Mike Brown and the Knicks found redemption together on magical NBA Finals run
To understand how Mike Brown ended up in New York coaching the Knicks, you must first understand the fragility of his profession.
Head coaches are often the first to blame and the last to receive praise. They’re the easiest scapegoat. It’s easier to cut a check and sell a new head coach to the fanbase than it is to acquire a new star player. Coaches, more often than not, at some point, have to do better than good enough.
Both Brown and the Knicks have experience with this. That’s how they became intertwined. Brown was fired in Sacramento in 2024 because, ultimately, he did too good a job and raised the bar. In his first season, 48 wins. The next was 46. It was the first time the Kings had won 40 games in back-to-back seasons since 2004-06. Midway through Brown’s third season, though, he was fired after the Kings got off to a slow start.
A franchise that had been a laughingstock for two decades thought to explore greener pastures. Sacramento hasn’t had a winning record since.
New York made a similar bet last summer, believing a new coach was the only change needed to propel the franchise even further. Under Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks, too, went from the butt of jokes to respectability. The peak was last year’s trip to the Eastern Conference finals, the organization’s first in 25 years. Decision-makers pulled the plug on Thibodeau shortly after his team fell in six games to the Indiana Pacers. Per league sources, the Knicks wanted a collaborator, someone willing to experiment and bring a different voice.
This is where the marriage between Brown and New York begins. And at this rate, who knows when it’ll end.
Brown, in one season, has the Knicks in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, facing the San Antonio Spurs, the organization that gave Brown an opportunity as an assistant coach in the early 2000s. New York is two wins away. Getting to this point felt like a mandate when Brown took the job. That was the vibe coming out of New York during its extensive coaching search. Brown could have been out of a job just as quickly if New York had fallen short in the postseason. Instead, the Knicks have put together, arguably, the most dominant postseason run the NBA has seen en route to the NBA Finals.
Not bad for a guy who had come to grips with the possibility of not being a head coach again.
“First of all, I have to thank (Kings owner) Vivek Ranadivé for giving me an opportunity. Obviously, it didn’t work out,” said Brown, who hadn’t been a head coach since 2014 before being hired by Sacramento in 2022. “When I got fired, I really didn’t think much of anything. My wife and I, we went to Sydney, Australia, to see UFC 313. We went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We went to St. Barts … I just wanted to have fun.
“If an opportunity came up, great. If it didn’t, I felt lucky, blessed and fortunate. I had a good run. I hoped at some point I’d get another opportunity as a head coach or assistant coach. I just rolled with it and didn’t think much about it.”
Last summer, when the Knicks called Brown, they also called several teams to inquire about the availability of their head coaches. It’s not uncommon, but it was rare given the volume of teams the Knicks reached out to. New York knocked on the door of Chicago (Billy Donovan), Houston (Ime Udoka), Dallas (Jason Kidd) and several others. All kindly declined New York’s request, and the franchise found itself staring at Brown as the lead candidate. (Oddly enough, two of those three coaches — Donovan and Kidd — are no longer with those teams at the end of this season.)
Only the Knicks’ front office knows if Brown was high on the list when the search began. They did know that he came well-recommended as a collaborator and communicator from his time as an assistant with Steve Kerr and the Warriors. They also knew that Brown had experience coaching stars, as he was once the head coach of LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and was part of the staff when Steph Curry and Golden State were a dynasty. That appealed to New York.
Brown didn’t care if he was the first choice. From afar, he saw a team with a chance to win a championship, a veteran team led by Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns that just made it to the Eastern Conference finals. He wanted the pressure.
“I respect (team president) Leon’s (Rose) process,” Brown said back in July. “I feel like I’m a detailed guy, thorough with everything I try to do. It’s no different here. I was just myself throughout the process. I had great conversations with (James) Dolan and, obviously, Leon and his group. My whole thing is that I want to form a partnership with (Leon). I want to do this together. It’s impossible to do it on your own.
“The outcome, obviously, is exciting for me because I’m sitting in the seat that I wanted to be in.”
It took about five games for Brown to feel like he was the head coach and not the new kid on the block. The Knicks, with sky-high expectations, started the season with a 2-3 record. The movement offense Brown was trying to implement wasn’t working for his players. The defense that wanted to push everything middle wasn’t, either. He had made the decision that Josh Hart would come off the bench, after the veteran forward had been ol’ reliable last season with the starters.
Brown had to look in the mirror. He had to massage personalities. It was during a rough patch that everything started to feel second nature again.
