A month after the New York Knicks elected to move on from coach Tom Thibodeau, who led the team to its first conference finals in a quarter-century, the franchise is expected to hire two-time Coach of the Year Mike Brown, sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania. The Knicks and Brown — who has previously guided the Cleveland Cavaliers (twice), Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings with a long run as the Golden State Warriors’ associate head coach — are expected to reach an agreement in the coming days.
Knicks president Leon Rose made his expectations crystal clear in the first sentence of his statement announcing Thibodeau’s dismissal, stating: “Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans.”
That is now the bar Brown inherits. But a highly talented roster that will be one of the clear favorites in a weakened Eastern Conference makes the expectations somewhat manageable — for now. But what shifts will Brown implement in hopes of taking this team further than Thibodeau, who reached the playoffs in four of his five seasons and led the Knicks to back-to-back 50-win campaigns for the first time since the mid-1990s?
Here are four key differences the 55-year-old Brown brings that Rose, team owner Jim Dolan and the club’s legion of fans are hoping can propel New York back to the promised land after 52 years of waiting.
A far less ironclad rotation
Kings third-year wing Keon Ellis, a fan favorite in Sacramento because of his defensive impact, was just two weeks removed from a career-best 33-point showing.
But on Dec. 3, one game after he committed a frustration foul 90 feet from the basket that gave the San Antonio Spurs two free throws in the final second of a quarter — the Kings lost that night by two points — Brown sat Ellis. In the following game, Ellis played just two minutes.
The underlying message from Brown: Even with Ellis showing clear progress in his career, he needed to be smarter around the margins.
It’s worth noting that Brown was obviously under duress last season, particularly in December before his firing. But between the way he handled Ellis and his decision to move Kevin Huerter out of the starting lineup after the guard struggled in the first half of the season, Brown showed a willingness to shake up his lineups, particularly if the Kings were mired in a funk.
“Sometimes mixing it up may bring a better end result because the pieces are different in terms of the rotation and the pieces fit better in terms of the rotation,” Brown told reporters in his final media session as the Kings’ coach.
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Stephen A. on Knicks hiring Mike Brown: ‘It lacks sizzle’
Stephen A. Smith says Mike Brown deserves the opportunity to coach the Knicks despite saying it “lacks sizzle.”
That’s obviously noteworthy as Brown joins the Knicks, who last season leaned on their starting five more than any other team in the league. Setting aside the heavy workload, New York’s starting five of Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart and OG Anunoby got outscored from Jan. 1 to the end of the regular season, then was outscored during the postseason.
That raises more questions about the viability of keeping that group together for such long stretches, particularly when other lineups with reserves Miles McBride and Mitchell Robinson often performed better because of the extra space, defense or rebounding they provided.
Brown could bring unique pace-and-space offense to New York
Like Thibodeau, Brown has long been seen as one of the league’s foremost defensive minds.
But in Sacramento, where he coached after his stint as an assistant with the Warriors, his offenses looked quite different from what much of the NBA was doing, particularly early in his tenure with the Kings.
Aside from playing up-tempo as a result of De’Aaron Fox’s blistering speed, the team also used a handoff-heavy offense with star center Domantas Sabonis as a hub and playmaker while wings such as Huerter and Keegan Murray zoomed toward the ball, leaving opposing defenses exhausted and befuddled as stoppers tried, and often failed, to get around Sabonis’ screens.
It was the epitome of pace and space. In some ways, it was a creative variation of what made those title-winning Warriors teams — Brown was with the franchise for their 2017 and 2018 championship runs — so difficult to stop. In Brown’s first season, the Kings broke their 16-year playoff drought behind a flurry of 3-pointers and the best offensive efficiency in league history at the time, at 118.6 points per 100 possessions.
And having coached everyone from LeBron James to Kobe Bryant to Stephen Curry to Fox, Brown is no stranger to the idea of one-on-one basketball in the clutch. Upon beginning work with the Knicks, Brown will have coached all three players — Fox, Curry and Brunson — who have won Clutch Player of the Year. (The Kings, who were so good in tight games in 2022-23 and decent in 2023-24, had piled up a league-worst 13 clutch losses at the time Brown was let go last season. Having Brunson will help there.)
