NBA Playoffs: Should Mike Brown Return as Los Angeles Lakers' Head Coach?
The Los Angeles Lakers' season is over now that the Oklahoma City Thunder have abruptly finished them off in five games. So what does that mean for the much maligned head coach of the Lakers, Mike Brown?
The old saying goes that you don't want to be the guy replacing the legend, but rather the guy replacing the guy who replaced the legend, and as of right now Mike Brown is sitting in the wrong part of that phrase.
All I know right now is that Mike Brown has at least one thing going for him: He's not the worst coach of a professional basketball team in Los Angeles.
After a little over a decade of Phil Jackson, having Brown on the sidelines wasn't exactly an improvement, and nobody expected it to be. However, did Brown do good enough this season with the Lakers to keep his job going into next season?
On the surface, it seems like the answer is quite simple: No.
The goal for the Lakers this season, and every season now that Kobe Bryant is getting older and the future seems less certain now than it was back in 2004, has been to win a championship, which they did not do.
The Lakers were set with three of the 25 best players in the NBA, but they lacked the depth and the youthful athleticism of Oklahoma City, so is that really something that you can blame Mike Brown for?
In reality, Brown can't be the one blamed for the loss to the Thunder, although he didn't do much to change the situation that the Lakers were in, which seems to be the biggest knock on the guy throughout the years.
Back in 2009 when he was coaching the Cleveland Cavaliers, Mike Brown had the best regular season team but ended up losing to the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference finals. The same happened in 2010, only his team lost to the Celtics in the second round.
In the end, that might be why Mike Brown should be fired; he's a regular season coach. He's able to get teams to play defense, accentuate their strengths and hide their flaws when the rest of the league is playing regular season ball, but when the game slows down and every possession matters as much as an entire quarter did in the regular season, he's just not the coach you need.
Brown is terrible at making adjustments during the game, his teams are notoriously slow in the third quarter—meaning they have trouble maintaining or extending leads from normally strong first halves—and he doesn't particularly command respect from big name players, which may be the biggest factor in deciding his fate.
With Cleveland, one of the biggest criticisms of Brown was that he let LeBron run the show. Brown was running the defense while LeBron was running the offense, and if anybody remembers the last few years of LeBron in Cleveland, much of their offense was isolation run through LeBron. This year he hasn't done much better. His offense is more intricate (considering the fact that he has pieces that are in their own right dangerous, rather than just complementary to the central figure like Cleveland was set up), but his command over Kobe Bryant seems to be nonexistent.
As we slide into the offseason and Mike Brown's fate is discussed more at length what really will make a difference is what Kobe is saying. If he's happy (which he isn't) and is content with Brown as the Lakers coach (which he probably isn't) then Brown will probably stay, if not, then there's going to be at least a chance that he's gone.
The Lakers are going to have to ask themselves whether or not they think they can win a championship with Mike Brown, and if they let his record speak for him then we could end up having a coaching search in Los Angeles.
