He was coming off a second NCAA national champion appearance with Butler when the Los Angeles Lakers chose Mike Brown to succeed Phil Jackson as their head coach.
Brad Stevens still was at Butler when the Lakers decided they'd had enough of Mike Brown and hired Mike D'Antoni.
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And Brad Stevens is precisely the reason the once proud Los Angeles franchise needs to fire coach Byron Scott, vice president of basketball operations Jim Buss and general manager Mitch Kupchak.
When Boston hired the Butler coach, Stevens took over a Celtics team that lost their Big Three of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen in 2013-14. In three seasons and their big free-agent acquisitions being Isaiah Thomas and Jae Crowder, Stevens has the Celtics near a .600 winning percentage, they're battling for the No. 3 seed in the East and they just ended the Golden State Warriors' 54-game home winning streak Friday night.
The Lakers have hired the likes of Brown, D'Antoni and Scott and passed on Phil Jackson and never publicly considered Stevens. The West Coast franchise used to be the team capable of pulling off the right moves to stay in contention for an NBA championship.
They've made one in the post-Jackson era, trading for Chris Paul, that former NBA Commissioner David Stern promptly voided.
But this is a franchise that has made curious moves ever since - not rehiring Jackson when Brown was fired, giving aging star Kobe Bryant a two-year $48.5 million contract extension in which the team is about to go back-to-back with the worst records in franchise history, and allowing Scott to refrain from talking to D'Angelo Russell about video recording teammate Nick Young talking about cheating on fiancée Iggy Azalea without his knowledge and being so careless with the video that he allowed someone to upload it to social media where it became public information.
The Celtics aren't going to win a title this year, but they are a lot closer to becoming legitimate contenders in their rebuilding efforts than the Lakers.
And the Celtics did it without any huge moves besides Stevens.
The Lakers weren't going to win any titles, either, but they entered this season with a healthy Kobe Bryant (relative to the past two seasons), the return of the No. 7 pick in the 2014 draft in Julius Randle, the No. 2 pick in the 2015 draft in D'Angelo Russell and the 2015 Sixth Man of the Year in Lou Williams.
And they almost certainly will fail to match last season's dismal 21-win output. That performance calls for multiple firings.
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