Yet part of what Brown will be tasked with in New York is finding ways to get more out of Bridges and Anunoby, who were Nos. 1 and 2 in the NBA in corner 3-pointers attempted last season. They can certainly score and be effective from the corners, but with Bridges being one of the most efficient midrange players last season and Anunoby having the physical strength he does, is that duo capable of doing more on offense?
Similarly, what counter will Brown have when teams seek to stifle Towns by guarding him with a quicker forward — like the Detroit Pistons did against the Knicks in the first round — as opposed to a center? Is it a lineup adjustment with the new-look bench, or is there a scheme he can implement?
Brown has challenged his stars to play defense
Upon getting the Kings’ head coaching job in 2022, one of Brown’s first orders of business was to speak with Fox. It was a refresher of when he coached Fox during an elite high school basketball camp.
“I thought he was going to be a premier guard defensively because of his quickness, athleticism and tenacity. His ability to guard the ball was unbelievable,” Brown said in an interview during his first season in Sacramento.
Brown made a point to tell Fox he could become a great two-way player — something Fox showed at times during a 48-34 playoff season.
Brown obviously wasn’t the first NBA coach to push that sort of button — the man he coached under with Golden State, Steve Kerr, used a similar approach with Curry when Kerr first took over the Warriors in 2015 en route to winning the first of four titles. But the approach was interesting and potentially makes it worth watching how Brown deals with Brunson, who was targeted relentlessly during the Knicks’ run to the conference finals.
Brunson defended a total of 123 pick-and-rolls as the screener defender against the Indiana Pacers during the six-game conference finals series, per Genius IQ. That was nearly quadrupled from the year before, when Brunson was forced to defend just 32 pick-and-rolls over seven semifinal games against Indiana.
Brunson doesn’t have the athleticism or wingspan that Fox does and carried a disproportionately heavy offensive burden, handling the ball an NBA-high 8.6 minutes per game this past season. But Brown’s thoughts about how to use Brunson defensively — especially in tandem with Towns, who also was targeted on defense throughout his first season in New York — could go a long way in determining whether the Knicks end their title drought.
Brown has criticized his players — individually and publicly
In the postgame news conference that followed Brown’s final game as Kings coach — a 114-113 home loss to the Pistons in which Fox fouled Detroit’s Jaden Ivey on a winning 4-point play in the closing seconds — the coach gave reporters a step-by-step rundown of everything his players did wrong on the deciding play.
“First of all, we told our guys: ‘If somebody catches [the ball] and their back is to the basket, foul them.’ And then they dribbled for eight seconds and we didn’t foul them,” Brown said. “The second thing is, if you’re up three, just guard your guy at the 3-point line [and ignore the drive] — there should be no closeout opportunity. No closeout opportunity. Because they know the only thing that can hurt us is a 3.”
Brown said he’d have to watch the film to understand why Fox lunged at Ivey but added that there should have been “no reason for there to be a hard closeout” on the play. (By contrast, following a one-point loss to Chicago last November, in which Hart fouled Chicago’s Coby White on a 3-pointer in the closing seconds, Thibodeau had a muted reaction when asked about the play, presumably to avoid saying anything critical of one of his starters.)
But the loss to Detroit wasn’t the only time Brown was publicly critical or at least asking more of his players. Last preseason, for instance, after guard Mason Jones committed a pair of careless, costly turnovers down the stretch of a scrimmage, Brown concluded the workout by shouting at his players about being more detail oriented and holding their teammates accountable to make sure such plays didn’t happen.
Specifically, in his media session with reporters shortly after that, he called out Fox, Sabonis and six-time All-Star DeMar DeRozan, saying they needed to be the ones to call out those mishaps. Whether good or bad, it would appear to mark a difference from Thibodeau.
So many questions face the Knicks’ new coach, and plenty more will arise once the season begins. Based on what the organization has claimed as its singular goal, at some point we’ll have a definitive answer about whether Brown was the right choice to succeed Thibodeau.
