Last night the Pistons lost game 6 of the Eastern Conference championship to the Boston Celtics, and thus lost the series. Like a lot of Pistons fans I'm disappointed, but not surprised. How many of us really believed we had a shot at the title this year, anyway? Nevertheless, I was hoping we could at least get past Boston. As I wrote in an earlier post, in Boston we had the perfect matchup for the team's weakest link, Flip Saunders. Indeed, Celtic coach Doc Rivers was probably the only coach left among the final four teams against whom Flip had a fighting chance.

The coach is important in the NBA, even more important than in other sports. Mediocre coaches win super bowls, NCAA basketball titles, the world series, whatever. But rarely in the NBA. The winning coaches from the past two decades are all people who've struck me as smart and capable of motivating a team: Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Larry Brown. (I don't really know too much about Rudy Tomjanovich, who coached the Rockets to two championships during the MJ interregnum—I was in Turkey at the time. Perhaps he's an exception, I can't say.)

The Pistons had a coach that I liked, years ago. Rick Carlisle took a Pistons team that was supposed to finish last in their division and instead won fifty games with them two years in a row. In 2003, the Pistons made it to the conference finals, only to be swept by New Jersey. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing turnaround.

Carlisle was fired—I think the official reason was that he was rude to people—and Larry Brown was brought in. Larry was a coach I immediately liked. So smart, articulate. Moreover, everyone on that team seemed to add a wrinkle to his game under Larry. Chauncey started acting like a real point guard, Ben Wallace started shooting (under Carlisle, Wallace had been forbidden from shooting, but Larry forced him to). In 2004, the Pistons won a championship, then lost in seven to San Antonio in 2005.

Maybe the Pistons had learned all they could from Larry by that time, who knows? Maybe that's why he wanted out, because he sensed that he'd given them all he could. In any case, he left. Obviously, he rubbed a lot of people (myself included) the wrong way by negotiating with Cleveland for their GM job while still coaching Detroit in the playoffs. It was inexcusable. All the same, the man had just taken the team to the finals two years in a row. What a waste.

It may have not seemed like a big deal to Larry, but a lot of
people in Detroit were pretty ticked off when he started negotiating
with Cleveland in the middle of the playoffs

Could the Pistons have won another championship with Larry? Nobody knows, of course. What we do know is that the Pistons fired Larry, hired Flip Saunders and things haven't been the same since. The point is: good coaches are rare, and in the NBA it is almost essential to have a good coach in order to win the title. When you've got one, you should try to hang on to him. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it now seems pretty obvious that the Pistons made a monumental mistake in getting rid of Larry Brown.

And now people will want to have Flip Saunders fired. Okay, I'm not against the idea—but who do you replace him with? While I'm pretty confident that the Pistons will never win a title with Flip at the helm, there's no point in firing him only to replace him with Flip 2.0.

Maybe we can wait a year until Larry leaves Charlotte.

Or maybe this team has just missed its chance.