Knicks coach Mike Brown is all about relationships
Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson and Knicks coach Mike Brown. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke, Jim McIsaac
GREENBURGH
When the Memphis Grizzlies made the surprising move of firing Taylor Jenkins late last season, they put the franchise and the progress of Ja Morant in the hands of Tuomas Iisalo, a first-time head coach. The current result is that there are reports that the two are at odds and a parting could come soon.
It is a delicate balance, the relationship between star and coach, and one of the most important decisions a franchise will make. And it is a two-way street.
In his days as Knicks coach, Jeff Van Gundy used to say that Patrick Ewing made his job easy. No other player was able to ease up if Ewing was working hard. There also are coaches who will make a point of pushing their stars hard, showing that no one is above the rules.
Relationships are a part of the job that Mike Brown has to navigate. Not just putting his system in place for a team that already had succeeded under Tom Thibodeau but showing the team that he will, as he has pointed out often, hold them all accountable, just as he expects the players to hold him accountable.
“There’s a guy named Kenneth Chenault. He was the first African-American executive of a Fortune 500 company, it was at American Express,” Brown said. “His definition of leadership was real simple and I embrace it, I love it, it tells the tale clearer than a blue sky. Basically what it is is as a leader, you’ve gotta give hope while defining reality. So it doesn’t matter who it is, you’ve gotta keep it real with them.
“If somebody goes left or right or off, you’ve gotta tell them the truth, and there’s different ways of telling the truth. Sometimes you may have to yell. Sometimes you may just have to talk. Sometimes you may ask them should you have done this or that, but you’ve got to define reality and keep it real with everybody in front of everybody so that guys know we’re all in this together, and they have to do that to me, too, because they’ve gotta hold me accountable.
“Taking it a step further, when I was in San Antonio, at the end of every year, we’d have our coaches' meeting before we had our player exit interviews and [Gregg Popovich] used to always say, 'I’ve gotta thank Tim Duncan.' After my second year, I asked him, ‘Pop, you said this last year. What do you have to thank Tim for?’ He said, 'He allows me to coach him, because this is a players' league, and at the end of the day, if your best player does not allow you to coach him, then you’ve got no shot,' and that resonates with me. I’ve tried to take that wherever I was as a head coach.
"If you’re sitting there and you’re keeping it real with your best player and he’s embracing it or taking it the right way, if you’re the fifth player or seventh player, you better fall in line cause he’s telling the number one guy just like he may tell the number three or number 10 guy.”
With the Knicks, his task might be easier because in Jalen Brunson, he has a throwback star, one raised by a former player and current Knicks assistant coach, Rick Brunson. He has been coached to be all that he can be since he was a child, and it is no different now with his father on the Knicks’ bench.
“We have not provoked him enough to make him yell at us yet,” Brunson said of Brown. “I feel like every coach has a point where they try and get their point across, but something small that you don’t think is a big deal, and it gets to the point where they let you know about it. But I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point yet.
"Individually, he may say something to people, but as a group, we haven’t gotten it yet. He definitely holds people accountable, right then and there. We appreciate that. That’s gonna help us get better.
“At a young age, I met [Hall of Fame high school coach Bob Hurley]. This is when I was in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, around that time. My dad was starting to push me, starting to push me and things were getting harder, things were getting mentally tougher. I came across him one day and my dad is like, ‘You got anything to say to my son? One line, give him one word of advice.’ He said, ‘Knowing your dad, he’s gonna be your coach and be your dad. When he’s inside the lines, that’s coach. Outside the lines, that’s dad.’ ''
That helped Brunson when he played for Villanova coach Jay Wright. "When it came to Coach Wright and it came to anybody from that point on, nothing was taken personal,'' Brunson said. "It made it easier to hear the message versus the shouting and the yelling. That’s something that will stick with me forever.”
"I’m accustomed to going back and forth with the coach a little bit when it comes to myself,” Josh Hart said. “I told Mike this: Hold me accountable, just know nine times out of 10 I’m going to say something back and we might go at it for a good 10, 15, 20 seconds. But I’m always going to respect what you say. I’m always going to listen to what you say.”
The social media problem
The messages sent to professional athletes and really anyone with a level of celebrity came to the forefront this past week with Giants kicker Graham Gano — unprompted — bringing up the vitriol to which he is subjected. He described not only calls for him to lose his job but “ever since sports betting started happening, I get people telling me to kill myself every week because I’ll hit a kick that loses them money [or] I’ll miss a kick and it loses them money. The other day, somebody told me to get cancer and die.”
Brunson is as beloved as any star athlete in New York, but he has been subjected to similar abuse — most of it from sports bettors.
“It’s definitely crossed a line a couple of times. Actually, I would say more than a couple of times,” Brunson said. “Said some pretty messed-up [stuff].
"The way I deal with stuff like that, I have my circle, I have my family, they keep me level-headed — when it’s positive, when it’s negative. I have a very close circle that I turn to when I start to get doubt or I start to get nervous or see stuff like that. It’s tough to see, but I feel like the way I was raised, I use that stuff and I try to make it into something positive for me. And that’s a credit to my parents.
“I try not to let it get to me, but there are definitely times that I reach breaking points. I try not to let the world see it because people don’t really care about your problems, but I think that when my family is around, I’m allowed to be vulnerable, I’m allowed to say what’s on my mind, say what’s on my chest and not feel any certain way about it.”
Even as he has been crowned as a king of Madison Square Garden, earning All-NBA honors and bringing the Knicks deeper into the postseason than they’ve been in 25 years, it can be a missed shot, a point left off the scoreboard that can spur anger on the internet.
“But it definitely crosses a line,” Brunson said. “I think people need an outlet. No matter what your outlet is, when stuff like that, when stuff like that is happening, whether it’s positive or negative, you need to be able to say how you feel. It’s tough. I really don’t wish that on anybody. I don’t really don’t understand why people think it’s all right to press send when [stuff’s] hateful. When I say some [stuff] — the worst things you’re thinking of, it’s worse than that.”
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.
