New York Knicks coach Mike Brown is on a quest to be a closer

NEW YORK — As the New York Knicks navigate their Eastern Conference finals series against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Mike Brown is a man looking in the mirror.

Brown, in his first year as head coach of the Knicks, looks down at the Cleveland bench and remembers his 36-year-old self, who was a rookie head coach with the Cavaliers in 2005, leading a team that featured a 20-year-old LeBron James in just his second NBA season.

Fast-forward more than 20 years, Brown, now 56, has been on a fascinating journey as the rare Black NBA coach who has gotten multiple opportunities at head coaching roles — two stints with the Cavaliers, one with the Lakers and one with the Kings before he arrived in New York — despite not winning a championship.

But while it would be unfair and inaccurate to say Brown had been working in obscurity prior to taking the Knicks job this year, one thing is certain: This stop in New York could be the defining opportunity of his coaching career. The franchise is looking for its first title since 1973, and Brown is looking to become certified as a champion head coach.

The only way to add that to his impressive résumé is to lead the Knicks to the Larry O’Brien Trophy and, in doing so, follow in the footsteps of seven Black head coaches who have won an NBA title.

But the mountain keeps getting steeper.

While Brown keeps getting older, the NBA keeps getting younger. Younger head coaches and a new wave of young Superstars such as San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama and Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander make winning a title more difficult with each passing season.

There is a window in New York. On Tuesday, the Knicks overcame a 22-point Cleveland lead and defeated the Cavaliers 115-104 in overtime to take Game 1 of the series.

After a recent Knicks practice, I asked Brown how much he reflected on the arc of his career —from being a rookie head coach with James in Cleveland to now being one of the NBA’s veteran head coaches.

“I don’t,” he said. “I don’t spend a lot of time doing it. Just like in your world, you’re probably a little better now than what you were 20 years ago, and so you look at it that way, and you try to lean on some of the things that you went through that were good for you and bad for you.”

Cleveland with James served as Brown’s learning experience of coaching an NBA superstar.

His Cavaliers tenure lasted five seasons, and the team reached the playoffs all five years, including a 2007 NBA Finals appearance that ended with a San Antonio sweep. Brown was named NBA Coach of the Year in 2009 for leading the Cavaliers to a team-record and league-best 66 wins.

Cleveland was also Brown’s first experience of losing his job. The Cavaliers won a league-best 61 games in 2010, but lost to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals. He was fired after the season.

“You lean on your experiences, and you just try to be better going forward,” Brown said. “But I don’t really think much about it.”

Well, he thinks about his choice of clothing during those years.

“My suit looked awful when I saw it. That’s about it,” he said. “I was little embarrassed from the suit standpoint, but other than that, you know, I just try to be better now than what I was back then.”

Brown’s résumé is strong but strange. He has coached Finals teams and won a pair of Coach of the Year awards. He has developed stars, managed egos, survived LeBron-era pressure in Cleveland and Kobe-era volatility in Los Angeles. He revived Sacramento basketball.

Yet his career has often been framed by critics who wonder at each turn if he deserved the new opportunity.

The New York situation is particularly odd. In most situations, a new head coach is brought in because the franchise has failed to win at all. This is not the case in New York, which has advanced past the first round of the playoffs each season since 2023.

The Knicks reached the Eastern Conference Finals last season, but after losing the series in six games, head coach Tom Thibodeau was fired. When Brown was hired, the expectations were made clear: His job was to lead the Knicks to the NBA Finals.

The fact Brown has received multiple opportunities is a testament to how much trust he has around the league to fix teams that are broken — or in the Knicks’ case, pull a team over a four-decade hump.

He led the Knicks to 53 wins this regular season — two more victories than last year — but that’s beside the point. Brown is tasked with taking the Knicks farther than they went last postseason, which means taking them to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.

Yet when asked if he felt an inordinate pressure, the good-natured Brown said he did not.

“I don’t really look at that like that,” he said after a recent practice. “I literally do this to try to compete to win a championship, and that’s what my focus is on throughout the course of year.”

New York, and the Knicks universe in particular, is known for incessant hand-wringing. There was no greater example than the first two months of the season, when the Knicks got off to a sluggish start.

There were questions about why Brown was hired when the Knicks had actually won the previous season. There was second-guessing. There was doubting. Through it all, Brown remained even-keeled and levelheaded. As an assistant in San Antonio and then at Golden State, he learned that even some of the greatest coaches in the business are second-guessed and criticized.

“Throughout the course of the year, there’s going to be noise out there,” he said. “When Pop [former Spurs coach Gregg Popovich] was at his high, people talked about him. I was with Steve [Kerr] too; when he was at his high, people talked about him. I’ve said this before: People could talk about Mike Brown, but it’s my job to ignore the noise, and it’s easy for me to do that because the pressure that I put on myself — that the team puts on itself to be great, or to try to be the best team in the league — doesn’t even match up to what everybody else says throughout the course of the year.

“Because of the money that we’re paid and the attention that we have in our positions, there’s a lot of pressure. So, whether it’s here or in Utah or Houston or Sacramento, it’s all the same, especially if you’re a competitor.”

The difference between the 36-year-old Brown and the 56-year-old Brown is that his frames of reference have expanded exponentially. He has a cauldron of past experiences to tap into that can help him deal with the here and now. He spoke about one such situation after Tuesday’s game.

Brown was an assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors from 2016-22.

During a playoff series against the Houston Rockets, who then were led by James Harden, Brown said the coaching staff took note of how many dribbles Harden took. Noting Harden dribbled the ball nearly three times as much as the Golden State guards, the Warriors coaches theorized he would eventually wear down.

Brown said he used that experience this during Tuesday’s game, when the Knicks were making their comeback after being 22 points down with less than eight minutes left. He told his team to continue to press Harden regardless of the score, because he might eventually wear down. Regardless of the exact reason, Knicks guard Jalen Brunson torched Harden during New York’s fourth-quarter comeback.

As an assistant with Golden State, Brown also experienced what it felt like to win championships. The Warriors defeated the Cavaliers in the 2017 and 2018 NBA Finals, and prevailed over the Boston Celtics in the 2022 NBA Finals.

Validated by those championships, Brown left Golden State in 2022 to become the head coach of the Sacramento Kings. In his first season, Brown led Sacramento to its first playoff appearance in 17 years. For snapping the longest playoff drought in NBA history, Brown became the first-ever unanimous NBA Coach of the Year in 2023.

By this time, however, Brown knew how fickle and fragile life in the NBA can be for a head coach. Less than two years later, The Kings fired Brown after the team got off to a 13-18 start to begin the 2024-25 season.

Brown was not unemployed for long.

The Knicks are a culmination of everything that has taken place during Brown’s coaching journey. In Cleveland, he was simply known as “LeBron’s coach.” In Los Angeles, he had the impossible task of following Phil Jackson, and he resurrected his career in Sacramento by being named NBA Coach of the Year for the second time in his career. Now, he is the head coach of a franchise that has not won a championship in more than 50 years.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to say Brown is looking for validation or that he’s after redemption.

It’s safer to say that Brown, at this stage of his career, simply wants to be known as a closer.

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