Lawrence Harvey Brown (born September 14, 1940) is an American basketball coach and former player who last served as an assistant coach for the Memphis Tigers. Brown is the only coach in basketball history to win both an NCAA national championship (Kansas Jayhawks, 1988) and an NBA title (Detroit Pistons, 2004). He has a 1,275–965 lifetime professional coaching record in the American Basketball Association (ABA) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and is the only coach in NBA history to lead eight teams (differing franchises) to the playoffs. He also won an ABA championship as a player with the Oakland Oaks in the 1968–69 season, and an Olympic gold medal in 1964. He is also the only person ever to coach two NBA franchises in the same season (Spurs and Clippers during the 1991–92 NBA season). Before coaching, Brown played collegiately at the University of North Carolina and professionally in the ABA.

Brown was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach on September 27, 2002. On July 8, 2021, the National Basketball Coaches Association awarded Brown the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early life and early basketball accomplishments Brown was born on September 14, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. His maternal grandfather, Hittelman, was from Minsk, Belarus. His mother's family immigrated to the United States in 1910 and opened a bakery in Brooklyn.Brown's mother met his father, Milton Brown, a furniture salesman, when she was 26 years old. Brown has an older brother, Herbert, who was also an NBA head coach. In 1947, Brown's father died suddenly of a ruptured aneurysm. His family later moved to Long Beach, New York, on Long Island. Brown's mother lived until the age of 106.

A point guard, Brown attended Long Beach High School. He won a gold medal with Team USA in basketball at the 1961 Maccabiah Games in Israel, on a team that included Art Heyman and Charley Rosen.

Brown attended University of North Carolina, where he played basketball under legendary coaches Frank McGuire and Dean Smith. Brown was an All-Atlantic Coast Conference player in 1963.

Playing career A stellar player for the Tar Heels in the early 1960s, Brown was considered too small to play in the NBA. He began his post-college career with the National Alliance of Basketball Leagues's Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, where he played for two years (1964–65). He led the Wingfoots to the 1964 AAU National Championship. Brown was selected for Team USA's 1964 Summer Olympics team, which won the gold medal.

After a two-year stint (1965–1967) as an assistant coach at North Carolina, Brown joined the upstart American Basketball Association, playing with the New Orleans Buccaneers (1967–68), Oakland Oaks (1968–69), Washington Caps (1969–70), Virginia Squires (1970–71), and Denver Rockets (1971–72). Brown was named MVP of the ABA's first All-Star Game in 1968, and was named to the All-ABA Second Team the same year. Brown led the ABA in assists per game during the league's first three seasons, and when he ended his playing career, Brown was the ABA's all-time assist leader. His total of 2,509 assists places him seventh on the ABA's career list, and he holds the ABA record for assists in a game with 23. He was a three-time ABA All-Star.Brown, Larry : Jews In Sports @ Virtual Museum

Coaching and management career

Early years: 1969–1983

Brown's first head coaching job was at Davidson College in North Carolina in 1969. He resigned after less than two months, having never fielded a team or coached a game. He did not discuss the reasons for his resignation, saying only that "it was in the best interests of Davidson and myself". He has later stated that it was a matter of the program reneging on promises made.

In the summer of 1972, with a sore hip that was plaguing his play with Denver (he later had it replaced), Brown was offered to coach the Carolina Cougars by team owner Tedd Munchak. Despite favoring college coaching over the pros, he elected to take the "great opportunity" and coach for $30,000. He then hired his friend and ex-teammate Doug Moe as an assistant coach. Using a "run-and-jump defense" that emphasized quickness and bench depth that could share minutes (at one point, Brown had four guards he had play equal time), the Cougars won 57 games in his first year; Billy Cunningham, who lept from the NBA, won league MVP that year. The passing-game offense emphasized moving the ball quickly rather than isolation. After the second season, Brown left the team.

Brown left to coach the Denver Nuggets in 1974. He soon built a rapport with the team, and in their first season, they scored 118.7 points per game and won the Western Division for the first time in five years with a 65–19 record. They made it to the Division Finals but lost in a seven-game series to the Indiana Pacers. The Nuggets, now packed in a league that went from nine teams to just seven by its end, won the most games with a record of 60–24. They defeated the Kentucky Colonels in a tight seven-game series reach their first and only ABA Finals. The Nuggets lost three of the first four games before winning Game 5 and leading in the third quarter of Game 6 before the Nets rallied back to win the game and the series. As it turned out, it was the final game of the American Basketball Association and the last time the Nuggets reached a league final until 2023. Despite the high fee to join the NBA and a new placement in the Midwest Division, the Nuggets went 50–32 and won the division title before losing to the eventual NBA champion Portland Trail Blazers in the First Round in six games. In the next season, they won 48 games for another division title and managed to win their first playoff series to get to the Conference Finals against the Seattle SuperSonics, where the Nuggets were beaten by the Sonics in six games. In the middle of the 1978–79 season, Brown clashed with general manager Carl Scheer over the latter's refusal to trade Dan Issel and elected on February 2, 1979, to resign under apparent strain of a near emotional collapse.

