Mike Brown picked the wrong time to make excuses for the Knicks

NEW YORK — Mike Brown has been pitching a perfect game for a very long time, so yes, the man deserves some space and grace. One wild pitch in the heat of the NBA Finals will not define his impeccable work as the first-year head coach of the New York Knicks.

But man, what he was selling after his first defeat since April 23 — which feels like nine months ago — was ripped straight from somebody’s sore loser manual. Brown essentially blamed the second-half officiating for the end of his team’s historic 13-game postseason winning streak, and that was hardly fair to the refs working Game 3 in Madison Square Garden.

Of greater consequence, it wasn’t fair to the San Antonio Spurs, who beat the Knicks 115-111 on Monday night and did not deserve to hear from Brown that the home team was screwed by the impartial arbiters of the court.

Their names are Marc Davis, John Goble and Curtis Blair, though Brown didn’t identify them in his postgame news conference. But moments after he sat down at the podium, Brown made it clear the refs were more responsible for blowing the first finals game in the Garden in 27 years than some of his old reliables during this staggering run — Mikal Bridges (two points on five shots), Landry Shamet (three points on 1-of-8 shooting) and Karl-Anthony Towns (completely outplayed by Victor Wembanyama).

“First of all,” Brown opened, “I want to make sure I get something clear. Coach Mitch Johnson and the Spurs, they won the game tonight. They came and took the game.”

It was a good start, actually. Brown has been all about accountability and honesty with his players, his staff and his fanbase. With Donald Trump in the house as the first sitting U.S. president to attend a finals game, and with enough celebrities ringing the court to fill a dozen after-hours parties at the Oscars, the Spurs came right in and took this game from the Knicks. That is exactly what they did.

“But I will say this,” Brown continued, “I never thought I would be in the NBA Finals and see a team get 24 free-throw attempts in the second half to another team’s eight.”

The losing coach was suddenly heading for a cliff with this line of thought. He didn’t mention that the Knicks were awarded 14 foul shots to San Antonio’s eight in the first half, or that the final tally of free throws (32-22) didn’t represent a particularly egregious disparity, especially when the Spurs are a 62-win team with a 7-foot-4 megastar known as “The Alien.”

Brown mentioned that he doesn’t complain much about officials or fairness, and that is a fact. He called San Antonio a great team, but then he went right back in on the not-so-great refs.

“It’s going to lower our odds big time, big time, if we play Game 4, and in the second half, they get 24 free-throw attempts to our eight,” Brown said. “Maybe we were fouling. Maybe we were fouling. But they fouled, too. (Towns) gets the ball off of a loose-ball rebound and he shoots it, and he gets whacked across the arm, and they hit the ball and it goes out of bounds on the baseline. There’s no foul.

“There were opportunities for fouls to be called, to at least try to even the free throws out.”

This was bad form. For more than six weeks, Brown and the Knicks have been rightfully celebrated for their likability as they obliterated their opponents over those 13 consecutive games, the second-longest postseason streak in league history.

You heard it a million times. The Knicks hit the open man. They play team defense. They play the game the right way. They play for one another.

Jalen Brunson, Captain Clutch, was running the show on the floor, while Brown was running it from the bench. It’s easy to root for the Knicks’ coach. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he’s never feared the consequences of failure when making some of the bold moves that have put the Knicks in position to win their first championship since 1973.

He deserved his flowers, locally and nationally. Once more, with feeling, his basketball team had forgotten how to lose, and it was a remarkable thing to see.

The love fest ended abruptly Monday night, and that’s OK. Nothing lasts forever. The Spurs aren’t the Atlanta Hawks or the Philadelphia 76ers or the Cleveland Cavaliers. They weren’t about to let the Knicks embarrass them in a sweep, and most of us should have known better.

But an apparent byproduct of his team forgetting how to lose was Brown forgetting how to handle defeat. In one breath, he admitted that the Knicks made their share of unforced errors in Game 3, and in the next, he said of the free-throw numbers, “I never thought I’d see that in an NBA Finals game, and I saw it tonight.

“That’s tough to overcome when you’re playing against a great team.”

Brown talked about how wonderfully Wemby and Stephon Castle played, and he talked about the Spurs’ extreme level of physicality and their ability to get into the paint. He didn’t want to take anything away from the Spurs, yet he kept taking things away from them.

“If you take away the fouls and the free throws that should have, in my opinion, been a little bit more even,” Brown said, “and again, maybe we fouled that many times. But they fouled too, and it’s not shown at the end of the day on this box score.”

Brown had outcoached Atlanta’s Quin Snyder, Philly’s Nick Nurse and Cleveland’s Kenny Atkinson on the way to this championship round. Atkinson, in particular, sounded flustered by the matchup with Brown, all but calling the Eastern Conference finals an analytical triumph for his blown-out Cavs.

Brown didn’t sound that crazy after Game 3, and certainly there was some of that old Pat Riley-Phil Jackson gamesmanship in his remarks, trying to get an extra whistle in Game 4. And yet, there are times to work the refs and times to let it go.

Losing in the playoffs for the first time in 14 games is definitely a time to let it go. In the end, the players knew the Knicks lost because they were stagnant on offense and reckless with the ball.

“I think we turned the ball over a lot and … we were definitely fouling a lot,” Brunson said.

“That (didn’t) cost us the game,” Towns said of the officiating.

“They were more physical,” Shamet said of the Spurs. “They hit first. Give them credit, they played a hell of a game. They kicked our ass tonight. … There are questionable calls every night. That’s not something new. We can’t sit here and make excuses.”

The players didn’t make excuses, but the coach did. Mike Brown lost his perfect game and needs to dust himself off for Game 4.