No suprise here.....Hubie Brown wins coach of the Year award.......

So we're more impressed with the Grizz roster than the job Brown did?

This team won 28 games in 2003 -- a club record! They won 50 this year. In the same tough conference in which the Jazz missed the playoffs. And Posey was their best signing of the year? Sloan impressed -- no doubt.

Brown deserved the award.

 

Look what that great coaching is getting Memphis in the playoffs right now.

Memphis should've been the top seed in the West - they signed James Posey, remember?

I guess no one was impressed by the job JVG did with the Rockets this year ... are you telling me taking a team that supposedly severely underachieved at 43-39 and getting them to 45-37 with better players isn't a big deal?

 

They'll play four more games than Utah.



(Utah, people. Utah. The Jazz).

 

I've read the arguments on both sides and I'm now ready to make my choice: Sloan easily. I think there is a good argument for Hubie Brown that hasn't quite been made yet: the Grizzlies have had a corporate culture of losing since their inception. Brown has finally managed to break that cycle. His contribution to the franchise in the league has been invaluable in that regard -- he's finally given that team some pride. But, had it been another team in the doldrums that had once been great -- the Sonics for example -- I don't think it would be considered remarkable coaching. It was a great contribution, but only good coaching. For good coaching, it has to go to Sloan because he built something out of nothing, and in so doing, showed how much other coaches are wasting when they have actual talent and yet can't get them to play hard and with discipline.

 

Rudy T has left the building.

 

Well, maybe PJ would have done better with the Utah team since he would have moulded AK47 into the next Jordan and Ostertag into the next Shaq?

 

Finally, someone who deserves it...Congrats...

 

Doc Rivers did a great job his first year in the league, he really did. His team almost seemed to suffer when they got that big name star.

Sloan got those guys to win more than a few games, they won 42. . .
Sloan did the impossible

Hubie did the improbable

Both coaches did a great job this year but one team had limited talent, meaning 3 or 4 guys that belong on an NBA team let alone start on one. While the other coach had a vast collection of talent that he got to play hard, together and near their potential.

Sloan got a bunch of nobodys to exceed their potential as a team. A truley amazing coaching job.

And people, Hubies team won 8 more games than Sloans. 8. the fact the Jazz did not make the playoffs is a testiment to the Western Confrence. The fact that Memphis almost had homecort advantage because they won 8 more games than a team that did not make it is a testiment to the parity or tight races at the top.

 

I miss Hubie Brown in the booth to be quite honest. Dude is the Peter Gammons of the NBA. I love hearing his knowledge.

 

i have thought about this for a minute and i would have to with Jerry Sloan. the jazz suck in a lot of ways, including there players. they won 8 less games then the Grizz. have to go with sloan.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs2004/columns/story?columnist=stein_marc&id=1786825

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Hubie casts his vote for Jerry

By Marc Stein
ESPN.com

The playoffs hadn't yet begun when Hubie Brown shared two provocative proclamations with us.

No matter what was about to happen against the San Antonio Spurs, Brown was already ready to say that "this is probably the best coaching job I've ever done."

And ...

"If I were voting as a TNT employee," Hubie said, "I would vote Jerry Sloan for Coach of the Year. I hope he wins it."

The bloody Spurs and the blasted voters have dashed Hubie's hopes. San Antonio's withering defense snuffed Memphis twice to welcome the Grizzlies to playoff basketball. The majority of Coach of the Year ballot-holders, meanwhile, have apparently decided that the 70-year-old who took the Grizz -- the Grizz -- from 28 wins to 50 had no choice but to extend Sloan's COY drought in Utah to 16 seasons.

"I sat down the other day and counted this up," Brown said. "There are 10 guys you can legitimately vote for in the Coach of the Year (category). I hope (Sloan) wins because he has been overlooked on a minimum of three -- maybe five -- occasions. He has done a marvelous job with that Utah team. He's a man's man and a great coach and if I were voting, that's who I would vote for."

Hubie's right. The COY field, always a deep one, is so rich this time that worthy contenders like Stan Van Gundy and Terry Porter and Jeff Bzdelik scarcely get a mention. The coaches who had great seasons with elite teams -- Rick Carlisle, Flip Saunders, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich -- are ignored even more than usual. That's largely because of Brown and Sloan, two vets who make a stronger case for sharing this award than even those rookies we're always discussing.

You're seeing now, in this Spurs series, what kind of job Hubie did with the Grizz to get them to 50 wins. The reason he plays 10 or 11 guys every night, instead of the standard NBA eight-man rotation, is because wearing the opposition down with depth is Memphis' only chance to compete against the good teams. Pau Gasol, James Posey, Bonzi Wells -- nice players, all. Not stars, though. Consider, furthermore, that Brown's players had a combined 74 games of playoff experience going into Game 1 at San Antonio. The Spurs? A collective 629 games, second only to the Lakers' 862.

Of course, there's a reason Sloan got Hubie's (and my) vote. The Jazz lost Karl Malone and John Stockton after last season, lost Matt Harpring a mere 31 games into this one and sported a roster so full of no-names that several ESPN staffers probably could have crashed it. Not just Anthony and Legler. Me and Bucher, too.

Not that Sloan stopped to notice. The Jazz still ground out 42 wins, amid predictions of a 9-73 season. Utah missed the playoffs for the first time in Sloan's career, but missed by only one game, convincing many of us that this would finally be the year Sloan won the COY trophy he always says he couldn't care less about.

Like we said, though, this is the category where you absolutely can't go wrong. As much as even he'd like to see Sloan finally win one -- Brown was the COY with Atlanta in 1977-78 -- Hubie justifies his selection by giving the West a 50-win team no one saw coming.

"C'mon," Brown said. "If anyone told you that (before the season), you'd just walk away. You'd say the guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

"It's been a miraculous type of year. It's been very rewarding and very rewarding for our players, but more so for the city. The city is just so happy. It's a great high school and college basketball city, they love the game. But they weren't sure about the pro game. Now they're really caught up in the pro game.

"Fifty is a benchmark number in the NBA, and I keep getting that to (the players), that they will remember this team for the rest of their lives. Because people were predicting them to win anywhere from 29 to 35 games, and they made it happen, with all of the close games that they've won. I think we're 33-2 when we're leading going into the fourth quarter. We have 14 wins from 10 (points) down entering the fourth quarter, and the next-closest team has nine. These guys do a lot of things which none of us really knew they could do."

Jerry West had the vision/daring to bring Brown back to coaching at 69, after 17 years away, and Brown makes it clear that he wouldn't have won anything without the "great help from Jerry, his intuition to always bring the right type of guy in here." Brown's coaching, nevertheless, has been as convincing as anyone's, after all the initial skepticism about his ability to relate to today's kiddies with his taskmaster reputation from the 1980s.

Only one question remains, then.

Will the freshly minted Coach of the Year be back next year?

"Jerry and I have a deal that I will tell him at the end of each year whether I can continue," Hubie said. "I have a very solid contract. They were very generous. But I have to see how my wife and family feel about it and also where I am in my health situation."

Leaning one way or the other, Hubie?

"No, not at all."

But ...

"When this is all over, I'll always have a special feeling for this team."

Marc Stein is the senior NBA writer for ESPN.com. To e-mail him, click here. Also, click here to send a question for possible use on ESPNEWS.

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Seriously now, even Hubie knows Sloan shoulda won...

 

Better him than a Jazzhole.