Mike Brown got hired by the Knicks last summer to do one thing. Get them past the Eastern Conference Finals. He just did it with a Microsoft PowerPoint and a video editor.
Before Game 1 of the conference finals against Cleveland, Brown sat his team down in a film session. The video he showed them was not Cavaliers personnel. It was not pick-and-roll coverage. It was footage of the Knicks themselves a year earlier. The handshakes after losing to Indiana. The faces in the tunnel. The Pacers celebrating on the Knicks home floor.
Brown went around the room and asked his players to describe what they were feeling in those moments.
The Tactic Worked
The Knicks proceeded to beat the Cavaliers by an average of 19.3 points per game. They won the series in four. They are now in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.
Brown was not subtle about it afterward. He said he wanted his guys to “feel that desperation” before the series started. He said he stole the idea from earlier in his career when he was Mike Brown the assistant for the Spurs. Gregg Popovich used to do it before big games. Show the team a clip of themselves losing. Make them sit with it. Make them remember.
Pop taught a thousand coaches how to motivate. Mike Brown is one of the few who has actually applied it at this level.
The Broader Brown Story
Brown coached the Lakers when LeBron James and Kobe Bryant were on the same coast. He coached the Cavaliers when LeBron was there the first time. He coached the Kings to their first playoff appearance in 16 years. He has been an assistant under Pop and on the Warriors staff during the Steph Curry dynasty.
This is the most respected basketball mind in the league among the coaching fraternity. Players talk about him with a reverence usually reserved for Pop or Steve Kerr. He has a real ability to take what other coaches have already proven and adapt it to his own roster.
The Knicks hired him to do exactly that. Tom Thibodeau was a great regular season coach. He was not a great playoff coach. Mike Brown is both.
What’s Next
The Finals start June 3 against either Oklahoma City or San Antonio. Whoever it is, Brown will spend the next week building a series-long plan that mixes his Pop teachings with his Warriors experience. The Knicks are going to be the more prepared team.
The OKC matchup is the harder one. The Spurs would be easier because Wembanyama can only do so much, and the supporting cast is thinner. The Thunder are the deeper, more athletic team, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player in basketball when healthy.
Either way, Brown will have an answer.
The Verdict
Mike Brown deserves the Coach of the Year vote next season. Not this year. Kenny Atkinson already won it. But the playoff version of Brown is the better version. He took a Knicks team that had been losing in May for a decade and got them to June in his first year.
The motivational video was the catalyst. The rest is a coach who has been waiting 15 years to prove he is more than a regular season guy. He just did. New York noticed. The rest of the league is taking notes.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
