Everybody Hates Mike

"You get defensive," Brown says. "Your insides start to boil over. What does he know? He's not in my shoes!"

But Brown, famous for his devotion to film, had watched the same games that Ferry had. And while it pained him to admit it, he'd come to the same conclusion. "Offensively," he says, "we were horrible."

How that came to be was part design, part DNA. In his first two years on the bench, Brown spent as much as 80 percent of the time talking about defense. "That's what I told Dan Gilbert: 'When I first get to your team, I'm laying the foundation defensively.'"

But defense was also what he knew. Brown played high-school basketball in Germany — his dad was in the Air Force — and college at the University of San Diego. But he was never gifted enough to star on offense.

"I could never score. I could never shoot," he says. "I just go to my strength. You could always just give effort defensively."

That continued into his career as a video coordinator, a scout, and eventually an assistant, as coaches tapped his military-bred attention to detail, his willingness to spend hours in the film room. "As an assistant coach . . . you don't make up offenses," he says. "You don't call plays." By the time he arrived in Cleveland in 2005, Brown says, "I had never put in an offense."

So he went to see the Italian.

Brown spent 10 days at Messina's training camp, studying an offense that, simply put, involves more movement of ball and bodies. What he learned wouldn't turn the Cavs into an offensive juggernaut. Even if Brown wanted to, he doesn't have players to engineer such a transformation. "It's hard when you don't have a point guard," says Ric Bucher, who covers the NBA for ESPN. "You don't have a lot of guys who are good at moving without the ball. So now you're stuck."

And for all of James' talents, Bucher says, "What you can do with him offensively is more limited than you would think."

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."