Brown Out With Knicks

Larry Brown has left another team under unusual circumstances, although this time he has no landing pad in sight.

Brown, hailed as the savior of the New York Knicks when he was hired as coach last summer, was fired Thursday when the team pulled the plug on an experiment that went awry almost from the start.

Isiah Thomas, the team’s president and general manager, who has been criticized for many of the Knicks’ problems in recent years, was selected as Brown’s replacement.

The Knicks had the league’s highest payroll and a 23-59 record last season, matching the most losses in the franchise’s 60-year history.

Brown, 65, has made a career of brief and successful stints as a turnaround coach and still has four years and about $40 million remaining on his contract. It is unclear how much he will collect, although the Knicks do not want to pay him all of it. NBA Commissioner David Stern reportedly could become an arbiter in this contract dispute.

Since the Knicks’ season ended two months ago, the uncertainty over Brown’s future resembled a soap opera. The Knicks wanted Brown to quit so they could avoid paying him a settlement, a standoff that led Brown to refer to himself as a “dead man walking” last month.

Brown continued to show up at the Knicks’ training facility to monitor pre-draft workouts with amateur prospects. Then came Thursday, six days before the NBA draft. The Brooklyn-born Brown, who said coaching the Knicks was his “dream job” last July, was no longer employed.

“No one in our organization is happy with last season and we all accept responsibility for our performance,” Thomas said in a statement. “Larry Brown is a great coach, but for various reasons, bringing him to the Knicks did not turn out the way we had hoped and we wish him the best in the future.”

The Knicks’ future has landed in the lap of Thomas, who went 131-115 as the Indiana Pacers’ coach from 2000 to ’03.

During his 2 1/2 years as Knicks general manager, Thomas has assembled an unbalanced roster with two former All-Stars, Stephon Marbury and Steve Francis, fighting for time at point guard. Barring a successful trade or two, things aren’t likely to improve for the Knicks any time soon.

The Knicks are well over the salary cap for years to come and have a host of older players on the downsides of their careers. Last season’s $125-million payroll doubled that of the NBA champion Miami Heat.

Next season the Knicks’ financial commitments include a group of aging veterans: $17 million to Marbury, $17 million to Jalen Rose, $15 million to Francis, $10 million to Maurice Taylor and $7.5 million to Malik Rose.

Also, center Jerome James, a free-agent acquisition from Seattle last summer, has four years and $24 million left on his contract after averaging 2.9 points last season. He arrived at training camp out of shape, was suspended halfway through the season and played in only 22 games.

Thomas’ late-season acquisition of Francis was questioned because the Knicks already had Marbury at point guard. Predictably, feelings were hurt, and Marbury bickered publicly with Brown as the Knicks continued their descent to the bottom of the Eastern Conference.

One New York tabloid began referring to the Knicks as “Team Titanic.”

Despite finishing with the league’s second-worst record, the Knicks don’t have a high draft pick next week because they traded the selection to Chicago last year for center Eddy Curry.

A shake-up was needed. Brown, who alienated some players with his tell-it-like-it-is demeanor, was the one to go.

“We hired him last summer with the expectation that he would be with the Knicks for a long time,” said James L. Dolan, chairman of Madison Square Garden, the Knicks’ parent company. “After careful consideration, despite the best intentions from everyone involved, this current structure did not work for us last season and I did not think it was going to improve next season.”

The Knicks were the eighth NBA team Brown had coached in a 23-year pro career. He also spent two seasons as UCLA’s coach and, in one of his longer stays, five seasons at Kansas, where he won the 1988 NCAA championship.

He left the Detroit Pistons last summer, accepting a buyout after leading the Pistons to a title and two NBA Finals in two seasons.

The Knicks’ media guide last fall stated that Brown’s “long coaching odyssey has finally reached its most appropriate and symbolic destination.” It never quite materialized that way.