So after all that windmill-tilting, the New York Knicks are about to spear Mike Brown as their new head coach, and there will be some laughter because of all the time they wasted to get a guy they could have gotten 15 minutes after firing Tom Thibodeau.
Which matters exactly not at all in the long run. It’s just us enjoying the shambolic Knicks for not receiving permission to bother all the coaches with all the reputations, just because they’re the Knicks and should never not enjoy all the illusory benefits of habitual label shopping—especially if the shopping is done with an eye toward taking something someone else has.
That is the funny part of all this. Mike Brown has been an excellent coach at other stops who only gets canned when someone tires of him asking his players to defend, and he is on any level an excellent fit for a team that seems well positioned to become a bully in the Jackson Pollock–level piefight of the Eastern Conference. His career winning percentage of .599 is the seventh-best of any coach with his volume of work, and his results as an assistant under Rick Carlisle, Gregg Popovich, and Steve Kerr are fairly self-explanatory. For a team allegedly on the verge of nearly a championship, he is a very good fit.
But he isn’t a sexy hire because he is also the essential coaching retread (this is his fifth gig and fourth team), and Jimmy Dolan and his district manager Leon Rose were aiming for their version of sexy because they have always leaned into sexy in New York. Even though the Knicks had success under the retread-y and deeply non-sexy Thibodeau, they didn’t have enough success to obscure that non-sexiness, and eventually Dolan decided the second failing wasn’t worth the principal benefits. It’s why he’s Dolan in a nutshell, and we use that word in all the ways you wish to imagine it.
It is an oddly inconsistent stance for Dolan to take, of course, but certainly a self-explanatory one, because all we were told all spring long was that New York is allegedly a Knicks town more than any other place is an anything town. Presumably this must be because they get celebrities sitting down front where they can be seen, and that measure has been very effective indeed if you ignore the fact that those celebrities haven’t seen a title in 52 years and only two Finals since. One of those Finals teams was coached by the noted Timothée Chalamet impersonator Jeff Van Gundy, since we’re talking sexy, and the two titles by famous runway model Red Holzman. In other words, the sexy always comes from the players.
Here are the sexpot coaches with rings in this century, in reverse order:
Mark Daigneault. Joe Mazzulla. Michael Malone. Steve Kerr. Mike Budenholzer. Frank Vogel. Nick Nurse. Tyronn Lue. Gregg Popovich. Erik Spoelstra. Rick Carlisle. Phil Jackson. Doc Rivers. Stan Van Gundy/Pat Riley. Larry Brown.
We’ll give you Popovich and Jackson, maybe even half a season of Riley. We could even be persuaded on Kerr. But even they all had incredibly sexy players for the tasks that players perform. The rest of those listed above are just smart technicians who knew that technical skills go less far than players willing to perform them on command. In other words, you spend your attention on players, and hire coaches who can convince them that the hard stuff—like defense, rebounding, picks, and shot-changing—gets people paid too.
All of this is why the Knicks could have, and probably should have, grabbed Brown immediately, even if you think that Sacramento was instructive of his actual shelf life and the Knicks players will turn on him three years down the road. The Knicks’ window is now, and having been freshly schooled by the Pacers they have all the reasons in the world to commit fully to whomever is wearing the ridiculous track suit and writing ransom notes on whiteboards. Schemes are important but even the best can be undone by inattentive or unimposing players. A coach is for the right-now in ways that players are not.
Does the month the Knicks wasted finding someone standing right in front of them matter in the longer term? No. Does it matter that Quin Snyder, Jay Wright, Ime Udoka, Chris Finch, Billy Donovan, or Jason Kidd would have been materially better at attracting celebrities to sit near Dolan? Also no. Hiring a coach is a basketball-only decision, and sexy doesn’t enter into it. If it did, Chalamet would have taken the job on Day 2.
In short, Mike Brown is a very correct hire for what the Knicks truly need, and even if their essential Knickhood prevents them from winning a title, it won’t be because he was a bad idea.