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Everybody Hates Mike

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Still, when the Cavs arrived for training camp in September, they noticed a slight shift in how they were spending their time. To the casual fan, the offense looks basically the same — give it to James and get the hell out of the way. But Brown says he committed to spending more time working on it. "That's what I need to get better at," he says. "This year, we said, 'Hey, we can't do that 80-20 anymore. It's got to be at least 50-50.'"

The results won't likely satisfy Cleveland, because the results won't get James to promise that he'll never, ever leave. But the Cavs are improving.

The team's scoring is up slightly this year, despite missing James, Larry Hughes, Sasha Pavlovic, and Anderson Varejao for extended spells. The Cavs have twice scored 100 points in wins against Boston, the league's stingiest defense. And just hours before discussing his European vacation, Brown watched his team rattle off the most gorgeously explosive 12 minutes he's ever coached — a 43-point quarter against Washington, the 12th-best defense in the NBA.

The next morning, Brown held his usual press gaggle on the Cavs' practice floor. It was a chance, an on-camera opportunity, for Brown to deliver an I-told-you-so speech about offensive improvement. The reporters were more than willing to set him up.

"What number jumps out at you the most from that third quarter?" one asked. "Forty-three points, 14 assists, or no turnovers?"

But something else entirely had stood out to Brown. During that quarter, the Wizards had shot just 13 percent from the floor.

"I think that's the number," the coach finally decreed. "We did a solid job defensively."

Can Mike Brown coach? If anyone would know, it's his players. But there's something precarious about asking employees about their boss — especially in an industry where everyone believes his upside is limitless, if only he were better used.

So when you ask players to describe Brown's style or assess his growth, the responses tend to match their place in the organizational hierarchy. Donyell Marshall, whose numbers have fallen each year with the Cavs, turns away at the mention of his coach's name. "You're talkin' to the wrong guy," he says.

Ira Newble, whose minutes were cut in half after Brown's arrival, sucks in a long breath of cautious pause. "I don't know how he's gonna answer that," says Shannon Brown from the locker next door. He should know: The first-round pick has been twice sent to the NBA's developmental league, his future surely resting somewhere other than Cleveland.

Players satisfied with their role respond just as predictably. Daniel Gibson, a second-round pick now among the league's three-point leaders, calls Brown "the best coach I could've asked for. He just had a way of giving me confidence."

And LeBron — the only guy whose opinion matters, right? — speaks of Brown's approach like only a face-of-the-franchise can: "We understand how Coach Brown is. He let us do what we wanna do on the offensive end when we play defense . . . He gives a treat, basically, if we play defense."

Wherever his status rests, Brown's ability to reach his players is something he's been thinking about lately. As an assistant, he unquestionably connected. "Whether they weren't playing a lot and needed to be motivated, or maybe were overemotional and needed to come down a bit, he was always very good at it," says Popovich.

Tim Duncan bonded so tightly with Brown they still talk regularly, five years after the coach left San Antonio. "The guy I know is a big-time player's coach," Duncan says.

But reaching players as a head coach — as the boss — takes a new level of savvy.

With Brown's military precision comes a tendency to wade so deeply in details, he sometimes risks missing the big picture. It takes him four hours to watch a tape that should take two — "I'll rewind, I'll pause, I'll rewind, I'll pause." Win or lose, he takes pages and pages of notes, though he knows he doesn't have the time — or his players' patience — to dissect them.

"I got all these notes on one stupid game," he says, pulling a stapled mass of paper from a stack on his desk. "By the second page, [the players] are gonna be like, 'Hey, this guy's crazy.'"

While most coaches are men of obsession, Brown's mania scales new heights. His office is decorated with one framed poem — a gift from Popovich — about a stone-cutter hammering his way through a rock, taking 100 swings before he sees a single crack. And before Brown leaves at night, "I've gotta check my door to make sure it's locked 18 times."

"He's the most anal-retentive guy I've seen in coaching, and I've seen a lot of them," says former Pacers coach Rick Carlisle, who poached Brown from San Antonio in 2003. He recalls watching Brown iron his socks and ties before games. "I always told him, 'One of the hardest things you're gonna do is to learn how to edit yourself . . . Head coaching is very much about the big picture.'"

Along with tweaking his team's offense, Brown says watching Messina helped him understand the value of letting go — of focusing on getting "messages across to the players, and not having an hour-and-a-half film session every day."

Obviously, communication wasn't a crippling weakness: As the fifth-best defense in the NBA last year, with a roster devoid of defensive stars, his team apparently consumed Brown's defense-as-life sermons just fine. And for a guy who checks the locks 18 times, letting go will never be easy.

But once you power through his players' gut reactions — the grimaces that beg, Please don't ask me about my boss — you find that progress can be seen, even from the end of the bench.

"He's changed his coaching style a little bit to be a little bit more — what's the word? — versatile," says Newble, recently thrust into the starting lineup. "Coming in, he was pretty much set on his system. And now I'm noticing he's more open-minded to accepting doing something different or trying something one of us may suggest."

Even Marshall — the "wrong guy" to talk — eventually makes his way to a passionate defense of the coach. "We struggled early, but it had nothing to do with the coaching," he says. "I think he's doing the right things. There was a reason we were in the championship last year."

With that, Marshall rises and walks toward the locker room. He stops to talk to his coach. Before long, his mouth is emitting a noise that sounds an awful lot like laughter.

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