first-place Sixers last December — when was the last time you heard of a coach going AWOL? — it seemed the pattern was holding. It is often in his fourth season with a team, with his act wearing thin, that Brown chooses to vanish — and this is his fourth year with the Sixers. Only this time, the disturbing walkout was followed not by the inevitable flameout, but by the return, apparently, of a different Larry Brown, a coach who not only sought his players' input on a major trade but gave them veto power over the decision. How to explain the change? That December walkout was the moment for Brown, nothing less than a face-to-face confrontation with his own legacy. If he had bolted then, the book on him would have been sealed: Great basketball mind, victim of his own tortured genius. He knew this better than anyone, in part because he has continued to be obsessed with what happened four years ago in Indiana, when he lost control of another talented team during his fourth and final year there. That past has haunted Brown. When he returned to the Sixers in December, he knew one thing: "I didn't want what happened in Indiana to happen again." Even after the most exciting games, Brown appears at the Sixers' post-game press conferences blank-faced, seemingly morose, hunched before a microphone and speaking in the most deadened of monotones. He utters platitudes about how his team "doesn't always understand that we have to play the right way to win" and how they have to "hold down the fort" until his injured players return. Even after a win, Brown sounds as if he lost — or needs a Prozac fix. Brown is the first to admit he's no Knute Rockne. "I wouldn't know how to give a pep talk," he says one day after practice. Get him started, and Brown will seem all of his 60 years and then some as he rails against a breakdown in traditional values, bemoaning the need for metal detectors in schools in one breath and basketball's epidemic of me-first-ism the next. He cemented his reputation as a team-builder shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, when he jettisoned a series of athletically talented players — Jerry Stackhouse, Jimmy Jackson, Tim Thomas, Larry Hughes — in favor of egoless, team-oriented players like Aaron McKie, Eric Snow, Tyrone Hill and George Lynch. "The way he's put that team together has proven what a genius he is," says Brown's old friend (and former Sixers coach) Doug Moe.  Growing up, Brown saw himself as becoming a high school history teacher and gym teacher. Today, he considers the court his classroom and millionaire jocks are the students he expects to soak up his curriculum of tried and true principles. While most nba practices are glorified scrimmages, Brown can't let more than a few minutes of action take place without interrupting. At one point during a week I spent with the team, Brown whistled a play dead to reprimand Kukoc for the way he was setting a pick, one of the game's most fundamental acts. "It's not that complicated," Brown chided. "Set the screen even to the ball, and then roll." Kukoc had been setting the screen perhaps 15 inches from where Brown wanted. "Those 15 inches," McKie would explain to me later, "could be the difference between an open shot and a blocked shot." Brown's assistants bemoan the day he got a satellite dish — now he watches every nba game every night and wants to dissect them with his staff each morning. "I don't think he sleeps," says Ayers. It is an obsession born of ideology, for Brown traces his basketball lineage all the way back to the game's origins. He played for Dean Smith at North Carolina; Smith played for Phog Allen at Kansas in the early '50s; and Allen played for none other than James Naismith, the father of the game, at Kansas in 1905. So when Brown talks about "playing the right way," it may sound like a clichΘ, but the tone masks the passion of a zealot. The problem with zealotry, of course, is that over time — every four years or so, maybe — it can come to be perceived as self-righteous moralism. "That reminds me of Rudy's L.A. play," Brown says, freezing the tape. On the TV screen, the Bulls have just run a play similar to one Brown picked up during last summer's Olympics from Houston coach Rudy Tomjanovich. Brown leaps to his feet, grabs a green marker, and starts diagramming a play on the wall-length board behind his seat. "We can run something like this," he says, "if we want to throw our big men a bone." A seemingly arbitrary collection of squiggly and dotted lines emerges as Brown feverishly narrates the play's options — one of which is for Ratliff to get the ball at the foul line and drive to the basket. It is no coincidence that Brown is thinking of throwing his big men a bone on the morning after Ratliff complained about not touching the ball enough.  