Warriors:
How Mike Brown rose from low-level video coordinator to be an NBA head coach.
“After being here three months, I recognized that, on a personal level, this would be the best year I’d have in the NBA . ... I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Mike Brown, Warriors’ acting head coach
Fifteen minutes into his stroll around Lake Merritt last week, Warriors acting head coach Mike Brown stopped at a crossroads. In one direction, the paved path in front of him led away from the water’s edge; in the other, a trail that was a mix of rocks and dirt lined the green-tinted lake.
“Which way do we go?” Brown said, seemingly to himself.
He has lived in a high-rise apartment complex overlooking Lake Merritt for nine months, but this was his first attempt at the 3.4-mile walk around it. By the time Brown arrived at the water near downtown Oakland that sunny Friday afternoon, he’d already slogged through seven hours of staff meetings and video study as his players enjoyed an off day before the Western Conference finals.
A master of color-coded practice plans and 200-page playbooks, Brown is an admitted workaholic. He often stays up until 4 or 5 a.m. mapping out how to attack an opponent’s defense. While others find peace in nature, Brown has long been most at ease poring over substitution patterns.
“You think you’re working hard, until you look over at Mike,” said Danny Ferry, the Cavaliers’ general manager during Brown’s first of two stints as head coach in Cleveland (2005-10). “He can outwork anybody.”
That obsessive approach was the driving force behind Brown’s rise from 22-year-old video coordinator to NBA head coach at age 35. Now, in the 18th season of a career that has included three firings, Brown, 47, realizes he doesn’t need to stress over every detail.
Though still the same genial perfectionist who once coached a young LeBron James to the 2007 NBA Finals, Brown sees the big picture these days in a way he never did before. It is why, in shepherding Golden State to eight straight playoff wins, he has had no qualms
empowering others to carry out the vision of the team’s ailing head coach, Steve Kerr.
“After being here three months, I recognized that, on a personal level, this would be the best year I’d have in the NBA,” Brown said. “Even though I was hired as an assistant, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
As a seventh-grader at Sabin Middle School in Colorado Springs, Brown took seriously his responsibilities as Dungeon Master for Dungeons & Dragons games. His friends waited in the basement for hours while he took detailed handwritten notes on the newest module. To ensure the game board was up to Brown’s standards, he cut his own out of Plexiglas.
His need for precision came from his father, Bobby, who spent 26 years in the Air Force and had the finest penmanship Brown has ever seen. The household edict was simple: “Focus on what you can control.” So when it came to his basketball career, because he wasn’t an explosive scorer, Brown committed himself to becoming a lock-down defender.
It wasn’t until his sophomore year at Mesa Community College in Arizona, when a friend offered him seats in the second-to-last row for a Suns preseason exhibition, that he attended his first NBA game. Two years later, after transferring to the University of San Diego, Brown was in the school’s basketball offices when he noticed a picture of then-Nuggets head coach Bernie Bickerstaff — a fellow Torero — on the cover of the alumni magazine.
Brown contacted Bickerstaff through San Diego head coach Hank Egan and convinced Bickerstaff to hire him as an unpaid intern. In August 1992, after several months of watching a college senior devise exhaustive schedules for Denver’s youth camps, Bickerstaff wrote Brown a $1,500 check.
“I was so thankful,” Brown recalled with a chuckle. “At least $900 of it went out the window to fix a dent in the front of my Nissan pickup truck.”
After graduating from San Diego the following December with a degree in business administration, Brown scrapped his law-school plans for a $15,000-a-year job in the Nuggets’ video department. Many of his days were spent putting together highlight tapes of NBA draft prospects. When he reached a stopping point around 3 or 4 a.m., Brown pulled a pillow and blanket from under his desk and slept on the floor.
At 27, he was an assistant under Bickerstaff in Washington. Brown’s goal was to show the players, most of whom were older than him, that he deserved their respect. Though Brown didn’t play professionally, his scouting reports were as nuanced as any in the league. Brown listened to the Notorious B.I.G. only with his headphones on, to avoid revealing his age. When players ran into him at clubs on road trips, he made sure to go elsewhere.
In June 2005, after building credibility among the NBA’s grinders during stops with San Antonio (2000-03) and Indiana (2003-05), Brown went to Cleveland as the league’s second-youngest head coach. The Cavaliers won 66.3 percent of their games over the next five seasons, reaching the Eastern Conference semifinals each year.
A year removed from winning the 2009 NBA Coach of the Year Award, Brown was fired after Cleveland, the top seed, lost to the Boston Celtics in six games in the conference semifinals. Shaquille O’Neal, the Cavaliers’ starting center much of that final 2009-10 season, later wrote in his autobiography that LeBron James had begun tuning Brown out.
But if part of Cleveland’s motivation to fire Brown was to satisfy the face of the franchise, the plan failed when James signed with Miami less than two months later.
In May 2011, after Brown brought 50 pages of notes to an interview with Los Angeles, the Lakers hired him — a coach who sports sweater vests over buttoned-up polo shirts — to replace the sandals-wearing, “Zen Master” Phil Jackson. Eighteen months later, Brown was fired after opening his second season with Los Angeles 1-4 despite his team having the league’s largest payroll.
Cleveland owner Dan Gilbert rehired Brown before the 2013-14 season, acknowledging during the introductory news conference that he regretted dismissing Brown the first time. A young Cavaliers team improved its record by nine wins. But when it missed the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year, Brown was unemployed again just one season into his five-year deal with Cleveland.
