Pistons hire Frank as new head coach

DETROIT -- Lawrence Frank will be the Detroit Pistons' sixth coach in 11 seasons, according to a team source.

The four-year deal with Frank will be officially announced by the Pistons during a press conference currently scheduled for Wednesday.

Frank, an assistant coach with Boston last season and a former head coach in New Jersey replaces John Kuester, who was fired by the Pistons in June after they missed the playoffs in both of his two seasons.

A deliberate coaching search, which also included Mike Woodson, Kelvin Sampson, Bill Laimbeer and Patrick Ewing, ended with the franchise choosing to give Frank another shot at a head coaching job.

While Frank might be the least sexiest of hires, he's also Detroit's best shot at bringing a contender back to the Palace of Auburn Hills.

It isn't surprising that large portions of the fanbase would have preferred one of the other candidates that new owner Tom Gores and president of basketball operations Joe Dumars didn't pick. After all, Laimbeer has won five titles at the Palace — two as a player and three as the coach of the WNBA's Shock, while Woodson was a member of Larry Brown's staff when the Pistons picked up the 2004 championship. Sampson doesn't have a Pistons pedigree, but he started his career working at Michigan State for Jud Heathcote, and earned plaudits for his performances at Washington State and Oklahoma.

Frank? All he's had is an uncharismatic 6 1/2-season run with the New Jersey Nets, finishing with a 225-241 record and an 18-20 mark in four playoff appearances.

So what makes him the best pick for the Pistons? He doesn't have the same fatal flaws as Sampson, Laimbeer and Woodson — issues that could have made any of them a third straight bad coaching hire for Dumars.

After six straight trips to the conference finals between 2003-08, a stretch that included the 2004 title and a near-miss in 2005, the Pistons have collapsed over the last three years. They went 39-43 under Michael Curry in 2008-09 and were demolished in the first round by Cleveland, then lost a combined 107 games in John Kuester's abysmal two-season tenure.

Things reached rock bottom last season, with players boycotting a shootaround in Philadelphia, refusing to enter games and openly mocking their coach. Fittingly, the season's final home game ended with Charlie Villanueva sprinting around the Palace in a white-hot rage, trying to avoid the police and attack the Cleveland locker room.

Curry's failure, and especially Kuester's, are the reasons that Woodson, Laimbeer and Sampson didn't fit in Detroit, even though all three of them might be successful coaches in other situations.

Laimbeer and Sampson, while they have had success at other levels, have never held head-coaching jobs in the NBA. After Curry and Kuester came up short in their first NBA jobs, Dumars couldn't afford to risk hiring a third straight rookie.

Sampson has another problem — the fact that, while the Pistons need someone to rebuild a roster that was completely out-of-control last season, he hasn't shown the ability to follow rules himself. He was put on probation for breaking recruiting rules at Oklahoma, then immediately violated that probation while coaching at Indiana. While the violations themselves wouldn't be an issue in the NBA — a Pistons coach calling players on the phone would actually be a nice change — there is still a concern about a lack of self-discipline at a time when the team needs a disciplinarian.

Woodson's issue is different. He has the head-coaching experience from Atlanta, and did well enough that he will almost certainly get another NBA job in the next two seasons. The reason that he wouldn't work for Detroit is that he would represent a third straight hire from Dumars' comfort zone. Curry played with Dumars and was an assistant coach under Flip Saunders, while Kuester (like Woodson) was an assistant on the 2004 championship team. Loyalty is a great thing, but the last thing this dysfunctional roster needs is a coach out of the same tree as Curry and Kuester.

Is Lawrence Frank the type of coach that is going to bring a fanbase to its feet in excitement. No, he's not. If anything, he got the job by default.

But if he brings winning back to the Palace on a regular basis, no one will remember that they didn't scream in excitement when he got the job.