Sloan, Brown have stood the test of time in dramatically different ways

Larry Brown (left) has won games with nine NBA teams, while Jerry Sloan has racked up more than 1,000 victories with Utah. AP (2) Related Links McCALLUM: Brown now part of Charlotte's web SI VAULT: Sloan in no hurry to leave (02.11.02) PHOTO GALLERY: Larry Brown's odyssey

Some numbers and thoughts inspired by the matchup Friday night between the Jazz's Jerry Sloan and the Bobcats' Larry Brown, with their 48 combined seasons as NBA head coaches and, as of tip-off in downtown Charlotte, their 2,107 regular-season victories:

• Brown isn't exactly the anti-Sloan among NBA coaches; that label would belong to someone who a) moved around a lot, which Sloan hasn't, and b) lost more often than he won, another non-Sloan activity. Someone, in other words, like Kevin Loughery, who compiled a 474-662 (.417) record yet got hired (and fired) by six different NBA franchises. But Brown sure took a different path to the all-timer status he shares with the Utah coach.

Brown has changed NBA teams six times since Sloan got promoted in Salt Lake City on Dec. 9, 1988, replacing Frank Layden. Overall, Brown has won or lost games for nine of the league's 30 franchises. He showed up for work most often with Philadelphia, coaching the 76ers in 460 games from 1997-98 through 2002-03. He won 255 of them, his most in any one place.

Sloan, when Utah beat Oklahoma City last Friday, became the first coach in league history to reach 1,000 victories with one franchise. He has a margin of more than 200 over the next closest contender; Red Auerbach won 795 games with the Celtics, after winning 143 with Washington and Tri-Cities from 1946-50. San Antonio's Gregg Popovich is the only active coach even halfway to Sloan's mark, with 634 and counting. Sloan has worked 1,599 of the Jazz's 2,764 games dating back to the team's inception in New Orleans in 1974. Five different coaches -- Scotty Robertson, Elgin Baylor, Butch Van Breda Kolff, Tom Nissalke and Layden -- divided up Utah's first 14 seasons, with Sloan handling the past 21.

• Both Sloan and Brown have logged 24 seasons as NBA coaches. Brown's teams have gone to the playoffs 17 times and have won 50 games or more on eight occasions, while finishing below .500 four times. He has taken clubs to seven division titles, three conference crowns and, with Detroit in 2004, one NBA championship. Brown also ranks as the fifth-winningest coach in ABA history, going 229-107 in four seasons there.

Sloan's teams have reached the postseason 19 times, with 12 seasons of 50 victories or more (he was on pace for a 13th if you count Utah's 37-13 mark in the 1998-99 lockout year). He has finished with a sub-.500 record three times, just once with the Jazz. Utah has won eight division titles under Sloan and two Western Conference crowns. His two NBA Finals teams lost to Michael Jordan, coach Phil Jackson and the Bulls in 1997 and '98.

• Sloan never has been named the NBA's Coach of the Year in the annual balloting of media members, a bauble that Brown got in 2001. That is quite different, however, from saying that Sloan never deserved to win it. Nine times, he has won more games that season than the award winner. He did that as way back as 1980-81 with Chicago, when the Bulls went 45-37 but Indiana's Jack McKinney got the award after a 44-38 finish, and Sloan did it as recently as 2006-07 when the Jazz went 51-31 but Toronto's Sam Mitchell got honored for a 47-35 record. In Sloan's most successful seasons -- when the Jazz won 60 or more in 1994-95 and the two Finals years -- he bested the COY winner each time, posting a composite 186-60 record to Del Harris', Pat Riley's and Larry Bird's 167-79.

Voters for COY tend to be enamored of improvement, the strides a team takes from one season to the next, often from a fired coach to a new one. The clubs directed by Harris (+15), Riley (+19) and Bird (+19) all jumped in the standings the seasons in which they won coaching honors. Sloan, meanwhile, has "improved'' only once by more than 10 victories (from 26-56 in 2004-05 to 41-41 the next season) and he didn't reach the playoffs that year. It is Jazz owner Larry Miller's, er, fault that Sloan never gets to replace anyone who has gotten fired.

• The Bobcats will play 25 games this season against teams Brown previously coached. The Jazz will play a total of two against Sloan's previous NBA employer (Bulls).

• Brown was coaching in San Antonio when Sloan took over as Jazz boss in December 1988. He and Don Nelson are the only two guys who were NBA head coaches then and now. Nellie is even with the same team, Golden State, but logged a partial season in New York and then, after a sabbatical year, eight years with Dallas.

Of the other 22 head coaches then, many still are active in the NBA in some capacity. For example, Harris and Bernie Bickerstaff share the same bench now as Vinny Del Negro's wingmen in Chicago. Doug Collins and Mike Fratello, after various coaching stops, are back to wearing TV headsets. But there are a number of blasts-from-the-past names, too, including Jimmy Rodgers, John McLeod, Doug Moe, Gene Shue and Mike Schuler. Phoenix's Cotton Fitzsimmons, named Coach of the Year at the end of Sloan's first Utah season, died in 2004.

Interestingly, five of the league's 25 head coaches were African-American when Sloan took over: Bickerstaff, Lenny Wilkens, Don Chaney, Willis Reed and Wes Unseld. Twenty years later, the share has grown from 20 percent to 36.7, with 11 of 30 teams employing black coaches (Mitchell, Mike Woodson, Doc Rivers, Mike Brown, Michael Curry, Byron Scott, Maurice Cheeks, Terry Porter, Nate McMillan, Reggie Theus and Eddie Jordan).