He then moved on to coach for UCLA (1979–1981), leading his freshman-dominated 1979–80 team to the NCAA title game before falling to Louisville, 59–54. However, that appearance was later vacated by the NCAA after two UCLA players were found to be ineligible—one of the few times a Final Four squad has had its record vacated. On March 17, 1981, Brown left UCLA to become head coach of the New Jersey Nets, which reportedly offered him a salary of over $170,000 a year that dwarfed what he made at UCLA. The team won 44 games in his first season and in their second season they were 47–29 before he was approached about the possibility of taking the job at the University of Kansas, who fired their coach after the end of the 1982–83 season. On April 6, 1983, with an offer to coach Kansas and advised by Nets owner Joe Taub that it would be best to leave now rather than at the end of the season, Brown resigned from the Nets and became coach at Kansas.

University of Kansas: 1983–1988 Brown began his tenure at the University of Kansas (1983–1988), replacing the fired Ted Owens, who had overseen back-to-back losing seasons in 1981–82 and 1982–83. Brown's impact was felt almost immediately, as the 1983–84 Jayhawks put together a 22–10 record, finished in second place in that year's Big 8 standings, upset Oklahoma to win the 1984 Big 8 Tournament, and advanced to the 1984 NCAA Tournament's Round of 32 before losing to Wake Forest. In the meantime Brown signed the most coveted high school player in the country, Danny Manning, to play for KU after signing his father, Ed Manning, to a position as an assistant coach.

Perhaps Brown's finest team at Kansas was the 1985–86 team. This squad put together a 35–4 record, the first 30-win season in KU history. They won the Big 8 regular season title for the first time since 1978, defeated Iowa State to win the 1986 Big 8 Tournament, and advanced to the 1986 Final Four before losing to Duke in the semifinals.

In the 1987–88 season, Kansas got off to a mediocre 12–8 start, including 1–4 in the Big 8, and the end of the Jayhawks' 55-game homecourt winning streak in Allen Fieldhouse. Ultimately, behind the high-scoring of Danny Manning, KU rallied to win nine of their next twelve games to finish third place in the Big 8 and qualify for the 1988 NCAA tournament as a 6-seed in the Midwest Regional. Kansas then proceeded to defeat 11th-seed Xavier, 14th-seed Murray State, and 7th-seed Vanderbilt before meeting rival Kansas State, which had beaten KU twice in three meetings that year. KU upset the 4th-seeded Wildcats 71–58 in the Elite Eight to reach the Final Four in Kansas City's Kemper Arena. Once there, Kansas upset the East Region's #2 seed Duke, 66–59, avenging an overtime loss at home to the Blue Devils earlier in the season. Two nights later, the Jayhawks, who became known as "Danny and the Miracles", upset the Southeast Region's #1-seed and fellow Big 8 rival Oklahoma, 83–79, to avenge a regular-season sweep by the Sooners and win the 1988 NCAA championship. Manning, who scored 31 points and grabbed 18 rebounds in the final, was named Most Outstanding Player of the Tournament. Kansas concluded the year 27–11; the 11 losses remain a record for most losses by an NCAA champion to this day.

Two months later, Brown opted to return to professional coaching, departing KU for the San Antonio Spurs. In his five seasons at Kansas, Brown had one Big 8 regular season title, two Big 8 postseason titles, five NCAA Tournament appearances, three Sweet 16 appearances, two trips to the Final Four, and one national title. As a collegiate coach, he had a cumulative coaching record of 177–61 (.744) in seven seasons, including a 135–44 (.754) record at Kansas. His efforts led to him being named "Coach of the Year" for the NCAA in 1988 and "Coach of the Year" for the Big Eight Conference in 1986.

After Brown left Kansas to return to the NBA, NCAA sanctions were levied against Kansas in the 1988–89 season as a result of multiple recruiting violations; potential transfer Vincent Askew was provided with money to leave his campus to visit his ill grandmother, and the "casual administration of a summer jobs program" that was linked to other "violations of NCAA regulations." No players on any of Brown's teams were named in the report, and Askew did not transfer to Kansas. The Jayhawks were given three years' probation and banned from the 1989 NCAA Tournament–to date, the only time a defending champion has been barred from defending its title. They were also docked one scholarship for the 1989–90 season, and barred from paid visits during the 1989 calendar year. As harsh as these sanctions were, the infractions committee seriously considered imposing a "death penalty" on Kansas, which would have resulted in canceling the entire 1988–89 season. Indeed, enforcement director David Berst said that Kansas was "on the bubble" for a death penalty. However, the committee opted against imposing a death penalty because Askew was the only player who received impermissible benefits, and because Brown had returned to the NBA by then.

San Antonio Spurs: 1988–1992