Larry Brown, a 67-year-old coach famous for bouncing around top pro and college jobs, was named coach of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats on Tuesday.
The move comes five days after Brown resigned as an executive vice president for the Philadelphia 76ers and three days after the Bobcats fired Sam Vincent following a disappointing 32-50 record in his only season guiding the club.
Brown, who has coached eight prior NBA teams in a 23-year career, is a former player at the University of North Carolina just like the Bobcats’ managing member of basketball operations, retired NBA legend Michael Jordan.
Brown’s career was well before the six-time NBA champion’s tenure with the Tar Heels, but Jordan knew journeyman Brown was the man he wanted to try and make a winner out of the fourth-year club owned by Robert Johnson.
“Like our program, he has struggled to find his identity,” Jordan said. “I think we will find the right position here. This is the type of atmosphere he enjoys. He will take the pieces he finds and turn them into something better,” he said.
“I think his teaching skills will be the biggest asset these young kids have. Our team did not respond well in game situations and that was a big downfall for us,” he said.
Brown ranks fifth on the NBA all-time win list with 1,010 career victories and is the only coach to win a US national college crown as well as an NBA title, winning in 1988 with the University of Kansas and Detroit in 2004.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
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