Two hours later, practice begins. A Sixers practice always follows the same script. It begins with calisthenics, accompanied by a nonstop soundtrack of wisecracks from the team's class clown, Iverson. Noting that Cheeks' push-ups are even more half-hearted than his own, Iverson calls out, "Mo! What you call those, man? They push-ups?" Next, Iverson spots Jalen, George Lynch's three-year-old son, who is visiting today, sitting rigidly behind a chair. Iverson and Jalen begin a peekaboo flirtation that will last until the drills start up. These are the most rudimentary of basketball drills, more typical of a high-school practice. At one end of the court, the "little men" — guards and small forwards — practice "L" cuts while Cheeks feeds them passes. The cut is precisely what it sounds like: The player starts at the baseline and comes sprinting toward Cheeks before sharply breaking off to his left, forming an "L" pattern. Brown surveys the drill with one hand on either side of his lower back, occasionally urging players, particularly the younger ones, like point guard Kevin Ollie, to sharpen the angle of the cut. "I've never seen a coach take so much time to teach NBA players," Cheeks says later. "You might think NBA players wouldn't need to practice something like an 'L' cut, but Larry knows that these days, more and more players don't know how to do these things the right way. Larry's whole thing is repetition, because if the cut isn't right, you ain't getting open." At the other end of the court, the big men perform a drill in which they practice reacting to a phantom double-team by passing the ball back out to a guard and, in turn, stepping outside for a return pass. It's the simplest of drills, but it's consistent with one of Brown's overriding principles: Players don't like surprises, he says, and it's his job to condition them to react. This drill takes place every day, so that in a game, when six-foot-nine Tyrone Hill is confronted by a double-team, he will automatically pass the ball out to Iverson and step free of the defense to be available for a return pass. Unlike many NBA coaches, Brown doesn't try to spice up his drills with gimmicks to minimize their monotony. Some coaches, for instance, offer money to the players who run the full-court, four-pass, three-man weave fastest. Not Brown. "I don't play games," he says. "I coach execution, not effort." It makes sense that Brown's practices resemble those of a high-school or college team, because the 76ers don't play an NBA-style offense. On most teams, the ball is routinely passed to the big man down low. With his back to the basket, he dribbles in place, waiting either for an illegal defense call or for a double-team, at which time he passes to a three-point shooter. Brown does none of this. He was taught that the object of the game is to get the highest percentage shot possible, so he doesn't devise plays for the three-point shot. And he doesn't concern himself with drawing the opposition into illegal zone defenses — because that would require his players to stand around passively, and Brown wants movement and action. He has what is widely considered the most sophisticated playbook in the league, each offensive "set" consisting of numerous screens and options that utilize the whole floor, side to side, so the defense has to move and doesn't have time to react. The Sixers may well lead the league in backdoor plays, which are designed to shake an offensive player free for a layup. "The plays here are twice as complicated as when I was in Chicago, playing for Phil Jackson — and about half as effective," says Kukoc after one practice. By the time he was traded, he still hadn't quite grasped (or embraced) Brown's offense.  After the drills, Brown introduces the new play, the one intended to throw the big men a bone. At first, Kukoc rolls his eyes at the introdution of yet another play, but after a half-hour of repetition, Brown seems satisfied — even with Kukoc — as he watches the run-through and shouts, "Good job! Good job!" Two nights later, Ratliff will twice get to the foul line, thanks to the new play. And Brown will unveil a modest half-court trap in the same game — two players double-teaming the ball at mid-court. To most onlookers, it might seem like little more than token pressure. But the point is not to force the opposition into turning the ball over; it's simply to disrupt their flow, to force them into starting their offense with, say, 14 seconds on the shot clock rather than 18. Brown knows that the loss of those four seconds can rob the opposing team's point guard of two or three options.  Brown's attention to detail doesn't come without a price. Its flip side is his obsessiveness, which many players find grating. "The way Larry coaches works great for younger players," says former Sixer Vernon Maxwell, now with the Dallas Mavericks, who was waived by Brown in December. Brown was also Maxwell's first pro coach 13 years ago in San Antonio; despite his disappointment after being cut, Maxwell still marvels at how much Brown knows. "The older guys, though, get kind of tired of how repetitious the man is," he adds. That, of course, is the book on Brown. And, when the first-place 76ers suddenly found themselves without a coach for a couple of days in December. The circumstances were eerily similar: It was his fourth year, his team was rife with injuries, and suddenly Larry Brown was losing them, just the way he'd lost the Pacers in 1997. This past December 15th, the Sixers lost at home to the Dallas Mavericks. After the game and then again in a team meeting the next day in Chicago, Iverson spoke up in defense of George Lynch, whose man, Dirk Nowitzki, had blistered the Sixers for 36 points. Iverson maintained that Brown hadn't adjusted to give Lynch the help he needed. "I thought I did adjust," Brown would tell me later. "But after taking the time to think about it, I realized that what's important is that they felt I didn't adjust. If they felt that, then I wasn't doing my job." Speaking for the team, Iverson also volunteered that Brown's incessant carping was wearing thin - that he was treating a first-place team as if it