Amid all the joyful preening and proclamations of destiny deferred but no longer denied, the most obstreperous of New York Knickerbockers fans arose today to the knowledge that they were dead-ass wrong about coach/reformed pariah Mike Brown.
At least for now, anyway. There is still another series to be played, and the team the Knicks will face in their first NBA Finals since 1999 will have just emerged from a ferocious rock fight that is barely halfway done. This means that there is still time for them to turn back to their original position on him, which was "We should have hired Tiago Splitter instead of this retread boob." Doctrinal error is always something that the person committing the error will try to justify as soon as possible.
For the moment, though, Mike Brown is on citywide scholarship. The man condemned on day one for replacing Tom Thibodeau—and remember that Brown didn't fire Thibs, just replaced him—has on day 323 become a genius in the town that wanted so much to hate him. Indeed, if the Knicks had behaved as they normally do, and wrapped their season up when they usually do, the demand for Brown's immediate firing would be a rare point of consensus among New Yorkers. This is what Knicks fans do, mostly: believe, hope, hallucinate, binge-eat disappointment, demand heads on pikes, repeat. They're like most other fans in that sense, only louder, surer, and more insistent. Some of them are also famous.
And now they have to acknowledge that Brown is not in fact a sad and incompetent retread who couldn't keep a job in Sacramento, but a coach who has at the very least not ruined a team on the come up, and at most subtly retooled his team's M.O. in a way that helped it go from intriguing pretender to potential juggernaut. Like almost every NBA coach ever, Brown is not the reason why his team wins. But, as good coaches do, he has made enough smart and subtle offensive touches to raise that unit's ceiling, and then let the players thrive within them. During their historic run of dominance in the postseason, Brown's Knicks have become the best kind of team for fans to enjoy: the kind that renders opponents ass, and then kicks that ass. Since eating Game 3 of the first-round series against Atlanta on a C.J. McCollum jumper with 12 seconds left, they have won 11 consecutive games by an average of 23 points per game, led 78 percent of the time in those games, and for added stomping pleasure 97 percent of the time in the fourth quarter. Being a fan has never been easier, not just in New York but anywhere.
This hysterical smugness will continue until the Western Conference Finals end, at which point the specter of San Oklatonio will cause the crippling levels of hyper-aggressive angst Knicks fans have trademarked over the last quarter-century and change. They have been up and down within their own division and conference during that period, but have not made the Finals since the strike-shortened 1999 season, which they made with a team that won only 27 of 50 games. The story that fans were partying "like it's 1999" has the hidden groin shot that the Knicks lost those Finals in five games and didn't get to 90 points in any of them. In fact, the Knicks haven't scored 100 in any Finals game since 1973.
These Knicks, on the other hand, have an indisputable dynamism that extends past Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, and even in ritualized beatings like the ones they have engaged in this postseason they have exhibited that least Knicks (and most axiomatically un-Thibsian) attribute—fun. For that, Brown can be credited not only for tweaking the offense for increased fluidity but for getting out of the way just enough to let the players be the show. They captured bar patrons across America the night they beat Atlanta, 140-89, and did so from the moment they went ahead, 72-22, halfway through the second quarter. The Knicks? Up 50? In the first half? To quote the Pope when the White Sox beat Kansas City to get over .500 two weeks ago, "That's got to be bullshit, right?"
The Knicks have won two championships, both under the charming grandpa Red Holzman. They've been to two others, under imperious human statue model Pat Riley and mopey-faced Seinfeld character Jeff Van Gundy, but Brown is just the guy who has taken the Knicks into a lofty state of existence that would tax Bodhisattva's confidence. He's owed a tower of apologies from a pigpile of front-row celebrities and upper-deck harpies alike, but because he knows the drill, he asks for none of it. He learned the backhand of coaching by getting fired after winning 61 games in Cleveland, fired again after only five games in his second season with the dying embers of the Los Angeles Lakers, getting hired as an assistant in Golden State and winning 12 consecutive playoff games while Steve Kerr was having post-back surgery health issues and then finding out that Kerr would get the record-book credit for those wins, and most recently fired for trying to give the kiss of life to the corpse that is the Sacramento Kings. Brown has silenced an army of critics but has never turned his ear toward that muted (and mutant) crowd. Theater is for all the other folks taking credit for what he helped build.
And now he has a week in which to enjoy that silence before the Finals begin and the nation remembers its commitment to the notion that whoever escapes the West is expected to curb-stomp the Eastern champ, because Oklahoma City is Galactus and San Antonio is Emperor Wemby I. The Knicks will not only be the underdog against either, but a cuddly underdog at that. It's another sharp departure for a franchise that hasn't been appealing outside of a few miles from Times Square since Willis Reed gimped out of the tunnel 56 years ago to help them win their first title. The Knicks still employ Walt Frazier as an icon and broadcaster 53 years after he led them to their second one. Knicks history since then has been, well, more Wizard-, King- and Clipper-like than anything else. You may not want to hear them say it because they will be so insistent about it, but this franchise's fans are the very definition of long-suffering.
And one of the things they will have to suffer is the fact that for all their self-proclaimed basketball knowledge, they were dead wrong about their head coach. Brown was the perfect hire at the perfect time, even though nobody could have seen its full manifestation in the carnival funhouses of their minds. Brown was the unassuming antidote to the rigidly doctrinaire Thibs, and, for those too conditioned to hate this team for being from New York with all that implies, also the guy who proved that Knicks fans know what every other fan base with every other teams knows about what they watch on a daily and yearly basis: not all that much.
