One day after a disappointing loss this past fall, the Sacramento Kings gathered to review the game tape. Head coach Mike Brown wasn’t pleased. The Kings had not brought enough effort the previous night, Brown determined, and it was time to tell them about it.
Brown scanned the room, players seated in front of him, and looked to All-Star point guard De’Aaron Fox.
“If you don’t play hard every possession, we’re not gonna win,” he announced to Fox.
The team sat and listened as he scrolled through the top of the roster. Next, he turned to another All-Star, Domantas Sabonis, declaring that if the big man didn’t go all out every play, the Kings wouldn’t find success. Similar words for another All-Star, DeMar DeRozan, followed.
“You guys are the engine that makes this team run,” Brown told the group. “If you don’t play like every possession matters, how can we expect (the role players) to do the same?”
This was not a moment of discipline. Brown is notorious for holding players accountable. But he doesn’t do it in a Bobby Knight-ish manner. As an assistant coach who once worked under him said, “He didn’t yell much. It’d be from a place of disappointment.”
This occasion, as he stood before his team, was no exception. Brown didn’t raise his voice. There were no punishments, no threats. It was a lecture, a hopeful wakeup call for a team that hadn’t played its best ball to begin the season. The coach hoped to change that.
Now, Brown has a new job. The two-time NBA Coach of the Year is finalizing a deal to become the next head coach of the New York Knicks, league sources confirmed to The Athletic on Wednesday. His new employer is betting on his personality and diligence more than anything else.
In some ways, Brown’s defining traits are similar to those of his predecessor, Tom Thibodeau, who built tremendous success in New York until his controversial firing a month ago. The decision to oust Thibodeau came only a few days after the Knicks lost in the Eastern Conference finals, the deepest playoff run they’d made in 25 years.
Brown, like Thibodeau, believes the film speaks facts. If it’s showing questionable effort, then he must question effort. He is defense-obsessed, though he also has organized the other side of the ball, which includes some of his time as an assistant with the dynasty Golden State Warriors. He leans toward size when trying to get stops and can become frustrated with defensive gamblers who risk throwing coverages out of whack by jetting for steals.
He loves practice. A couple of decades ago, when he was the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, his first lead gig, he faced allegations of being too rigid — a similar arc to Thibodeau’s.
Brown’s defining trait comes in his attention to detail. He is notoriously organized. After he picks up his mail at home, he stacks up the envelopes, dividing each into different categories before opening them. His office is always “immaculate,” said Warriors assistant Bruce Fraser, who overlapped with Brown for six seasons in Golden State.
He color codes his plays, often carrying various pens — a red one, a blue one, a black one, etc. — so that he can diagram them as clearly as possible. When he was with the Warriors, he would categorize pens in his locker by their colors. Just to mess with him, other coaches would switch them around, removing a red pen from its intuitive group and place it among the blues. Brown would notice quickly and restore order.
Brown is a copious note taker. At any given moment around the team, he could be holding a massive folder that contains all his scribbles.
“It’s like his basketball bible,” Fraser said.
The coach will notice an interesting tidbit another team has added or think of a play and jot it down without hesitation. Later, just to make Marie Kondo jealous, he will go back and reillustrate his diagram, making sure to create a color-coded version.
He expects the same attention to detail from those around him, from the players to the coaches to the rest of the franchise.
At morning shootarounds, when teams outline their game plans for upcoming opponents, he focuses on nooks and crannies, not much different than Thibodeau’s objectives. Players would describe Thibodeau’s practices and shootarounds as more exhausting mentally than physically. He wouldn’t run guys into the ground, but participants would have to learn and then retain each element of a coverage.
Yet, Brown goes about his business in his own way. He will jump into a drill to show players that each tiny movement has a purpose.
For example, the Kings wouldn’t just rehearse where to go while trying to send a ballhandler over a screen. If Brown felt one element of the coverage was imperfect, he would intervene, crouching into a defensive stance and showing what the defender should do with his hands. He would explain which leg goes where as he ventured to the proper spots on the court. Once he finished, he would dart to another area of the floor, mimicking another Kings player and displaying how these edits would affect what the help defenders were supposed to do.