were losing. One person in the room remembers Iverson telling Brown that some players wouldn't raise these concerns for fear of their minutes being cut. The meeting sent Brown reeling, not so much for what Iverson said, but for how the issues raised mimicked those that marred his final year in Indiana - to this day, one of Brown's great regrets. "Those were guys who were really important in my life," Brown says, "and I didn't treat them the way I should have. The word got out: I was too demanding, I never let up on them." It was so bad that when Brown first returned to Indiana as coach of the 76ers, even some of his mild-mannered former players, like Rik Smits, took snarling, trash-talking delight in beating their old coach. During his December sabbatical from the Sixers, Brown ruminated on his Indiana experience, even having a couple of heart-to-heart talks with then-injured center Matt Geiger that both men point to as eye-opening. The upshot? "I knew I had to back off," Brown says. But it's still a struggle, in part because Brown knows something that can be a problem for a coach in today's NBA: "I can't coach assholes," he says. "I know that about myself."  Brown likes to talk about an academic study that gauged his positive to negative reinforcement ratio while he was coaching the University of Kansas in the 1980s: "I've always heard what a tyrant I am, but they found I was the most positive coach they studied," he recalls. 'The problem is that players don't hear when you're positive. They have selective hearing." In Indiana, one of those refusing to listen was a young, prodigiously talented hip-hop player. After Brown left, that player, Jalen Rose, became a star, blossoming under the nurturing of Brown's replacement, Larry Bird. Brown knew how much Rose loved to play, and he wished more of his players cared so deeply for the game. But Jalen wanted to play point guard, seeing himself as the next Magic Johnson, and Brown saw him as a small forward. Brown held firm, and Rose retreated into himself. "I'm disappointed that I couldn't reach Jalen," Brown says today. Like Rose, Iverson has a passion for the game that is palpable. Yet Brown's relationship with him, prior to this season, seemed similarly cursed. Had it not been for lessons learned from his failure with Rose, Brown and Iverson might already be history. Last season, when Brown benched Iverson during a game and Iverson demanded a trade, Croce mediated a sit-down between the player and coach. After Iverson spat out an angry litany of all the slights Brown had foisted upon him, Brown coolly responded: "Are you finished?"  "Do I ask you if you're finished when you talk to me?" Iverson replied. But as the meeting went on, it was as though their differences faded. Croce suggested that to Iverson, what Brown had done, the way he'd insulted him publicly, was akin to what those white law-enforcement officers had done to him seven years before, when they hauled him off to jail on a trumped-up charge of inciting to riot. Brown was floored. "Who would have thought that to Allen, those would be comparable?" asks Brown, who grew up idolizing Jackie Robinson. "But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, you know, that was probably this kid's only experience with white male authority figures before playing for me. And why would there be trust there? A lot of times in their lives, no white person has shown kids like Jalen or Allen any respect at all." No doubt Jalen Rose, four years ago, would have appreciated some of that kind of empathy from Brown. Fast-forward to January 9th, when the Sixers visit the New Jersey Nets and their star point guard Stephon Marbury, Iverson's longtime archrival. During pregame warmups, a leather-lunged fan lets Iverson have it, calling him a "gunner" who cares only about himself and his scoring average. Iverson turns on the fan and bellows: "Man, I already won a scoring title. I'm going for that ring now!" Standing just a few feet away, Brown almost lets himself smile. There is more reason to smile during the game, when Iverson takes only 14 shots but plays a flawless floor game en route to another win. The next day, Brown calls his star into his office at the practice facility. "There are a lot of things I've been proud of you for, things that you've done, what you've become," Brown says. "But that might have been one of the most satisfying games I've ever coached, because I know that playing against Marbury is big for you, and you just played to win." Now, after games, Brown lauds the player not just for his guts and hustle and talent, but also for how he keeps his teammates involved - giving them touches - and finds his scoring opportunities out of the natural flow of the offense, in stark contrast to his rookie year, when Iverson seemed to play one against five every night. The player, likewise, praises the coach at every turn. "He's got a tough job," Iverson says. "He's always drawing up and calling the right plays. He's got to make tough substitutions, 'cause we got 12 guys who want to play, and he's got to keep me happy."  