We learned Monday that if he’s leaving, it isn’t going to be to Cleveland. The Cavaliers Monday confessed that waiting for Larry was like waiting for Godot. Rather than wait forever, they hired Danny Ferry, who played 10 years for Cleveland and was running the Spurs personnel office since 2003, to run the basketball operations in Cleveland.

Brown has said nothing. He is staying with the Pistons through the draft. On Wednesday, he is going to the Mayo Clinic to have some medical problems related to his hip surgery last year attended to. He has said that if the doctors say he can, he wants to return to coach the Pistons. But, he’s added lately, only if Joe Dumars, the Pistons president, wants him.

That’s classic Brown. As of the NBA Finals, when the Cleveland stories surfaced, Dumars had never given any indication he wanted anyone other than Brown to coach the team. That made sense. Few chief executives would want to get rid of somebody who had won one title and had gone down to the seventh game in pursuit of a second.

So what Brown said could have been setting the stage for that expected goodbye. And if Dumars doesn’t bite on it, Brown can always say the doctors told him to take a year off before coaching again, in which case the NBA’s most notorious traveling man can shuffle off to New York to sit in the Knicks’ front office until the day when he can take over from Herb Williams as coach.

If Dumars wanted Brown gone, it would be done by now. Instead, the Pistons’ president seems to be biding his time, waiting for his coach to see the medics and make up his mind about coming back. Better to let a departure be Brown’s decision, not Dumars’.

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At the same time, Flip Saunders hasn’t been spotted in serious negotiations with any other team about coaching, which makes one suspect that Dumars has already talked to the former Minnesota coach and told him to hang loose until Brown gets out of the clinic and is ready to decide.

If that’s the case, the Pistons are in great shape. Sure, dealing with Brown is annoying and a royal pain where you’d rather not have a pain. But he’s a great coach, and if you can keep him, that’s what you do. And if you can’t keep him, you let him be the bad guy who walks out instead of the wronged hero who was shoved out.

And if he stays, the annoyance will go and you’ll have the best coach available. Even if it’s for just one more year, you live with that, because you can’t get anyone better.

Some people in Detroit may want him to leave. They don’t fully appreciate what they’ll be losing.