If Mike Brown were still the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers by 12:01 AM this morning, his entire 2011 salary of 4.5 million dollars would have been guaranteed.
The chances of that happening were equivalent to Megan Fox winning an Oscar for “Jennifer’s Body” (eye candy alert).
I have been hard on Mike Brown in the past, but honestly he was in a no win situation. He had no head coaching experience when he took over the Cavs. He was placed in a situation where the star player was making all the decisions and was the de facto coach. The supporting cast was, while decent, never at a championship level — but anything less than a championship wouldn’t be good enough. In many ways he was set up to fail.
He is a modern day Doug Collins (see Michael Jordan and the Bulls before Phil Jackson took over).
I thought the one thing that hampered him was his offensive philosophy. Brown is a protégé of Gregg Popovich so he knows how to coach defense, but offensively he never seemed to grasp the best way to use his role players around LeBron James. We have included a diagram above of his best offensive set.
If James wanted Brown to be the coach he would still be employed, but James seemed to use Brown as a scapegoat for his post season failures. If Cleveland had any hopes of retaining Lebron, Brown had to be fired.
Best case scenario for Brown is like Collins; he’ll get a few more opportunities to prove he has the ability to be a head coach in the league. Maybe next time he will be afforded the opportunity to be a real coach, not just a figurehead (pun intended).
*Sidenote*
Since Mike Brown will have some free time on his hands, I know he won’t mind if we include some more pics of Megan Fox in his article for his viewing pleasure. Also, there is no way I am watching the new Transformers movie if she isn’t in it — that was the only reason I sat through the first two.