Brooklyn Could Use Taste Of Phil Jackson’s Zen
Follow
By DERON SNYDER
The Los Angeles Lakers fired coach Mike Brown last month, just five games into the season, even though the starting point guard was injured and the starting center still was recovering from back surgery. The Brooklyn Nets fired coach Avery Johnson on Thursday, with a 14-14 record, even though he won Coach of the Month in November with a totally revamped team and players still learning each other.
“This isn’t about the fair game,” Johnson told reporters during his farewell news conference. “A lot of time, it’s about the blame game. Because for the most part in this business, the coach always gets blamed. Whether it’s fair or not isn’t the point. It’s just the way it happens.”
Johnson and Brown deserved more time, but they worked in the biggest markets for impatient owners with high expectations in a microwave culture. That was a bad combination, especially for Johnson, in the final year of his contract with no extension in sight. The fact that Brown was jettisoned with nearly three full seasons left on his deal just shows that owners with deep pockets can be extremely impulsive.
But here’s where Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov can show much better instincts than the Lakers‘ ownership duo of Jerry and Jimmy Buss.
