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Brown could revive hoops in Charlotte

Ken Berger

April 27, 2008

Of the "half-dozen" jobs Larry Brown is considering, it is no secret that the one that makes the most sense is coach and president of the Charlotte Bobcats.

If stars and dollar signs align, the next town for Brown could be one of the dormant cities in an otherwise thriving NBA. Nothing has been able to revive basketball in Charlotte since the Hornets left town - not owner Bob Johnson, not golf pro Michael Jordan, not Emeka Okafor, Ray Felton, Gerald Wallace or Jason Richardson.

What better guy to take on a seemingly impossible reclamation project than Brown? The Bobcats' firing of Sam Vincent, coupled with Brown's resignation as executive vice president of the Philadelphia 76ers this past week, made it two steps closer to being so.

Joe Glass, Brown's longtime agent, said the exiled Knicks coach is weighing approximately six NBA and college coaching jobs. My money is on Brown getting back into the league, to prove that what happened in New York was an aberration and to make sure his NBA career doesn't end with that kind of embarrassment.

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Better jobs could present themselves before the playoffs are over. Seats could be open in Detroit, Phoenix and Denver if those teams fail to get out of the first round, and Mike Woodson is toast in Atlanta once the Celtics' inevitable sweep is competed.

The one thing Brown likes more than reclamation projects is money, and it remains to be seen whether Johnson - the Bobcats' owner in absentia - is willing to dig into his notoriously tight wallet. But everything else about this makes sense - the Jordan connection, the Carolina connection and the opportunity for Brown to turn around one more franchise before he retires.

"It makes an awful lot of sense," a person with knowledge of Brown's thinking said yesterday.

As Brown displayed to a fault in New York, he has an uncontrollable urge to control the personnel he is coaching. This is, in part, what got him fired by the Knicks. So Brown could not only coach the Bobcats but act as team president, which would allow Jordan to spend even more time teeing off on the great golf courses of the land.

The irony of Brown getting back into the league is that the Knicks are searching for a coach at the same time. Brown is exactly the kind of coach they need to tear down the mistakes of the past and build it back the right way. If not for the water under the bridge - not to mention the likelihood that the Knicks put a clause in their settlement with Brown that he couldn't work for the team again - Donnie Walsh already would have his man.

Instead, the Bobcats probably will have their man. If anybody can revive a basketball town on life support, Next Town Brown is the guy.

Howard misfires

Josh Howard's admission that he smokes marijuana during the offseason - and his assertion that other NBA players do, too - is nothing new. But Howard should have known that raising these issues during the playoffs - particularly when his team was trailing the Hornets 2-0 in their first-round series - was a no-no.

Howard admitted his marijuana use for the second time in a year last weekend in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. In a Dallas radio interview Friday - before the Mavericks got back into their series with a 97-87 victory over New Orleans - Howard brought more attention to the topic.

Howard first addressed his marijuana use last April in an interview with Henry Abbott of the True Hoop blog. He escaped the backlash then, but not now. Mavs owner Mark Cuban said he will "deal with Josh . . . internally" this summer. Howard would be wise not to ask Cuban what he was smoking when he traded for Jason Kidd.

Aside from causing an unnecessary distraction for his struggling team, Howard has given league officials "probable cause" to test him as often as they want under the NBA's substance-abuse program.