Pressure on everyone, not just new Knicks coach Mike Brown
GREENBURGH — Mike Brown came through the door into the cramped news conference room at the Madison Square Garden Training Center and stepped to the podium and began enthusiastically talking about all the possibilities that were ahead of him and the Knicks as he was introduced as the franchise’s new head coach.
But there were few hints of what he was stepping into, what preceded his arrival. In the front row, a segment of seats marked reserved sat empty except for one taken by his fiancé. There were no Knicks executives in the room, no star players held over from the team that had achieved so much in recent years.
What was clear from the image and even more clarified by his words was that this was a new day and the past was something to be left behind. And that’s fine as a theory, but in reality, no matter how the day was orchestrated, Brown’s every move will be judged against the team that was left behind with the firing of Tom Thibodeau just days after the most successful season in a quarter century came to an end.
The pressure will be on Brown, but really, it will be — should be — on the front office and ownership that made the decision. It’s not unprecedented in the NBA to make a change with a championship seemingly in reach, tantalizingly close. And this one was all the more curious with Thibodeau’s tight relationships with not just team president Leon Rose, but with the franchise centerpiece, Jalen Brunson. There was no one clarifying any of the thinking on this day.
Brown certainly has faced pressure-filled chances before in his long and accomplished NBA coaching career, including stepping into the seat vacated by the end of Phil Jackson’s run with the Los Angeles Lakers. But that one lasted just one season and five games into the next before he was unceremoniously fired. So, yes, pressure is something he’s seen before.
“Nobody has any bigger expectations first of all, than I do,” Brown said. “My expectations are high. This is the Knicks. We talked about Madison Square Garden being iconic. We talked about our fans. I love and embrace the expectations that come along with it. So I’m looking forward to it.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the NBA circles with a bad word to say about Brown and with good reason. He is an outgoing, amiable coach, detail-oriented and hard-driving, but also an enthusiastic 55-year-old whose demeanor would never be mistaken for Thibodeau’s self-inflicted image as a curmudgeon (off-camera he’s not). So there is no one — likely Thibodeau included — who doesn’t wish the best for Brown as he takes over this task.
But it’s a tough task, even if he didn’t want to acknowledge it. The closest Brown would come to acknowledging that anything existed before this day was calling Thibodeau a friend and complimenting the job he did. But every attempt to discuss the team that he inherited or his own experiences with outsized expectations in his prior jobs — fired four times and nearly every one was a head-scratching affair — was countered with, “I’m looking forward.”
The pressure will be on him, but maybe more so on the faces you would have liked to see in those empty seats in the front row. Not a single member of the front office was in the room, some posing for pictures with Brown on the court and leaving him to be the only voice. That may play well in a postgame session, but someone should have stepped to the microphone to explain in clearer terms than a crafted statement why the change was made and why Brown was the one to lead now.
But the front office will be facing the expectations just as much as Brown. Thibodeau was fired after the best season in a quarter century for the team, so that figures to be the baseline of expectations.
Time will tell and this may all work out — and Brown is a solid choice for a veteran team, a coach who has seen all sorts of situations and been on the bench (as an assistant coach) for four NBA championship teams, one under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio and three with Steve Kerr in Golden State.
“I’ve been to six Finals with three different teams and the commonality that they all have is that they all sacrifice for one another,” Brown said. “They’re all connected. The connectivity is at the highest and it starts with ownership on down. They all have a competitive spirit and there’s a high level of belief, not just in the process but each other. So those four things are common amongst all teams that I’ve been with that have participated in the Finals.”
He knows the game but also knows the landscape, where the blame goes and how the game is played. The talk as the Knicks zeroed in on him as the choice was leadership and collaboration, things that Thibodeau certainly believed he was part of here as he teamed up with players and executives he’d been tied to for decades.
On this day though none of that mattered. The past is left in the past and now the job is Brown’s and the responsibility for what comes next will tell the ending to this story, whether the decision was the right one. The statements that accompanied Thibodeau's departure and that welcomed Brown both spoke of championship goals. That's the only statistical measurement that will matter in the end.
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.
