Brown, like his teams, comes back

Larry Brown was back in town. Of course, when isn’t he?

No other coach in NBA history can have homecomings in nine league cities (Denver, East Rutherford, N.J., San Antonio, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York and Charlotte, N.C.).

His present home, Charlotte, counts because his first pro team, the ABA Carolina Cougars, operated as a regional franchise and played there.

Of course, when you hit double-figure gigs, it’s harder and harder to find somewhere you haven’t already been.

Counting the Cougars and his two college jobs (UCLA, Kansas), Brown is at 12. If you include the two jobs he accepted and then gave back (UCLA, which rehired him in 1988, for a few days, anyway; Davidson, his first job, which he left when they wouldn’t carpet his office), it’s 14.

There’s a word for this: meshugeh. If Brown’s name isn’t already next to it in the English-Yiddish dictionary, his career isn’t over.

Nevertheless, there’s a coolly rational reason why, with Brown at 67, teams will still go through this tsuris, which is Yiddish for a tour of duty with any of his teams.

When you’re as good as he is -- and nobody may ever have been better, although a lot were more lucid -- you can go through 11 jobs and they still call you “Coach.”

In all but one case, Brown performed wonders, with three actual miracles, like taking the young Bruins to the 1980 NCAA title game, or his Kansas team that took a 21-11 record into the NCAA tournament and won the 1988 title, or the underdog Pistons who shocked the Lakers in the 2004 Finals.

And it’s happening again. . . .

Brown arrived Tuesday night with his new team, the Charlotte Bobcats, who proceeded to rock the Lakers’ world, beating them, 117-110, in double overtime.

“I was thinking we had to go to Portland [for a game tonight],” Brown said after the game. “Right now I think we could fly there without the plane.”

After starting 7-18, the Bobcats have gone 12-8, sparked by the arrival of Brown-style journeymen Boris Diaw and Raja Bell, who came from Phoenix in a trade for Jason Richardson, a famous 20-point scorer.

“If we had this group from the first day with the schedule we had, I think we’d be all right,” Brown said before the game. “We had a really favorable schedule and we weren’t ready to take advantage of that. And I don’t think from a coaching perspective I helped very much because I had no clue, how we should play, who should play.

“If you watched us in exhibitions, I honestly didn’t believe we could win any games.”

Justifying his belief in them, the Bobcats went 0-8 in the preseason. In the first quarter of the exhibition opener, Orlando outscored them, 41-9.

With Brown, it’s always darkest before the dawn, even if it’s more like a flash of lightning, after which comes the storm.

Twelve jobs later, he can still go into detail why each one could have been the one he never left.

“My first job, the team [Carolina] moved to St. Louis and my owner then sold the team and didn’t let them take me,” Brown said. “But I’ve been really fortunate, even though I’ve left places, they’ve all been pretty sensational experiences.

“And then when you see seven guys [the number of NBA coaches fired this season] get axed in our league, you realize how lucky you are.”

He never realized it as much as he did after his nightmare in New York, where the Big Censor, corporate boss James Dolan, fired him after one season, more for his candor than for going 23-59. Dolan’s Knicks went 23-59 all the time.

Not that Brown needs any other reason to coach, other than the fact he’s alive, but it wasn’t something he took lightly. “When you get fired, somebody tells you you’re a failure so that’s not a comfortable feeling,” he said.

Knicks or no Knicks, a good day for Brown is one when he has a gym to go to. In his two seasons away, he went to other teams’ gyms, mainly that of Villanova, near his Philadelphia Main Line home, where Coach Jay Wright almost put him on his staff.

“It’s been my life,” says Brown. “I never worked a day in my life so it’s a pretty neat thing to do. Only 30 of us have this job.”

Few, indeed, could ever do the voodoo he do.

“Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t,” says Old Lodge Skins in the movie “Little Big Man.”

Sometimes the magic still works for Larry Brown, too.

--

mark.heisler@latimes.com