“Everyone was real welcoming, and we all agreed to be open and honest,” Brown said. “We started 2-3 and had real conversations at that time.”
Part of what got Brown through that initial dip was his coaching staff, which featured several voices who were with the team last year under Thibodeau. Brown would lean on them heavily, using them to get the pulse of the players and tweaks that could be made. They would often vote on decisions as a group. Brown would have the final say, but if it was obvious to him that the majority of his staff believed a change or two needed to be made, Brown would listen. In talking to people around the league, one of Brown’s best qualities is that he doesn’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. That’s part of the collaborative process that attracted the Knicks to him. It was no longer a dictatorship.
In figuring out his squad, Brown scrapped a lot of things. He started running an offense similar to what New York ran a season ago. He switched the defense to a more traditional “ICE” coverage, which means funneling ballhandlers to the sideline and baseline. The Knicks did that under Thibodeau, too. Brown listened to his players. He listened to his staff.
Brown’s collaboration doesn’t stop there, though. If you watch New York closely, you’ve probably seen that there are several instances throughout a game where one of Brown’s assistant coaches is drawing up a play in the huddle. Thibodeau rarely consulted with his assistants during timeouts. Brown came in with the idea to give everyone a voice. It was up to him to listen or not, and he more often than not tended to receive and apply the input of others.
“He’s not too high, not too low,” Hart said of Brown. “He allows himself to be coachable in the sense of listening to other coaches and players. He has our input instilled into what we do. He’s been the same all year long. That’s what you want as a coach; you don’t want him to get too high or too low. He has a real comfort in his role.”
One mentality that Brunson carries with him at all times is “Don’t be afraid to fail.” He sees that mentality in Brown, too.
Brown experimented with lineups all season long, just like he did with offensive and defensive principles. Brown gave a second-round rookie in Mo Diawara a rotation spot for a large chunk of the season, and he improved noticeably as his reps increased. Brown also leaned on second-year point guard Tyler Kolek at times. The point guard played a big role in the Knicks winning the NBA Cup in December. Brown also started the season with veteran Jordan Clarkson in the rotation, only to take him out around the trade deadline when he started to stack poor performances. Then, one March night in Utah, when the Knicks were getting beaten by the lowly Jazz, Brown pulled Clarkson off the bench and tossed him back into the fire, basically telling him, “Go fix this!” It was a move that one of Brown’s assistant coaches, Maurice Cheeks, urged the head coach to consider. Brown obliged. New York trailed by as many as 18 points in that game. Clarkson scored 27 points in 26 minutes. The Knicks won by 17.
Landry Shamet was largely out of the rotation during the first round of the playoffs, as a knee injury had hampered his play. Brown dusted him off in the next round against Philadelphia and, like Clarkson, Shamet hasn’t left the rotation. The Knicks won the NBA Cup in part because a lineup featuring Brunson, Kolek and Clarkson played well together. That lineup had barely played together before that night, and it wasn’t very good when it did.
For much of the season, the Knicks had scrapped Brown’s initial plans for the offense. That was until New York found itself down 2-1 in the first round to the Atlanta Hawks. Brown reverted back to his roots, but this time got the guys to embrace the movement offense that he wanted to initially implement. It featured Towns in the pinch post as a passer, several players setting off-ball screens and others cutting. It took the burden off Brunson to try to beat his man off the dribble every other possession.
New York would go on to win Game 4 and tie the series behind a 16-point victory. Since then, the Knicks have won 11 straight playoff games and have won 10 of their games by double digits, multiple by 30-plus points.
Brown has created an environment founded in flexibility. Players stay ready because there are several examples of teammates getting another shot after sitting on the bench. The offense can play several styles depending on the opponent. The defense is as tied together as it has been in many seasons.
“It shows the confidence and trust Mike has in us to figure things out,” Brunson said. “He’s not afraid to fail either. Having the mindset of not being afraid to fail is good for us because it allows us to continue to fight and not worry about the result. We might go out there, play good defense and then they hit a tough shot. We may play a great game all game and then lose at final buzzer.
“We’re not afraid of failure, and I think it’s a big-time thing about us.”
The 56-year-old Brown has done everything that he said he would do when he got the job. He’s made his bosses look like geniuses in the process. The firing of Thibodeau, combined with those expectations, felt like a situation waiting to backfire. Instead, the Knicks are in the NBA Finals.
Many coaches have tried and most have failed. Not Brown, and it’s because he’s been willing to have everyone involved have a say in how this story will end.