At first glance, they would appear to be Philadelphia's least likely love match. But maybe not. Maybe the differences they've endured arise from their similarities; both men indulge emotional, artistic temperaments and are given to impetuous judgments. "I think Allen's a lot like Larry, in that they have these little blowups and then they're over and everything's fine," says Doug Moe. "In fact, I think they both thrive on controversy." Indeed, their headline-making dramas often seem to precede some breathtaking success on the court. "I've given up trying to figure them out," Croce says. "They're both geniuses. And genius is something I can't relate to." Brown smiles when told of Croce's comment: "I don't know about being geniuses, but I'll say it again: We both have loose wires." Larry Brown may still be learning how to talk to today's players, but he has no trouble in the huddle during games. No statistics are kept on this type of thing, but it seems as if his team leads the league in baskets scored directly after a timeout. In the huddle, the gaps in generation, culture and race he deals with every day are forgotten. There, it's all about what he does best: pure coaching. His is the only voice; the assistants can pull guys aside individually on their way into or out of the huddle, but Brown wants the players focused on him. He talks offense first and then defense, because he wants his defensive admonitions to be freshest. On this night, Brown's Sixers are struggling at home against the lowly Chicago Bulls. Brown calls a timeout late in the third quarter with his team trailing, 71-68. His team seems flat, and the First Union crowd is silent. The Sixers should not be losing at home to the Bulls, and as his charges come to the sideline, Brown seems poised to rip into them. Instead, he is calm and reassuring. "These are the kinds of games, guys, that we've just got to get through," he says, kneeling before his starters, who have taken seats on the bench. "Let's just remember to play solid" - in Brown-speak, "solid" defense means staying with your man, resisting the urge to double-team - "and the main thing is to keep it simple. This is a simple game. Let's not try and do too much." Moments later, the Sixers go on a rampage, forcing 14 straight Chicago misses and blowing the game open. Brown tells me the next day that there is a method to such counterintuitive communication. The best coaches, it seems, are tough when one might expect coddling, and gentle when the situation seems to call for reaming out. It's a lesson Brown learned when he was coaching Kansas in 1988; in the midst of a terrible losing streak, he told his players things were going great, that they were coming together. "They looked at me like I was nuts," he recalls, but he knew that a coach's attitude can take on a self-fulfilling role for players. That team went on to win the NCAA title.  Two nights after the Chicago comeback, the Sixers eke out a win against New Jersey without an injured Iverson. At the end, with the game close, and the man the team looks to for clutch baskets wearing baggy hip-hop garb on the end of the bench, McKie rushes over to Brown. "No one seems to want the ball," he says. Brown looks at him. "Don't tell me," Brown says. "Tell your teammates." McKie understands. It's a challenge to lead, and he promptly drains the big baskets to win the game. The Larry Brown of just a few years ago, the relentless moralist whose constant lecturing alienated his Indiana team, might not have been satisfied to simply exhort a player to lead the way. That Larry Brown more likely would have called a timeout and screamed platitudes - morale be damned. After the battle of wills with Iverson, after the flirtation, however brief, with the North Carolina head-coaching vacancy last summer, and after the strange December walkout, might it be that Brown has finally passed that critical point where, in the past, he'd cut and run? One afternoon in the practice-facility conference room, Brown fidgets with his spectacles and seems to provide an answer. If you're Larry Brown, there are always frustrations, whether it's with the big men who want more touches or the little guys who won't run the correctly angled cut. But he's more at ease now, more settled than ever. He and Herb drive to games together, talking hoops like when they were kids in Long Beach. And he proudly regales visitors with tales of his eight-year-old son, L.J.: "Yesterday, L.J. told Shelly that when he grows up, he wants to be either a paleontologist, a pro basketball player, a piano player, or work at Ruby's diner in Ardmore."  It's not that he's less given to dark moods; it's just that, after all the jobs and blown relationships, after the big trade that may have guaranteed him the best shot he'll ever get at that elusive NBA title, he has come to see things through the prism of his own coaching legacy. This coach who has alienated so many of those he loved to teach continues to speak often of Dean Smith and how Smith remained an integral part of almost every one of his player's lives. Brown offers, candidly, that he simply has never measured up to his mentor's example. "I love my players, and I don't know if they know that," he says, in that robotic voice that masks all those roiling emotions. "And I want them to love me. I really do." He pauses. "You know what Allen's said to me? That he'd like his relationship with me to be like Magic Johnson's with Pat Riley, or Michael Jordan's with Phil Jackson." Brown shakes his head wistfully at the fantasy. He puts on his wire rims, looking every bit the teacher he sees himself as. "You know what? I realize now that's all I've ever wanted as a coach." It's a realization, albeit rather late in coming, that could just turn Larry Brown's coaching epitaph from "builder" into "finisher."		Author Larry Platt   Source Phillymag.com   Return to Articles