Tue Apr 29 13:22:49 2008

Comment | Email | Print

Brown tabbed to coach Bobcats, his 9th NBA team

---

Charlotte, NC (Sports Network) - The Charlotte Bobcats introduced Larry Brown as their new head coach on Tuesday, bringing the 67-year-old to his ninth NBA team.

"I've been out of basketball two years as a coach, and I realized how much I loved it and how much I missed it," said Brown. "When Michael (Jordan) talked to me about coming here I thought it was a no-brainer."

Brown replaces Sam Vincent, whose honeymoon phase as an NBA head coach was a quick one, as the Bobcats relieved the first-year head coach of his duties on Saturday after a 32-50 season.

"We are extremely proud and fortunate to have in our organization the greatest basketball player that ever played the game in Michael Jordan, and one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game in Larry Brown," said Robert L. Johnson, majority owner of the Bobcats.

Jordan, like Brown a North Carolina alum, is a part-owner of the club.

"I think he's going to do a great job here, and I think we have the right places in piece here," said Jordan. Two of those pieces, forward Sean May and guard Raymond Felton, are also former Tar Heels players.

Brown has served 23 seasons as a head coach in the NBA, spending time with eight different clubs in that span, and holds an all-time mark of 1,010-800, making him the fifth winningest coach in league history.

"I guess I've coached almost everybody in the league, I've been around so much," he quipped about his well-known journeyman habits. Brown finally achieved the pinnacle of the sport with the Detroit Pistons, when he led the team to the 2004 title, and the 2005 NBA Finals.

But, like it often does at each of his stops, things went bad between Brown and management in Detroit, and the Hall of Famer then took over as coach of the New York Knicks for the 2006 campaign, but was fired after going 23-59.

The former Sixers coach rejoined the club in January 2007 in the advisory role, but had said multiple times through media outlets that he would like to get back into coaching. He resigned his post as executive vice president for the Sixers last Thursday.

Brown also spent time coaching in the college ranks, winning the 1988 national championship at Kansas, and reaching a final with UCLA, and is the only head coach in basketball history to win both an NCAA Championship and NBA title.

In his NBA career, which includes time as a player, he has also coached Denver, New Jersey, San Antonio, the Los Angeles Clippers and Indiana.