NEW YORK -- While Brooklyn Nets interim coach Tony Brown was addressing reporters for the first time since taking over for his good friend, Lionel Hollins, the fire alarm went off at Barclays Center.
“Uh oh!” Brown joked. “It’s a good start.”
This certainly isn’t how Brown, 55, envisioned stepping into his first NBA head coaching job after spending several years as an assistant with eight different teams. But he’s going to try and make the best of it.
“Listen, we're a 10-27 team,” said Brown, who will stay on the job for the remainder of the season. “Obviously we haven't played well. We've had some key injuries. Our goal is to up our energy level. We want to play freer. We want to have a little bit more fun. But I'm not going in there and telling them, 'Hey, we need to make the playoffs.' Our job is to play a little bit harder, a little bit smarter.”
Brown spoke highly of Hollins, who was fired Sunday.
“We've been friends a long time. I understand the situation from the organization's standpoint. But I just wanted to thank him for giving me the opportunity to be on his staff. I think he's a solid basketball mind. I think it's unfortunate things went the way they did. But we spoke at length yesterday, he'll continue to be my friend, and I wish him the best,” Brown said. “He and his family went over the top for me this past year and a half. So I just wanted to thank him for the opportunity.”
Brown’s staff will include Hollins’ assistants Joe Wolf (lead), Jay Humphries, Steve Jones and Jim Sann.
“Everybody’s going to bump up a little bit,” said Brown, the team’s fifth head coach since moving to Brooklyn in 2012.
Brown spent seven years in the NBA as a player after the Nets selected him in the fourth round of the 1982 draft.
He plans to give the team’s younger players an opportunity to get minutes.
The Russian billionaire speaks: Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov addressed the team after firing Hollins and reassigning GM Billy King.
“He wanted us to go out there and have positive energy about us,” center Brook Lopez said. “He wanted us to go out, play hard every game, have fun and play for each other. Try to do our job. Represent Brooklyn and put a good product on the floor. He wanted us to know he was obviously going about his job figuring things out and talking to his advisors to see what they want to do next.”
Another coach for the B. Lo: Lopez is now on his eighth different coach as a Net. He and Hollins clashed on occasion.
“It was always interesting,” Lopez said of his relationship with Hollins. “It grew a lot through our season and a half together. I thought it was getting to be a very big positive for us.”
What’s the plan? Lopez doesn’t seem to know, at least as of yet.
“Obviously we're going in a different direction right now, so I'm in the dark in terms of that because everything happens so quickly,” he said. “But we'll see what goes on in terms of upper management and stuff like that in the next few days, I'm sure.
"As far as the situation now though, we have Tony Brown coaching, I'm very excited to be working with him, he's very specific as to what he wants from us today as we walked through shootaround, he expects us to play with energy, we can't be out there anymore just going through the motions, trying to get through a game. We want to play to win. We need to play hard and play together as long as we're out there.”
