Mike Brown has taken the New York Knicks past the Cavaliers and into the NBA Finals, a run that puts him two wins from the title and back in the center of the league’s biggest stage. It also gives the Spurs head coach a new line on a résumé already marked by deep playoff runs in Cleveland, Los Angeles and Sacramento.
The timing matters because Brown has spent much of his career in jobs where the leash was short and the scrutiny was constant. NBA coaches stay with one team for an average of three years, yet Brown has kept getting back into the room, and back into pressure, long after many of his peers were pushed out.
He was 35 when he became a first-time head coach in Cleveland and quickly became part of LeBron James’ rise, guiding the Cavaliers to several playoff appearances starting in 2005 and to the NBA Finals in 2007. In Cleveland, his name still carries weight. Brown has more than a few fans there, and local columnist Terry Pluto once called him one of the most unpretentious people he had ever seen, the kind of coach who could take the body blows of the NBA and keep moving.
That reputation was built well beyond the sideline. While his NBA life kept changing, Brown volunteered with the Westlake football program as a middle school assistant and could often be found at St. Edward while supporting his two sons. He joked at the time, “I have to be the highest-paid film guy for any eighth-grade football team in the country,” a line that fit his dry, low-key style.
His path, though, has never been clean. Brown has been fired before contracts expired in Los Angeles, Cleveland twice and Sacramento, and the first time Cleveland let him go he was still collecting about $2 million from the Cavaliers. Even in Cleveland, his success came with friction: Dan Gilbert once walked out to Brown’s introductory news conference carrying a clock and said, “Mike’s on the clock,” before Brown ever coached a game there. He also faced a looming decision to bench Zydrunas Ilgauskas and end the center’s consecutive-games streak, a move that showed how quickly his calm manner could run into hard choices.
That history makes this Knicks run more than a fresh hot streak. New York hired Brown after firing Tom Thibodeau, even though Thibodeau had taken the Knicks to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in 25 years, because the team believed he was not the coach to get it all the way to the Finals. Brown has answered that gamble with the sort of offense Pluto said he adapted from an old-school high-post look into a machine, and now the only question left is whether the Knicks can finish the job.
Brown has done the hard part. The Knicks still need two more wins.
