What a ride it’s been for Larry Brown from Long Beach. Titles in Carolina and Denver. Titles in Kansas and Detroit. A bronze medal in Athens. 35 years in the business, en route to becoming the oldest coach ever to win a title. And now, at 65, Brown has finally come home to tackle his biggest job of all: turning the Knicks into champions for the first time since he was a rookie ABA coach in 1973.
It’s been a long road.
And once again, nobody knows what to expect of the Knicks. GM Isiah Thomas has once again stripped off the lug nuts and souped up his team’s engine, adding sharpshooter Quentin Richardson and potential All-Star Eddy Curry to a core group of hot rods like Stephon Marbury, Jamal Crawford, and Antonio Davis.
Critics may point out that you can’t tell the new faces apart. Fine. Maybe it’ll sell some scorecards. Maybe having to tell Jerome James apart from Jackie Butler will finally get an apathetic city invested in a team. Can you name the starting five of the Nets? Can anybody, these days?
All of which speaks to a bigger point about the modern NBA. To look at the league, you’d think it moribund, considering the state of the league’s traditional heavyweights: rebuilding in New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Philly…the list goes on.
It’s in the NBA’s best interest, frankly, to field a winning team in its major markets. And that means New York. New York is, like it or not, the face of the league – they’ve got the most money, the best stadium, and the most tradition, and they belong on top. When the Knicks are winning, the league is winning. And when the league’s best player languishes in obscurity in Cleveland, something’s wrong. Believe in frozen envelopes if you must, but David Stern apparently has no master plan to make the league’s biggest teams its best teams.
But he should.
Read any NBA preview and you’ll see the Pacers and Spurs as near-unanimous picks to win their respective conferences. You mean…there are newspapers in Indianapolis and San Antonio? Ones people read? Really? If these teams live up to expectations, we’ll be left with nobody watching another anticlimactic snoozer of a Finals. Remember the Lakers, Celtics, Pistons, Bulls, and Knicks? Remember rivalries that captivated their cities, remember outsized personalities on and off the court?
They’re still there.
And when – not if, but when – LeBron James finally becomes a Knick, as he should have been all this time, it’ll be a moot point. Couple the most dynamic player in decades with a living legend like Larry Brown and you might as well start engraving the rings.
Until then, consider the case of the Philadelphia 76ers, Brown’s latest success story. When he took over in 1998, they’d won 31 games, two fewer than last year’s Knicks. Three years later, they were in the Finals.
Sound like a familiar script? Brown is the ultimate fixer. And the Knicks are the ultimate fixer-upper.
Mike Lupica writes for the New York Daily News and is a frequent guest on E$PN’s “Sports Reporters.”