Except now, here he is, back in the place where he had one of his favorite teams, the one he calls “Allen and the Doo-Wops” — it was Allen Iverson (maybe Brown’s greatest coaching challenge) and 11 not-so-good guys he could mold, who played his way, whom he really connected to. Now, he doesn’t have a team.

His role with the Sixers, with Ed Stefanski replacing the fired King two months ago as team president, is undefined. There were whispers King brought Brown back to replace coach Mo Cheeks; Brown says that was never in the cards, that he “could never stab Mo in the back like that.” Brown still has an office at the Sixers practice site and talks regularly with Stefanski and stops by practice to see Cheeks, but he’s really just killing time until he finds the next outpost.

“I still want to coach,” he says. “I don’t want to coach here.” He sips his coffee. “I don’t want it to end the way it did in New York. I don’t wish that on anybody.”


IT ENDED UGLY with the Knicks, way uglier than it did with the Pistons in Detroit, way, way uglier than it did the first time around with the Sixers, in 2003. It was supposed to be his last stop — really it would be, he swore, because after all, he grew up on Long Island, with Nathan’s hot dogs and the Knicks, and legend Red Holzman teaching him the game, and to rehab this woebegone franchise in magnificent Midtown would serve the league and the sport and provide the perfect bow to his legacy. But Larry Brown lasted only one disastrous season, highlighted by a blood feud with paranoid team president Isiah Thomas and star player Stephon Marbury, and Madison Square Garden officials monitoring his press briefings (until he began holding them roadside, talking to the media from the front seat of his Audi). The whole saga played out in the New York tabloids, circus-style, before the Knicks settled on a buyout of $18.5 million, netting Brown a total of close to $30 million for the one year, in which the team won only 23 games.

This was not the ending Brown had envisioned: “Imagine when you get to work, they don’t talk to you. They had security people standing close to me in press conferences, and spies throughout the arena.”

While the financial windfall was staggering, and the Knicks, without Brown, remain the NBA’s most dysfunctional franchise, his reputation took a nasty hit, particularly since all this occurred on the heels of another bad ending, in Detroit.

Brown coached the Pistons to two Finals appearances, winning one and losing the other in Game 7, but was accused of eyeing another job, with the Cleveland Cavaliers and their new superstar, LeBron James, during the playoffs. He left with a $7 million buyout amid these words from owner Bill Davidson on a Detroit television station: “There was too much Larry Brown and not enough Pistons. You’ve got to understand that whoever coaches the Pistons represents me. And I’m not going to give them somebody that’s not a good person.”