Brown has been around Hall of Fame ballers and coaches throughout his career. He assisted San Antonio Spurs legend Gregg Popovich and Indiana Pacers mastermind Rick Carlisle before leading the first team of his own. He coached LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers from 2005-10.
From there, he bounced to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he stayed for a little more than a year. He then returned to the Cavs for one season. Brown didn’t land another head coaching job until eight years later, when he took over the Kings, who he led to the playoffs in Year 1, ending the NBA’s longest postseason drought. He helped the group win 46 games the following season but accepted an unexpected and roundly criticized firing, which occurred after a 13-18 start this past December.
Brown is a product of his experiences. The offense during his first year in Sacramento — a league-leading offense that revolved around movement, cutting and downhill actions off Sabonis dribble handoffs — was unrecognizable compared to the old-school ones with the Cavs. People with the Kings describe him differently than those who once worked with him in Cleveland. Coworkers from his earlier days refer to him as hands on, someone with a firm grip. Some in Sacramento describe another management style.
The Knicks sought out a replacement for Thibodeau who could excel as a collaborator, league sources said. But such a buzzword, “collaboration,” doesn’t apply just to working with the front office or hearing out the players. It extends within the coaching staff, too.
In Sacramento, Brown would field feedback from his assistants enthusiastically, though they had to prepare first. The coaching staff understood any suggestion to Brown would come with follow-up questions — not for the sake of defiance but because their boss wanted to test their preparation. He expects the same attention to detail from his staff that he requires from himself.
While Thibodeau would often take the reins to lead practices, which isn’t common for NBA coaches, Brown delegates to the assistants in those scenarios. He has spoken extensively about how his six years under Warriors coach Steve Kerr, one of the league’s most famously collaborative leaders, changed him. This seems to be one of those ways.
For now, his assistants in New York are still uncertain, though the Knicks could bring back various coaches from this past season’s staff, league sources said. Rick Brunson, the father of All-NBA point guard Jalen Brunson and who was the lead assistant under Thibodeau last season, will remain on the bench.
Like Thibodeau, Brown is a veteran of abrupt firings. That was true in Cleveland, where Cavs owner Dan Gilbert let him go, later admitted doing so was a mistake, re-hired him and then fired him again less than a year after bringing him back.
… And in Los Angeles, where he coached the Lakers for a lockout-shortened 41-25 season and made it only five games into the next season before a 1-4 start led to his demise.
… And in Sacramento, where he led the Kings to their first winning record in 17 years, posted a 46-win season the following year and then suffered the consequences of a 13-18 start after that.
Now, he will take over the Knicks.
During interviews with Brown and other coaching candidates, New York concentrated on how prospective coaches could change the substitution patterns, league sources said. At times this season, Thibodeau used only a seven- or eight-man rotation. He didn’t experiment much with lineups.
The Knicks hoped to find someone who could balance competitiveness with the development of younger, non-rotation players at the edge of the bench. Candidates presented strategies on how to handle such situations.
Of course, competitiveness does not come in the form of regular-season wins alone. This is a franchise with ambitious goals.
“Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans,” team president Leon Rose said in a prepared statement released in conjunction with the Thibodeau firing. “This pursuit led us to the difficult decision to inform Tom Thibodeau that we’ve decided to move in another direction.”
In other words, the Knicks believe they have a championship roster, but they did not consider Thibodeau the person who could get them there — even after the coach rebuilt a once-crestfallen franchise and fell only two wins short of the finals this past season.
Brown has spent more than a decade as an NBA head coach but has never won a title, though he went to the finals with the 2007 Cavs. His history doesn’t scream that he’s an elite playoff adjuster. He is principled in ways that may sound familiar to New Yorkers. This past season, amid cries from the fan base to play sparkplug guard Keon Ellis more, Brown went the other direction, moving the 25-year-old to the fringe of the rotation, a decision that stemmed from Ellis’ overzealous gunning for steals, which hurt the defense more often than it helped.
But Brown is also a new voice with a track record of racking up victories, a man with a .599 career winning percentage who shares many of Thibodeau’s positive traits and deviates in other places.
Now, New York has committed to him, hoping a seasoned, detail-oriented, collaborative-yet-still-evolving coach can take the Knicks to their first ring in more than 50 years.
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