Right To The Very End, Brown A Distraction To Pistons

As usual, Brown comes first, his team second, even now


It just never ends with Larry Brown, does it?

The rumors, the innuendos, the cryptic comments, the medical issues, the denials, the insinuations -- looks like they're going to be here right up until the very last buzzer of the last Pistons game this season.

Right now, of all times, as the Pistons struggle to contain the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, comes a report from ESPN's "NBA Insider" Chad Ford that Brown has already told two league sources that he plans on taking the Cleveland Cavaliers' offer of being team president. Just what the Pistons need -- more Brown hijinks to pull their eyes off the prize.

I'm not too thrilled with the Cavs, either, by the way. Why in the world they can't wait until after the Pistons' postseason to ask for permission to talk to Brown is anyone's guess. Why they have to disrupt things now is something I'm sure Pistons president Joe Dumars is wondering. Brown is a hotbed of rumor and speculation even when there's nothing concrete to back them up, much less when there actually is some smoke to follow toward a fire.

But if nothing else, Brown looks to be keeping his word that the Pistons will be his final NBA coaching job. Of course, he never said he wouldn't leave for a non-coaching position, did he? Kind of like that episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg is told not to drive by his parents, yet he ends up driving a friend's car instead. "Your exact words were don't drive; you didn't say whose car I couldn't drive," Greg told Mike and Carol.

"I never said I wouldn't take a front office job with someone else," Brown is basically saying.

But I wrote a column for www.RetailDetroit.com a couple months ago that indicated it was a good thing for Brown to be leaving, as it was apparent he was going to do even back then. All season, Brown has been a distraction to the club, and despite his players' professed adulation of him, they have to be tired of reading and hearing about their coach for things such as hip replacements and complications from hip replacements and whining about the brawl and hinting that he has "other issues" to deal with and how New York would be a "dream job" of his and hinting that he may never coach the team again and then doing an about face 24 hours later and yada, yada, yada. The latest odd thing Brown said was maintaining to the media that he'd never even met Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, that he's aware of. Yet he also has supposedly told two league sources that he's ready to take the Cavs job as soon as the Pistons' season ends. Doesn't seem to ring true, does it?

And by the way, even if the Cavs' timing for this permission thing is strange, even stranger is Brown's leak -- if it occurred, of course -- that he's going to take the job. My goodness, where's the sense in that? Wouldn't you want to keep all focus on winning that second straight NBA title, rather than fueling speculation, even if the speculation has some truth to it? But then common sense with communication isn't a Brown strong suit. Instead of trying to put the November 19 brawl behind him and his team, Brown whined about it for weeks to anyone who would listen, saying it practically ruined coaching for him and that his son, a Pistons ballboy, was afraid to return to the Palace.

So here we are, talking about Brown's future, as usual, even as the Pistons are in the middle of a Conference Final in which they are down, 1-2.

You think Dumars has Flip Saunders' number on speed dial?