Mike Brown swears on his grandson: He didn’t know how many games the Knicks won last season under Tom Thibodeau. Brown’s priority after taking the job left by Thibodeau’s sudden departure following the Eastern Conference Finals was to steer the ship in the right direction, towards the style of play capable of lifting the Knicks to an NBA Finals appearance for the first time since 1999. That meant more than just wins and losses, more than a superficial end-of-season record that may dictate playoff seeding and home-court advantage but falls far short of determining what’s inside of a team when things hit the fan in April and beyond.
“On my grandson, I didn’t know how many wins [the Knicks] had last year,” Brown said after practice at the team’s Tarrytown training facility Wednesday afternoon. “It didn’t matter to me… I wanted to feel like we’re playing a certain way going into the playoffs, and we had a really good feel on the direction that we needed to go while having true belief in what we’re doing, not just in the process, but with each other, as well.
“So those are things that I concentrate on more than anything else, because at the end of the day, whether you finish first, second, third, or fourth, I mean, you have a chance at it if you’re clicking at the right time and if you’re healthy. So that’s my thought process on it, and I might win as many games as I could.”
Yet here the Knicks are, 51 wins in hand with three games left on the regular-season schedule. They have tied Thibdoeau’s mark of 51 wins and a win over the Boston Celtics on Thursday, the Toronto Raptors on Friday, or the Charlotte Hornets in the season finale on Sunday will mark the best record the Knicks have owned in the Jalen Brunson era.
How fitting: For Brown to one-up his predecessor, his team will be tested by the very competition they will need to run through in two weeks’ time.
And the Knicks need those games.
Because even though they are the Eastern Conference’s No. 3 seed — for the second season in a row — they have swung torrid and frigid, nine game winning streaks and losing streaks alike. They have looked at times like contenders and often other times like pretenders. Only now, the time for pretending is long gone — because the once-in-a-lifetime championship window the team prepared for will open when the records revert from 50-plus wins to 0-0 in mid-April.
“I feel like we’re in a pretty good spot,” Brown said after practice. “As a coach, you always want more. I want more. But at the end of the day, we’re in a pretty good spot right now.”
***
Karl-Anthony Towns agrees. The Knicks are in a good spot. They won 50 games the season before his blockbuster trade to the Knicks in exchange for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. They won 51 games last year after trading for Towns and Mikal Bridges, and are on pace — provided they can beat one of the three projected playoff teams left on their schedule — to reach 52 wins in their first season under Brown.
The No. 52 is symbolic, even if Brown says he didn’t set it as a goal coming into the season.
Not at all because it resembles improvement year-over-year.
“I’ve seen teams that won a lot lose in the end, and I’ve seen teams that barely made the playoffs find a way to be in the Finals,” said Towns. “So at the end of the day, we’ve gotta control our own destiny. It doesn’t matter what you did in the regular season. It doesn’t matter if you won the NBA Cup. The NBA Finals isn’t guaranteed to anybody, and we’ve gotta go and take the opportunity.”
It’s symbolic because the Knicks have adhered at least to a preexisting standard of excellence that’s survived a coaching change and offensive and defensive philosophical overhauls. This Knicks team is not the same as the one that won over the hearts of fans during two consecutive 50-win seasons concluding Thibodeau’s MSG tenure. Some might say this team is worse — less connected, less organized — than they were before Thibs came up short in the conference finals last season.
“We’re in a good spot. We did a good job this year of dictating our destiny through the good and bad,” said Towns. “You ask in the preseason, and you ask in training camp, that we control our own destiny. So we’ve just gotta be better all around. We’ve gotta be the best version of ourselves, be the sharpest tool. Right now, we just practiced, and at practice, we got a lot done. We’ve gotta show it tomorrow [against the Celtics].”
That’s why these final three games are so important, as are the implications of victory — or the ramifications of defeat — staring down the home stretch of the regular season.
The Thursday-Friday back-to-back against the Celtics and Raptors is a playoff preview, as is the season finale against No. 9 Charlotte: If the playoffs started Wednesday afternoon, the Knicks would be scheduled to face the No. 6 Raptors in the first round and the No. 2 Celtics in the second. But the Knicks still have a shot at the No. 2 seed, provided they win the remaining three games and get some help via Boston losing two of their last three, too.
“I’m a big believer in taking care of the present, and it’ll take care of the future,” said Towns. “So right now. We’ve just gotta stay in the present. Tomorrow is the most important game because it’s the next game in our season, and we’ve gotta make sure we execute with discipline no matter what happens, we leave that court tomorrow feeling we got better.”
All of that is outside of the Knicks’ control. What’s within their control is adhering to the game plan, focusing on the details, playing for one another and, of course, starting games stronger. They have three games left, plus a week’s worth of time to practice before the dress rehearsal is over and the real thing begins.
***
Last season, the Indiana Pacers went 50-32 and finished fourth in the Eastern Conference. They won the East, made it to the NBA Finals, and forced Game 7 against the juggernaut Oklahoma City Thunder. The season prior, the Dallas Mavericks won 50 games, ran through the West and made it to the NBA Finals as a fifth seed against No. 1 Boston.
It’s been a decade since two No. 1 seeds faced each other in the NBA Finals. The trend favors the Knicks, who fancy themselves as better than the teams currently ahead of them in the standings.
The Detroit Pistons have had the Knicks’ number, sure, in dominant fashion at that, this season. But the Knicks went 1-3 against the Pistons last year before beating them in six games in the first round last season — a series the Pistons remember vividly as a robbery of epic proportions. The Celtics, too, were expected to have a gap year of sorts given Jayson Tatum’s career-threatening Achilles injury sustained in the second round against the Knicks last season. Boston also traded away both Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis.
Yet barring an end-of-season meltdown, the Celtics are positioned, alongside the Pistons, to finish the year with better seeding than New York.
Viewing the Knicks through such a prism would certainly cause concern: The Knicks brought back the same core that made it to the conference finals last year but are finishing worse in the standings than both teams they beat to reach Round 3 of the playoffs last year.
That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another.
The Knicks have had growing pains all season long. A coach who changed the team’s identity before his first day on the job. A pair of All-Stars who’ve been asked to expand their games for the good of the players around them. A team that tasted a championship when it won the NBA Cup, then immediately began smelling itself a little too much and lost nine of an 11-game stretch. And now a team sitting on its exact same win total as last season, needing a victory over a playoff opponent to set the bar just an inch higher.
The Knicks aren’t worried about the standings. Brown isn’t worried about Thibodeau’s record. He’s worried about two things: tomorrow and June. Everything else is the hyphen separating the present from where the Knicks have to be when the season’s final buzzer sounds.
“It depends,” Bridges said. “I think also, it’s how you’re winning games and all that stuff. Am I too big on the win-loss column as much, especially with how you’re playing? You know, you can play a really good game and lose. I’d rather, you know, in these situations, lose and learn from it in the regular season than, like, win a game and have none of our details and our values or not playing the right way.
“So, yeah, I think the win-loss column — I see both sides. Of course, you want to win. But, yeah, it’s just how you’re winning and, you know, if you’re growing or not.”