Mike Brown is familiar with pressure.
He coached LeBron James to his first MVP and NBA Finals appearance. He was the Los Angeles Lakers coach tasked with steering the final years of Kobe Bryant’s greatness in the right direction. He was right next to Steve Kerr and Stephen Curry as they orchestrated the league’s latest dynasty.
He’s been to the finals as a head coach. He’s won four NBA titles as an assistant/associate coach with the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors. He made a dysfunctional franchise respectable as a head coach. He’s been fired after one year as a head coach. He’s been fired in the middle of seasons.
The New York Knicks wanted experience when looking for Tom Thibodeau’s replacement, per league sources, and that’s why Brown is now their guy.
On Wednesday, multiple league sources confirmed to The Athletic that Brown and the Knicks are working on finalizing a contract to make him the franchise’s next head coach. The hiring comes weeks after New York fired Thibodeau following the team’s first Eastern Conference finals appearance in 25 years.
But there’s pressure, and then there’s New York. Brown’s about to learn what it’s like to be a Knick.
The 55-year-old coach isn’t just walking into one of the NBA’s most followed and starved franchises. That’s pressure in itself. But he’s now the head coach of the team that made it very clear that doing something it hadn’t done in a quarter century still wasn’t good enough. The Knicks, per league sources, are singularly focused on winning a championship. They believe Brown gives them the best chance to do that.
Whether Brown will be an upgrade over Thibodeau for this iteration of New York basketball is yet to be seen. We’re months away from learning that. What we do know, though, is that everything that comes with being in New York, Brown has gone through something similar. LeBron. Kobe. The lights don’t get much brighter than when standing next to those two.
The two-time NBA Coach of the Year was the only candidate the Knicks ended up bringing back for a second interview, per league sources. It was a patient search that featured multiple twists and turns. New York’s front office led by Leon Rose reached out to employed head coaches (like Houstons’ Ime Udoka and Dallas’ Jason Kidd), assistant coaches (like Minnesota’s Micah Nori, Dallas’ Sean Sweeney and New Orleans’ James Borrego), recently fired head coaches (like Brown and Taylor Jenkins) and even held a conversation with South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley. Rose and Co., per league sources, didn’t feel rushed to make a hire since the Knicks were the only team in the NBA with a vacancy.
New York went into the initial stages of the hiring process with Brown’s name circled. Per league sources, the Knicks liked Brown’s extensive résumé and the fact that he’s worn many hats in the NBA. Brown’s willingness to collaborate and the leadership qualities the franchise examined were also big selling points, league sources said.
New York, led by stars Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, liked that Brown has worked with James, Bryant and Curry. The Knicks liked that Brown came up under Popovich, worked alongside Kerr and won championships with both. New York was impressed at how Brown turned the Sacramento Kings around and helped them win 45-plus games in back-to-back seasons for the first time in the lowly franchise’s history since 2006. Before he was fired by Sacramento after 31 games last season, Brown helped turn De’Aaron Fox into an All-Star. In 2022-23, Brown and the Kings had the best offensive efficiency since tracking began in 1996.
Now, Brown is tasked with pushing the Knicks to the next level, into a tier of champions.
The Knicks’ offense, while it finished the regular season with the fifth-best rating in the NBA, was a bit deceiving. Things started hot for New York on that end of the floor until around the top of the calendar year, when teams started regularly guarding Towns with smaller, athletic wings and putting their centers on Josh Hart. The Knicks’ offense, despite all of its firepower in the starting lineup, ranked just 16th from Jan. 1 until the end of the regular season (Brunson missed a month due to injury in March).
In the postseason, veteran-laden New York struggled with the up-and-coming, injured Detroit Pistons in the first round of the playoffs. In the second round against the Boston Celtics, the Knicks found themselves down by 20 points late in both Games 1 and 2 before pulling off miraculous comeback wins that helped them eventually take down the defending champions.
Ultimately, New York ended up in the Eastern Conference finals. That’s an achievement worth celebrating. However, even with that success, it’s also easy to understand how the franchise’s decision-makers looked at how the Knicks got to that point and came to the conclusion that this team needed a shake-up in order to get to the next level.
*Enter Mike Brown*
The Knicks are positioned as well as any team in the Eastern Conference to make the leap next season. On paper, New York should be one of the conference’s last two teams standing. Yet, there’s so much more that goes into winning a championship than names on a sheet. There’s talent. There’s luck. There’s health. The Knicks aren’t promised another trip back to the conference finals, but they’re expecting one.
Brown comes into a situation that he can only come out of as a superhero if he takes New York to the NBA Finals or beyond. That’s it. Anything less will be considered a failure, unfair or not. New York’s decision-makers put those expectations on their new head coach. The fans didn’t. The media didn’t.
The pressure is tremendous. The Knicks feel like they got the right person to end a 50-plus year title drought. And maybe they do. We won’t know that answer, though, for quite some time. What we do know right now is that of all the coaches available to the Knicks, no one was more familiar with the gravity of the situation than Brown.
That’s at least a good start.
(Photo: Mark Blinch /Getty Images)