New ideas and promises of a transformation always sound great in the preseason. The hope of what they can bring is in full abundance.
But now all of Mike Brown’s envisioned Knicks changes stop being theoretical — they come under the spotlight and must become reality.
Yes, there were other moves made — particularly in beefing up the bench. But firing Tom Thibodeau and subsequently hiring Brown is what the Knicks are most relying on to be the catalyst that elevates them into true title contenders.
And the changes Brown intends to implement get their first test against a Cavaliers team most expect to be the biggest obstacle in the Eastern Conference.
An NBA Finals berth is the bar Brown must meet, considering the Knicks fired Thibodeau after reaching the conference finals.
With the preseason over and the regular season beginning Wednesday night, how confident is Brown that he can be the force that brings the Knicks to a new level?
“The good part about it is, the Finals or the championship round doesn’t happen until June,” Brown said after Knicks practice on Tuesday. “We’ve got a long time to get there. It starts on the daily. We can’t skip any steps.
“We just wanna keep taking steps, because it’s gonna be a process. Knowing that we might take one or two steps backwards, but hopefully we can regroup and continue to take three, four, five more forward.”
The changes Brown wants to bring to the Knicks offense have been well documented. He has placed an emphasis on pace and ball movement, a sharp departure to the slower, isolation-heavy offense under Thibodeau.
And it wasn’t exactly pretty during the preseason. In the early days, it can be expected that the Knicks will have their fair share of growing pains. But the hope is that it will ease the load on Jalen Brunson and get the periphery scorers more involved.
Last year, after making several major offseason moves with the specific goal of competing with the Celtics, the Knicks were humbled by Boston in their opening game of the season.
But by the end of the year, the Knicks eliminated the Celtics in the conference semifinals.
Wednesday’s game against the Cavaliers at Madison Square Garden presents what could be a similar development.
“Early on, it’s gonna be, starting with me, all of our jobs to hold each other accountable while embracing the process,” Brown said. “The process isn’t gonna happen overnight. It’s gonna take some time. If a guy does go this way or that way, just trying to pull him back in and keeping everybody together while we figure out what needs to happen on the floor on both ends.
“It starts with me and it trickles down to everybody else.”
Off the floor, Brown represents major change as well. Thibodeau has a long-earned reputation of being gruff and no-nonsense. Brown is similarly intense, but much more personable.
After working with him for a few months, it’s something his players have already noticed.
“He’s great,” Mikal Bridges said Tuesday. “How he leads the team — I think it’s tough to get 15, 16, 17 guys to all follow one voice, especially nowadays when we got a lot of guys [around the league] getting paid a lot of money and they can tend to act like they don’t need a coach or anything like that. Us, we could be prima donnas or divas a little bit, but for him to be able to get a whole group of guys to follow him, he’s done a great job.
“He has that voice, it makes you not want to mess up. It makes you want to play as hard as you can. He gets on you, but in a respectful way. He’s gonna get on you as he should, that’s how I look at it. I’ve had some tough coaches growing up, starting with coach [Jay] Wright, Monty [Williams], guys that would really let you know what you’re doing, where you fear not doing the right thing. He’s done a great job. Every time he talks, every time he’s explaining something, he does it to the highest level for our understanding and making sure we know what we’re doing.”
Thibodeau was rigid when it came to how he wanted his Knicks to play — they were going to be fierce on defense and outwork opponents.
Brown wants his Knicks to be much more adaptable. The championship teams, he says, can’t be pegged into one hole.
“We’d like to establish or have an identity, but it’s not just strictly ‘Hey, we’re a defensive team’, or ‘We’re an offensive team.’ In my opinion, you have to be able to do a lot of things in order to win,” Brown said. “You can’t just be a good defensive team, because if you look at the NBA champions of the past, everybody who has won a championship wasn’t [just] a top three defensive team. Everybody who’s won a championship wasn’t just a top three offensive team. So you have to have belief in what you think this team can do and grow from that.”
Time for Brown’s theories to turn into realities.
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