EL SEGUNDO – In the absence of any other 11-time NBA championship coaches, and with John McGraw, John Wooden, Scotty Bowman, Red Auerbach and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant unavailable, the Lakers introduced Mike Brown on Tuesday.
It is a commentary of the peculiarly insular nature of Los Angeles that Brown needed such an introduction.
You really wouldn’t think we would be so provincial.
You really wouldn’t think the Lakers would need to select a coach who brought more of an authentic certificate than Brown does, with his .661 winning percentage in Cleveland and his 2007 Eastern Conference championship.
“You look at the Cleveland roster that he had to work with and your look at our roster, and I think ours is better,” said Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak, who seemed more annoyed than usual.
Maybe it was the skepticism that has greeted Brown, maybe it was the assumption the Lakers had acted hastily, maybe it was the belief that Jim Buss was more instrumental in this hire than Kupchak was.
Brown was more deferential to Kupchak than to anyone else. He began by leaning on the modern buzzwords, mainly “culture,” “trust” and “accountability,” but when people began asking him specific questions, he was relaxed and surprisingly specific.
For instance, Brown enumerated his three tenets of offense and defense, just to satisfy those who thought he had none of one and six of another.
That is because he spoke frankly about “random offense” in 2007, when LeBron James was basically outscoring Detroit by himself in the Eastern Conference finals.
He talked about spacing, ball reversal and “attacking the clock,” which meant sprinting into the offensive zone.
Then he talked about shrinking the floor defensively, pushing the ball to the sides, and contesting shots.
All of that dovetails nicely with what Phil Jackson taught.
“We will run bits and pieces of the triangle,” Brown said, which was a nice coincidence, considering that Jackson’s offense was pretty much in bits and pieces by the end of the Dallas series.
Brown also discussed, lightly, Cleveland’s playoff disappointments.
He said the Cavaliers weren’t committed enough to 24 seconds of defense per possession when they were swept by San Antonio in the 2007 Finals, although the other problem was that the Spurs were worlds better.
He also said the Cavaliers probably lost the 2008 Eastern finals to Boston, in a seven-game series, because of “three loose balls” that the Celtics got.
He didn’t mention 2009 against Orlando or 2010 against Boston. The Magic was deeper than Cleveland and far better at the rim, and the Cavaliers lost embarrassingly to the Celtics with James already plotting his escape to Miami and tuning out Brown.
Brown was asked repeatedly about his relationship with James, and his upcoming partnership with Kobe Bryant.
A few things about that:
•James averaged more than 30 points twice when Brown was a coach, won back-to-back MVP awards and was first team All-Defense twice.
•It is difficult to postulate that James disdained Brown, because that means he must have signed with Miami to fulfill his boyhood dreams of playing for Erik Spoelstra.
•There is no indication Brown and Bryant won’t get along other than Bryant’s inexplicable failure to hire a skywriter to decorate the sky with “I Like Mike.”
•Brown said he had spoken with Bryant “at length” several times. Bryant has great respect for Jackson, of course, and endorsed Brian Shaw to succeed him. Shaw should have gotten first crack. But that ship has sailed.
“Kobe is happy when he wins, and if we win there will be no problem,” Kupchak said.
Implicit is the notion that happiness is an actual possibility for Bryant, who has snarled throughout his career with Jackson, a coach he revered.
Bryant will have difficulty outworking Brown.
When Brown played for Tom Bennett at Mesa (Ariz.) Community College, he walked three-quarters of a mile to school every day because he had no car. He regularly was shooting when Bennett left for the night.
“He put up 300 more shots than anybody else,” Bennett said. “That’s every day. We calculated that he probably shot 165,000 or so more basketballs than the second hardest working guy on our team.
“He also had a sprained back at one point and spent the whole practice watching us while he was lying on his stomach, with an ice pack on his back. I could tell stories about Mike Brown all day. How long you got?”
Brown has four years. By then we will know if the Lakers have to apologize for this, but their core reasoning, at this point, appears sound: If he made it in Cleveland, and he did, he will make it here.
Contact the writer: mwhicker@ocregister.com
