Mike Brown's "Evolution"
A media member whose biggest career break has been knowing LeBron James since high school and thus being hired by various outlets to follow James around throughout his career just wrote a piece about Mike Brown's supposed "evolution" as a head coach. Media members (1) often tend to be wrong and (2) rarely admit that they have been wrong, so when something happens that confounds their predictions they feel compelled to contrive elaborate explanations.
For example, Bill Belichick did an excellent coaching job in Cleveland, but media members perceived him to be surly and so they portrayed him not only as surly (which may contain some degree of truth) but also as incompetent (which was completely false). At age 39 in his first NFL head coaching job, Belichick took over a team that had been 3-13, and by year four the Browns went 11-5 and won a playoff game. How impressive is it to do that in Cleveland? The next time the Browns went 11-5 was 2020, which was also the next time that they won a playoff game. The Browns collapsed to 5-11 in 1995, but that had a lot to do with the disruptions caused by Art Modell announcing that he planned to move the team to Baltimore and little to do with Belichick's coaching.
On the way out of Cleveland, Modell fired Belichick. The next time Belichick was hired to be an NFL head coach, he led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles. Belichick's coaching staff in Cleveland included Nick Saban (who became arguably the greatest college football coach ever), Ozzie Newsome (who later won two Super Bowls as Baltimore's General Manager), and several others who became successful coaches in the NFL or college. Objectively, it seems obvious that a coach who assembled a talented staff like that and who led the team to a playoff win not long after a 3-13 season must have known what he was doing--but Belichick being competent in the early 1990s (after he had already won two Super Bowls as a defensive coordinator, by the way) did not fit the media narrative, so instead we are told that Belichick "evolved" in New England.
If you converted what most media members understand about coaching into an explosive device, you would not generate enough power to ignite the smallest firecracker!
It should be obvious that any diligent professional learns and evolves--but the notion that Belichick "evolved" from incompetent bumbler to six-time Super Bowl champion is preposterous, as is the media's obsessive focus on "in-game adjustments." The most important coaching is done in practices. That is when coaches prepare their teams for (1) what is most likely to happen during games and (2) how to react to the various most likely scenarios. If the coach fails at anticipating what is most likely to happen and preparing how to react then he is not going to come up with some magic halftime "adjustment" to save the day; what media members incorrectly call "adjustments" are in reality just the coach implementing the parts of the pre-game plan that are most relevant at that time.
Tom Brown, who played safety for Vince Lombardi's Super Bowl-winning Green Bay Packers, told me that what changed after Lombardi left the team was the attention to detail in practices. Uninformed media members blabber about "in-game adjustments" and are often overly impressed by sideline histrionics, but--as I noted in that article mentioning Brown--the reality is (as I explained) "The importance of coaching is not revealed by sideline tantrums during games or witty comments in press conferences; the great coaches do their work on the practice field, outside of the public eye."
Much like Cleveland media members did not like Bill Belichick or understand what he was doing, they did not understand what Mike Brown was doing as the Cleveland Cavaliers' coach (though they may have liked Brown on a personal level more than they liked Belichick).
The season before Mike Brown first became the Cleveland Cavaliers' head coach, the Cavaliers ranked 11th in points allowed, 14th in rebounding, and 19th in defensive field goal percentage. Two years later, with the same frontcourt starters--LeBron James, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and Drew Gooden--the Cavaliers ranked fifth in points allowed, eighth in defensive field goal percentage, and second in rebounding en route to advancing to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history. In Brown's final two seasons during his first run in Cleveland, the team went 66-16 (ranking first in points allowed, second in defensive field goal percentage, and seventh in rebounding), and 61-21 (ranking sixth in points allowed, fourth in defensive field goal percentage, and 11th in rebounding). The same guy who is now declaring that Brown has "evolved" was one of many who at that time questioned Brown's ability to make "in-game adjustments." Brown built the Cavaliers into a defensive powerhouse and perennial championship contender, but the media narrative was that LeBron James was singlehandedly carrying a team that lacked talent and was not particularly well-coached--as if James, by himself, could outrebound entire teams and also lock down entire teams defensively. That is not a knock against James--who is one of the greatest players of all-time--but just an objective assessment of what it takes to win over 60 games in back to back seasons, something that no poorly coached team has ever done or ever will do.
If your career is based on following James around and being some sort of confidant to him--and if Brown does not even deign to provide you good soundbites--are you going to praise Brown's coaching or are you going to say that James is a one-man team overcoming bad teammates and bad coaching? That question is not difficult to answer, and the proof can be found in various articles and TV appearances.
After being dumped by the Cavaliers, Mike Brown coached the L.A. Lakers for one season, succeeding Phil Jackson and leading the team to a 41-25 record in the lockout-shortened 2011-12 campaign. The Lakers fired Brown after a 1-4 start in 2012-13, limped into the playoffs under Mike D'Antoni, and did not sniff the playoffs again until player/general manager LeBron James joined the team and acquired Anthony Davis.
The Cavaliers brought Brown back for the 2013-14 season, and he guided the team to a 33-49 record after the squad had won 19, 21, and 24 games in the previous three campaigns. The Cavaliers fired Brown at the end of the season, and Brown then served as a Golden State assistant from 2016-2022, winning three championships to go along with the 2003 title he won as a San Antonio assistant. It is amusing that media members question Brown's coaching ability but two of the most successful head coaches of all-time (San Antonio's Gregg Popovich and Golden State's Steve Kerr) both hired Brown.
This season, Mike Brown inherited a Sacramento Kings team that went 30-52 last season while ranking 26th in rebounding, 28th in defensive field goal percentage, and 29th in points allowed. So far this season, the Kings are 27-20 while ranking 25th in rebounding, 28th in defensive field goal percentage, and 22nd in points allowed. Those are not huge improvements, but Brown's first Cleveland team did not make huge defensive improvements in the first season, either; Hank Egan, then an assistant coach in Cleveland, explained to me that when teaching defensive principles to a team it takes until "deep into your second year before you’re getting to the point that it is second nature."
The notion that Brown has "evolved" from a defensive coach into an offensive coach based on a 47 game sample size is as silly as it is premature; Brown inherited a team with a lot of offensive talent and not much of a defensive mindset, so as any smart coach would do he is maximizing their offensive efficiency while also attempting to improve the team's defensive efficiency. I expect the Kings to be better defensively in a year, and possibly even in the second half of this season.
Brown has always been an excellent coach, but in terms of media relations he never found a great niche; you are not going to see soundbite clips of him the way that you do with Gregg Popovich, Steve Kerr, and other popular coaches. Media members resent coaches like Brown because in order to cover him effectively they are forced to either (1) understand the nuances of the game (fat chance!) or (2) come up with catchy narratives. The Mike Brown narrative that has stuck is "Mike Brown is a good defensive coach who does not understand offense and is not good at making in-game adjustments." The Kings' success this season without immediately becoming a defensive powerhouse challenges that narrative, which means that media members either have to admit that the narrative is wrong or else they have to assert that Brown "evolved."
I am not suggesting that Mike Brown is as great at coaching basketball as Bill Belichick is at coaching football--but I am stating that the way that Cleveland media members (and other media members) misunderstood Belichick in the 1990s foreshadowed the way that Mike Brown has been misunderstood and continues to be misunderstood.
Labels: Bill Belichick, Cleveland Cavaliers, Golden State Warriors, L.A. Lakers, Mike Brown, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs
posted by David Friedman @ 8:26 PM
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