“I don’t think my dad has ever really gotten a fair chance,” said Elijah Brown, the oldest of Mike’s two sons and a rising senior guard at Oregon. “I mean, look at what he’s done. He took a (Cleveland) team that started Sasha Pavlovic to the Finals. He’s deserved better.”
After picking up his Joseph Abboud suit and dress shirt from the dry cleaner, Brown finds a private room at Oracle Arena to iron the shirt once more. This pregame press hushes his racing mind. He starts with the collar, gliding the iron from right to left, then left to right, before working his way down the inside of the shirt and, eventually, to the sleeves.
It is a stark contrast to Kerr, whose pregame routine includes grabbing whatever wrinkled T-shirt and pair of sweatpants he sees first. And that is precisely why they’re ideal co-workers: Laid-back to an extreme, Kerr appreciates having someone as meticulous as Brown around to help balance him out.
“He’s really detail-oriented,” said Kerr, who hired Brown as his lead assistant last summer. “I definitely use that to my advantage.”
A numbers whiz, Brown developed a substitution pattern in training camp that ensured that at least two of Golden State’s four core players — Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — would be on the floor at any point in the game. Having Brown, rotation sheet in hand, monitor the times for players to check in and out freed up Kerr to concentrate on what he does best: Relay his message to the team.
It also helped that Brown quickly built a bond with Green. Kerr and Green, two of the league’s most fiery competitors, had plenty of run-ins during their first two years together. The verbal sparring matches are far less frequent this season, in part because Brown is adept at reining in Green when necessary.
Still, the Warriors presented challenges for a man who has long relied on order. Unlike Brown, who lives in the fine print, Kerr keeps his focus on the macro level. He has fostered a joyful, family-oriented atmosphere where players are encouraged to run drills and offer input.
To mock his team’s new public image as the NBA’s new evil empire, Kerr distributed T-shirts to his players during training camp that read “Super Villains.” Hip-hop music thumps through the loudspeakers at every workout. An advocate for rest, Kerr is more apt to give his team a day off than practice an hour longer than initially scheduled. Humor is foundational to the locker-room culture.
In October, while leading an All-Star-laden group through offensive sets, Brown noticed several players exchange slightly annoyed glances. In that moment, he realized that a team filled with All-Stars and established role players doesn’t always call for his hands-on approach.
“A lot of times, they just need a little bit of direction,” Brown said. “Less really is more with this group, and that’s something Steve understands as well as anybody.”
Before Game 2 of last month’s first-round series against Portland, Kerr told Brown that the head and neck pain that had plagued him for nearly two years was worsening. Three days later, on the eve of Game 3, Kerr called to inform his assistant that he was taking an indefinite hiatus from the bench and would need Brown to take over.
During his stops with the Cavaliers and Lakers, Brown struggled to manage his emotions in games. Watching him fidget on the bench sometimes made players nervous. Now, as he fills in for Kerr, Brown is making a point to convey calm.
Early in the third quarter of Game 3 in Portland, with Golden State down 16 points, Brown subbed in Andre Iguodala for Zaza Pachulia. Little more than two minutes later, he put JaVale McGee in the game and kept Green on the floor. The high-octane, attacking lineup sparked the Warriors’ gamechanging comeback.
When Golden State dug a 25-point, first-half hole in Sunday’s Western Conference finals Game 1 against San Antonio, Brown kept his composure and reminded his players that no second-quarter deficit is too big for them to overcome. The Warriors stormed back after intermission to stun the Spurs, 113-111. With Tuesday’s Game 2 blowout win, Golden State improved to 10-0 in the postseason — one game shy of tying the NBA record for the best playoff start.
“The best thing about Mike is his demeanor,” general manager Bob Myers said. “When pushed into this position that we thrust him into, he’s who he is. He’s comfortable.”
“The reality of it is, I’m still not comfortable with this role,” said Brown, who consults with Kerr daily. “I’ve coached big games and big-time All-Star guys, but the culture Steve has laid down here, it’s so unique, so special, that I’m more concerned about screwing that up. I can’t be him, so I have to balance it between being myself and trying to do what I think is right — all while staying the course of what he has in place. It’s a fine and tricky line.”
During Brown’s 45-minute walk around Lake Merritt, passersby repeatedly stared at the affable-looking man in the black Warriors pullover. A man with thick dreadlocks broke from a conversation with his friend to ask, “Mike Brown, is that you?” A young woman stopped mid-jog to exclaim: “Oh, my God! I’m so glad I saw you! This just made my day!”
Brown grinned and waved with each acknowledgement. After three head-coaching stints that didn’t end on his own terms, he feels at home in the Bay Area. Brown, who is divorced and lives alone, sometimes hops on his beige green Harley-Davidson motorcycle after practice and rides through the Oakland hills. Before beginning his late-night video study, he often runs on the treadmill at his apartment complex while gazing at the lake below.
“It’s like a movie to me, because the scenery is … ,” Brown started to say before he was cut off by an elderly woman approaching.
“Good luck!” she shouted. “I’m praying for you. I really am. You have no idea. I know it’s a tough time, but you’re doing a great job.”
“The best thing about Mike is his demeanor . ... He’s who he is. He’s comfortable.” Bob Myers, Warriors’ general manager