Mike Brown’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” Story From the Knicks Bench Is the Best Side Quest of the Finals
Mike Brown has been to four NBA Finals as an assistant. He went to one as a head coach in 2007. He has been fired by the Lakers twice, won Coach of the Year with the Kings, and finally, at 56 years old, gets to coach his own team in a Finals.
And the story he chose to tell reporters before Game 1 was about coaching flag football in San Antonio.
Brown told reporters that when he lived in San Antonio years ago, he used to coach his kid’s flag football team. To get the parents on the sideline hyped, he would start a “Who Let The Dogs Out?” chant. That image is going to live in our heads now. The man currently coaching the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals was, in a previous life, a youth flag football coach who used Baha Men deep cuts to get suburban San Antonio parents off their feet.
The reason this is the best side quest of the Finals is because it tells you exactly who Mike Brown is as a coach. He gets people locked in. The man whose first NBA head coaching job featured a starting lineup that included LeBron James is, at heart, a flag football dad who knows how to pump up a crowd.
That energy is showing up in the Knicks halftime numbers. New York was down 14 in the third quarter of Game 1. Then Brown made adjustments. The Knicks closed the game on a 27-12 run. Brunson scored 13 in the fourth. Towns went 7-of-13. The Knicks have not lost a playoff game under Brown yet, and they just went 12-0 in three series.
Mike Brown got fired by the Kings in December 2024. People wrote columns about how his sets were too complicated, how players had tuned him out, how his time as a head coach was probably over. The Knicks hired him as an assistant. When Tom Thibodeau got fired after the 2025 conference finals loss, the Knicks went outside the obvious candidates and gave Brown the job.
That decision is going to win an executive of the year vote one day. The Knicks have not had a coach who can adjust mid-series in years, and Brown’s halftime adjustments against the Spurs in Game 1 were borderline surgical. He switched assignments, sent more bodies at Wembanyama, and dared the Spurs role players to win the game. They couldn’t.
What this means for the rest of the series is the Knicks have a coach who has been waiting his entire career for this moment. Brown is 56. He has been an NBA head coach for 13 different seasons. He’s been to the Finals. He’s been on Steve Kerr’s staff. He’s won a championship as an assistant. There is no scenario in this series where he gets caught flat-footed by the moment.
The Knicks are 12-0 in the playoffs. Mike Brown is going to win Coach of the Year on the back of a Finals run. He’s already done the hard part, which was getting Brunson and Towns and Bridges to buy into a defensive scheme that requires effort on every possession.
And he did it after a long career of feeling underrated. The Knicks coach is who Knicks fans deserved all along. The flag football chants are just the bonus material.
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.
