Knicks have a new coach and a new style — but can they live up to even higher expectations?

If you followed the Knicks during the past five years, you heard the lines that Tom Thibodeau would repeat like a mantra.

“The game will tell you what to do.”

“Next man up.”

“Everything concerns me.”

“The magic is in the work.”

But you never heard anything like you heard from Mike Brown before the first preseason game was played.

“The biggest thing is, you know, trying to make sure you watch everybody’s minutes instead of trying to chase games,” Brown said. “There might be some games that, maybe throw the towel in early.”

Before a regular-season game has been played, the words and the explanation, focusing on saving his players for the long haul, are music to the ears of fans who griped about the minutes load, the miles logged and the bruises accumulated by the team’s stars during the past few seasons.

But that “everything matters’’ focus also resulted in back-to-back 50-win seasons and a trip to the Eastern Conference finals last season.

Now the Knicks have a new system, a new attitude, a focus on the last game instead of the game in front of them. And they have one massive weight on their shoulders: the expectations have been raised again.

They just have to prove that they can live up to them.

It’s not the first time the Knicks have boldly changed course in midstream of a successful run. They swung major trades during the past two years to rebuild the roster, trading away Julius Randle, RJ Barrett, Immanuel Quickley and a boatload of draft picks to form the current core of the team. It worked last season as they advanced deeper into the postseason than they had in a quarter-century.

Still, with the weakened Eastern Conference opening up for the Knicks to try to reach the NBA Finals, changing a system that had Jalen Brunson playing like an MVP candidate is a risk. Brown, to his credit, has made it clear that he’s not maintaining the legacy of what came before. He instead is intent on implementing his own plan and taking his chances.

The Knicks shrugged off the accomplishments of the past and opted for a new step — hopefully forward. It is a change of style, a shift of the lineup and a new voice. All huge risks, but risks balanced by a return of the core of the roster, the experience gained and the push of a new voice.

“I think for us, as long as we’re moving forward every step of the way and getting better every single day, that’s where we want to be,” Brunson said. “We don’t want to be plateaued, we don’t want to be one spot. We want to continue to get better every day. And there are going to be days where we don’t get better and we play bad and we take steps back, but it’s all about how we progress and move forward.

“So I mean, we’re not where we want to be, but we’re going to work to get there and continue to get better.

“I feel like it took us some time but we got there [last season]. I think us, most of us coming back and being here, I would like to carry that over. But it’s not as simple as plug and play. We’ve got to continue to work at it. We were off for a couple of months. We’ve got to get back to that. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch.”

The message from Brown has been speed in every aspect. Run the ball up the floor, move and cut, and then race back on defense. But for all of the talk, the Knicks ranked 31st in pace in the preseason.

While it has at times looked very much like the old system — and Brown has said that in clutch time, the ball will be in Brunson’s hands — there has been an emphasis on running the floor.

Brown has developed a system during his own long career and, like Thibodeau, he has won two NBA Coach of the Year awards.

But he refined what he hopes to implement in New York during his tenure as an assistant coach on Steve Kerr’s staff with Golden State, adding more to it in Sacramento with assistants Jay Triano and Jordi Fernandez.

The goal is to keep Brunson and Towns as productive as they have been while increasing the roles of Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby. Josh Hart, who led the NBA in minutes per game last season, seems bound for a bench role once he recovers from a back injury that has sidelined him for more than two weeks. Mitchell Robinson, expected to start, has been kept out of games and full practices for a week with what the team called workload management.

“I would love to have everyone together, especially trying to play the way we’re playing with it being new to everybody,” Brown said. “But it is what it is and we’ve still got to go and win the game.

“But the result, whether we had everyone or we didn’t, is for us to understand, hey, this thing is going to be a marathon. It’s not a sprint. It’s not being at our peak on opening night.

“You’re always hoping and wishing you are, but they’re fighting their tails off. They’re learning quickly. They’re actually a little ahead of where I thought we’d be at this point. But again, the guys that have been out, they’re the key pieces to what we’re trying to do, so they haven’t gotten the reps, and for us to jell together from top to bottom is going to take a little more time than I thought probably because of the injuries, so we have more than capable guys that are ready to play whenever their numbers are called.”

Almost to a man, the Knicks answer nearly every question with the disclaimer that what you see now, what you see on opening night, is not what they believe they will be when the postseason arrives.

On paper, just as there was before the changes, there are plenty of reasons to believe that this finally could be the year when the Knicks break through and it’s a parade, not early playoff street signs, that will line the streets of New York City. It’s just a long road to get there.

By Steve Popper

steve.popper@newsday.com@StevePopper

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.