Tag: Gregg Popovich

Brown’s second chance likely to come on the NBA’s biggest stage

It’s not a shock that former Cleveland coach and former Spurs assistant Mike Brown is returning to the NBA after a season away.

But it’s a little surprising that he apparently is , according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Lakers are the biggest of the big-boy jobs in the league.

Brown led Cleveland to a league-best 61 victories last season before the Cavaliers were eliminating in the Eastern Conference semifinals by Boston. That collapse led to Brown’s eventual dismissal and LeBron James leaving that franchise for Miami.  

During the season before, Brown earned the NBA’s Coach of the Year honors after leading them to a league-best 66-16 record. He earlier took the Cavaliers to the 2007 Finals where they lost to the Spurs. His .663 career winning percentage ranks sixth in NBA history among coaches with at least 100 career victories.  

But in hiring him, it appears that Lakers management will be go against the wishes of key players like Kobe Bryant and Derek Fisher, who both endorsed Lakers assistant Brian Shaw. Other finalists included former Houston coach Rick Adelman, Lakers assistant coach Chuck Person and former Lakers coach Mike Dunleavy.

A source close to the Lakers told SI.com’s Sam Amick  that , and that he was not a part of the decision-making process.

The choice of Brown appears to be falling in line with the type of coach that Bryant had described during the team’s exit interviews.

“If you’re building a championship team, your DNA always has to start with the defensive end of the floor,” Bryant said earlier this month. ”Always. I’m a firm believer in that. I don’t believe in building a championship team on offense. It has to be built on defense and rebounding. Period.” 

Brown has been the most successful of Gregg Popovich’s proteges.  And he should bring a defensive bent to a Lakers’ franchise that didn’t play with much fervor during the playoffs.

During his time away from basketball, Brown was an assistant coach on his 13-year-old son’s middle-school football team as he bonded with his family and collected on his settlement with the Cavaliers.

It’s given him perspective as he tackles his new job.

Lakers executive vice president of player personnel Jim Buss likes his defensive-minded style. His hiring would also likely mean that Andrew Bynum, another Buss favorite, likely will remain on the roster.

Hiring Brown would enable the Lakers to pinch a few pennies. Team management wants to bring their coaching costs down after playing Phil Jackson the league’s highest coaching salary last season. Brown would likely command about half of Jackson’s rumored $9 million per year salary.

Will Brown be what the Lakers need to return to the form that enabled them to claim the last two NBA titles and has boosted them to the NBA Finals in each of the last three seasons?

It likely will mean the end of Jackson’s preferred “Triangle” offense for a more defensive bent.

It will be interesting to see.

TP: “I don’t think this current team will play for the title in the future”

Tony Parker painted a sobering assessment of the Spurs franchise during a recent interview in Paris with L’Equipe and other French journalists earlier this week.

Parker told them that he doesn’t think the current makeup of the Spurs roster. (Hat tip to Sports by Brooks.com)

“I don’t think this current team will play for the title in the future,” Parker said. “We are aging. We must be realistic. It was sort of our last chance this season.”

Parker was blunt in his assessment about the Spurs, who raced to a 61-21 record during the regular season before they were eliminated in the first round of the NBA playoffs by Memphis.

“”We can’t count on trades to happen,” Parker said. “We’re going to have to rely on the draft, but Pop (Spurs coach Gregg Popovich) has made many good choices.”

Parker said he met with Popovich in a post-season meeting that was difficult for both of them.

“It was a huge disappointment for us,” Parker said. “I went to see Pop (Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich) at the training center. He was sad, Tim (Duncan), too.

“We’re all frustrated because we had a great regular season during which we dominated. But it was a tough match-up for us (against Memphis.) They dominated us inside.”

Parker, who turned 29 earlier this week, is the youngest of the Spurs’ “Big Three” that also includes Duncan and Manu Ginobili. And when he says that the Spurs’ current roster title hopes are gone, it’s a significant statement from somebody who should know about his team’s chances for success.  

Here’s a of Parker’s Paris interview (with English subtitles) along with aprovided by FIBA’s official web site.

Why Spurs fans should pause and praise the lottery tonight

David Stern’s annual role as a game-show host rolls around tonight as he hosts the league’s draft lottery to determine which team will earn the No. 1 pick in the June 23 draft.

The league’s previous system of picking envelopes is long gone away. No longer does Stern face allegations of grasping any alleged frozen envelope when the order is sorted out tonight.

Even though the system is flawed — the worst team doesn’t necessarily get the best player — the league has continued with the lottery system since NBA teams blatantly began throwing games to get a shot at the best player in the mid-1980s.

There will be 14 balls in a lottery machine, with the numbers 1-14 on them. It will result in 1,001 potential combinations that can come out as order does not matter, with 1,000 of those combinations assigned to teams.

The lottery machine will spit out four balls and the team with that combination will get the first pick. The process will be repeated two more times for the second and third pick. After that, the draft will go in order of record with the worst team first. 

Drew Carey or Pat Sajak couldn’t do it better.

No team has benefitted from the current lottery system in place more than the Spurs. Luck has played a huge factor in the success of the franchise over the years.  

After finishing with the fourth-worst record in the league in 1987, the Spurs  won the lottery and the chance to pick David Robinson. If they had picked fourth that season, they would have had the opportunity to pick among Reggie Williams, Scottie Pippen, Kenny Smith, Kevin Johnson and Reggie Miller. Pippen, Johnson and Miller had great careers. But none was as dominant as Robinson.

And in 1997, after finishing with the third-worst record in the league in Gregg Popovich’s first season coaching the team, the Spurs again won the lottery and picked up the chance to pick Tim Duncan. If they were picking third, they would have had their choice of Chauncey Billups, Tony Battie, Antonio Daniels and Ron Mercer. Tracy McGrady was the only player in the draft to average 20 points during his career other than Duncan. No player in the draft had the career of Duncan.

Here are the chances tonight for  the No. 1 pick among the teams that are eligible.

1. Minnesota Timberwolves 25 percent chance of getting the top pick (they have 250 combinations)
2. Cleveland Cavaliers, 19.9 percent chance
3. Toronto Raptors, 15.6 percent chance
4. Washington Wizards, 11.9 percent chance
5. Sacramento Kings, 7.6 percent chance
6. Utah Jazz (from New Jersey Nets), 7.5 percent chance
7. Detroit Pistons, 4.3% chance
8. Cleveland Cavaliers (from L.A. Clippers), 2.8 percent chance
9. Charlotte Bobcats, 1.7 percent chance
10. Milwaukee Bucks, 1.1 percent chance
11. Golden State Warriors, 0.8 percent chance
12. Utah Jazz, 0.7 percent chance
13. Phoenix Suns, 0.6 percent chance
14. Houston Rockets, 0.5% chance

Tonight’s lottery will mark the Timberwolves’ 14th time in the lottery. Minnesota has gone backward seven times and stayed in the same position the other six times in their 13 previous lottery appearances. And not since 2004, when Orlando claimed the pick and the right to select Dwight Howard, has the team with the worst record picked up the top pick.

So while Stern and the NBA honchos determine who gets the shot at Kyrie Irving of Duke in this year’s draft, Spurs Nation might pause for a few moments to be thankful that the current system brought them who it did and when it happened.

Because it’s not a stretch to think if the Spurs didn’t win the lottery in either of those two seasons, the team now likely could be playing somewhere else.