That Coach of the Year trophy has a short shelf life

Unable to lead Jason Kidd (left) and the Mavs on a deep playoff run, Avery Johnson was shown the door only two years after winning the Coach of the Year award. AP Steve Aschburner's Mailbag Submit a comment or question for Steve. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

Awards are nice and trophies are cool. Everybody should have a trophy. Come to think of it, among folks under age 35 or so, everybody probably does have a trophy, thanks to the national "no child's self-esteem left behind" movement.

There are, however, some awards you probably should not aspire to win. Like Miss or Mister Congeniality in pretty much any pageant. Or MVP of the San Quentin softball league. Or Cathouse Customer of the Year, presented by HBO.

Or, it seems pretty clear this week, the NBA Coach of the Year.

Dallas' Avery Johnson, deemed the best in his business just 24 months ago by a voting body of more than 120 writers and broadcasters, was fired Wednesday after the Mavericks' second consecutive quick exit from the playoffs. Phoenix's Mike D'Antoni, who won the same award one year earlier as an acclaimed offensive mastermind with the Suns, might be on his way out of the desert.

Then there is Toronto's Sam Mitchell, the 2007 COY whose job security was bandied about in the final days of the Raptors' blink-and-you-missed-it postseason. Mitchell has two years and $9.5 million left on his contract, the biggest disincentive for management to make a change (it would have to pay his replacement a head-coaching salary, on top of that). Yet Raptors general manager Bryan Colangelo was not the exec who hired Mitchell, his old pal D'Antoni soon could be available and, in a Toronto Star online poll Thursday, Mitchell's coaching took 30 percent of the fans' blame for the team's first-round failure.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that Byron Scott, named just the other day as the NBA's top coach for 2007-08, is in trouble in New Orleans. Let's just say, based on recent history, that the Hornets' bench boss is on the clock.

Going back to 1993-94, to capture the past 15 COY winners beginning with Atlanta's Lenny Wilkens, six of them were fired not long after winning their awards. They are: Wilkens (1994), Del Harris (1995), Mike Dunleavy (1999), Doc Rivers (2000), Rick Carlisle (2002) and now Johnson. Phil Jackson was at least nudged out in Chicago two years after winning the honor in 1996, a bit of semantics that now might befall D'Antoni.

Meanwhile, Pat Riley (1997) keeps firing and rehiring himself. Larry Bird (1998) and Hubie Brown (2004) let the jobs get to them and left, whereas Larry Brown (2001) just keeps on getting himself to the jobs. That leaves just San Antonio's Gregg Popovich (2003), Scott and, er, Mitchell as our cornerstones of stability. And this is just among the coaching elite. It's like tracking a dropout pattern for valedictorians; you don't even want to look at what's happening with the C students.

"I don't think it was anything specific with Avery,'' Mavs owner Mark Cuban said in a TV interview Wednesday night. "But it's a team game and all the pieces have to fit together. The pieces just weren't fitting together. Unfortunately, in this business, you have to make changes.''

Of course. It's just like the underwear- and socks-wearing business, only more often. And everyone involved knows it. Of the 30 men who began this season as NBA head coaches, 20 of them have been fired, either since November or from similar jobs in previous seasons. Seven still are in their first head-coaching gigs, leaving only three (Jackson, Riley and Nate McMillan) who have worked their careers (mostly) on their own terms.

"More than anything, I knew that, after this year, we were probably going to be going in a different direction,'' Johnson said Wednesday on a popular Dallas radio show. "This is not a separation or split or situation where I have been removed from my coaching duties that is a bitter situation. This is something that needed to happen. It's happened. There's no animosity, no bitterness, nothing.''

Why should there be? Almost always, the fired fellow walks away with millions of dollars, either in money already earned or years still owed -- regardless, it's way better than what assistants coaches, TV analysts or Dairy Queen managers make. It's not as if future employment ever is a problem, anyway. In the reliable old game of coaching musical chairs, in this age of proliferating networks and 30 oversized coaching staffs, it's like someone keeps adding a chair each time the music stops. Carlisle, Hubie Brown, Mike Fratello, Jeff Van Gundy, all wearing headsets and microphones, in an on-site, sideline temp service offering not-so-cheap labor.

Fans like frequent coaching changes because they offer hope, however hollow, and media folks like them, too, because they generate headlines. General managers get to look proactive while keeping the wolves away from their own doors. And then there are the owners, the real driving forces behind most of these moves.

Firing the coach generally is an impulsive, petulant act, something that surely appeals to the inner Trump in the billionaires and multimillionaires who own sports teams. Think about it: So many other areas of building and running a sports franchise are drawn-out, studied and analyzed processes, not unlike the enterprises in which owners earned all their money in the first place. Teams have offseason plans. Organizations prepare for the draft, study the upcoming free-agent class. Their "salary capologists'' calculate and project the luxury-tax implications of every possible roster manipulation.

But a coach gets ... fired! Axed! Whacked! Dumped! And (ooh, goose bumps) terminated! It's fast, it's abrupt, it's definitive and, best of all, it's decisive. Boom! Gone!

Where's the fun in owning your own pro sports franchise if, metaphorically, you have to eat three square meals, and weigh your portions, and count calories and fat grams, and grocery-shop mostly in the aisle of fruits and vegetables? Every so often, you have to suddenly swerve your land barge into the drive-thru and super-size every last artery-choking taste sensation on the menu.

Now that's what being a rich guy is all about. Firing and, to a lesser extent, hiring head coaches is ownership ego unbound.

It all flows from expectations, too. That's why fellas such as Johnson -- fastest ever to win 50, 100 and 150 regular-season games but with one blown Finals and two hasty eliminations on his résumé -- get dumped and why Flip Saunders and Mike Brown still were sweating this week. Meanwhile, lottery-land coaches such as Lawrence Frank and Randy Wittman slept soundly last night, thanks to low expectations or owners who are distracted by other areas of mogulship.

So maybe it isn't fair. Maybe it doesn't make sense. But being at the top of your profession, then winding up on the bottom not so very long after, is part of every NBA head coaches' high-risk/high-reward bargain.

Awards are nice and trophies are cool. But the coolest thing about the Red Auerbach trophy is that, next to the little bronze statuette of the legendary Celtics' coach, there is room on the little bronze bench for a little bronze "Will Work For Food'' sign. To be added, almost inevitably, at a later date.

Steve Aschburner covered the Minnesota Timberwolves and the NBA for 13 seasons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has served as president or vice president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association since 2005. His new book, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: Minnesota Twins, can be ordered here.