Woody Paige: Nuggets, NBA and NCAA coaching legend would love to see a mile-high championship
The Gazette - Feb 16, 2023
The Earth and the basketball are round, and nobody in both worlds would appreciate the Nuggets winning their first championship more than the team’s original anomalous avant-garde coach.
“A title for Denver would be great. I’d love it,’’ the legendary Larry Brown said Thursday afternoon.
At 82, the Hall of Famer is still around. He has coached 2,602 games in the pros (with a winning percentage of 57) and the colleges (72 percent victories), and, at 5-foot-9, the Little Big Man of Basketball has been in the sport over seven decades and in more than 20 locales.
“But the only way players know me now is to google me,’’ he said by phone from Charlotte.
Brown always was a basketball Don Quixote, searching for giants and dragons and tilting at windmills and power forwards.
As a young man Larry served as an assistant under a coach who learned basketball from the inventor of the game. He’s the only coach in basketball history to win NCAA and NBA championships. Also, as an avant guard, he won an ABA championship and an Olympic Gold medal. He is the only NBA coach ever to take eight different franchises to the playoffs, and he was an assistant or head coach at three prestigious basketball schools – North Carolina, UCLA and Kansas (where he won the Final Four) – and played or coached for 14 ABA and NBA teams. He won a national AAU championship in Denver.
The Brooklyn native was MVP of the first ABA All-Star game and coached the first All-Star game with a slam-dunk contest. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002 and honored with the Chuck Daly life achievement award two years ago. His father died when Larry was 7, but his mother lived to be 106. As a kid in Long Island, N.Y., Brown lived above his grandfather’s bakery and slept next to the sesame seed rolls.
Larry last played in the ABA for the Denver Rockets and would become the coach of the Denver Nuggets of the ABA, then the NBA in five seasons before resigning. From 1983-88 he coached at Kansas, won the Final Four and mentored Tad Boyle, who became the Colorado coach.
“Most fun I ever had was in the ABA,’’ Brown says. When four of the franchises were merged into the NBA, Brown carried the red, white and blue basketball on the road for the Nuggets to warm up with in NBA arenas. The NBA adopted the ABA’s three-point shot.
Larry’s last college head coaching job was at SMU from 2012-2016. Then he coached an Italian pro team briefly before agreeing to join University of Memphis coach Penny Hardaway as an assistant in 2021.
He left the school’s program as a consultant in November because of back issues and communication problems. Larry must hold the coaching record for being hired and fired, signing and resigning. When he left the Knicks in 2006 Brown told me he wanted to coach high school basketball. Instead, he was the Charlotte Bobcats coach from 2008-10.
I asked Brown if he finally is retired.
“No, I can’t be idle.’’ In Charlotte he regularly watches his six grandchildren play sports and views a full slate of NCAA and NBA games nightly.
Larry is considering “several possibilities.’’
He is the best and remains on the quest.
Although Brown has loyalties to nine NBA franchises, he has a special connection to the Nuggets. Larry was the first of four former North Carolina players who coached here. The others were his closest friend and former assistant Doug Moe, who is recuperating in San Antonio from a back injury suffered in a fall; Donnie Walsh and George Karl.
“The West is wild,’’ Brown said, “especially after all the trades at the deadline. But the Nuggets have got a real chance in the postseason. I love The Kid.’’ He was speaking of The Joker – Nikola Jokic. “He makes everybody around him good. I’d love to coach him. He’s the best big-man passer ever. He could be one of the top three players to come out of Europe. I don’t know (coach Michael) Malone at all, but those players trust him, and I love their pace on offense, and they work hard on defense.’’
Brown won the NBA title with the Pistons and Chauncey Billups in 2003-2004. His Nuggets won 124 games over two seasons in the ABA, but lost the league’s final final to the Nets and Julius Erving. Brown’s first two NBA Nuggets made the postseason, but then, and since, the franchise never has reached the Finals.
“This could be the year,’’ he said.
The Nuggets should invite Larry Brown, who coached the team to its last ABA playoff victory and its first NBA playoff victory, to the next playoff victory.
Woody Paige has been a sports and general columnist in Colorado with the Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post, The Colorado Springs Gazette and The Denver Gazette since 1974. He has been a commentator for the ESPN network on six different shows for 20 years. woody.paige@gazette.com
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