Mike Brown focused on getting Knicks up to speed
New York Knicks head coach Mike Brown on the sideline during the first half of an NBA preseason basketball game against the Philadelphia 76ers, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Credit: AP/Altaf Qadri
YAS ISLAND, Abu Dhabi
Just over an hour before debuting his newly installed fast-paced offense, a hopeful step forward for the Knicks, coach Mike Brown was focused on bringing attention to something else — his sneakers.
For the preseason game Thursday night in a world of color ways and styles and player-attached names on sneakers, Brown opted for black high-top canvas P.F. Flyers, the predecessor to all of the high-priced brands today. He recalled that — before he was born — this brand was the first sneaker endorsed by an athlete when Bob Cousy signed on in 1958.
And maybe that explains something about Brown — a focus on analytics and the latest ideas while rooted in history.
Consider the path he took through his long coaching career. He served as an assistant coach on two teams that had the most beautiful passing in the game — the San Antonio Spurs’ championship squad in 2003 and the Golden State teams that won three titles from 2016 to 2022.
He has experimented with forms of the Princeton offense, picked up from Eddie Jordan when the former Princeton guard and Nets coach was on his staff in Los Angeles. And he has taken parts from all of his stops and worked to combine the finer points of the game with a throwback slogan from P.F. Flyers, which promised to make you run faster and jump higher.
In the Knicks’ preseason debut 7,000 miles away at Etihad Arena, the focus was on the “run faster’’ part. The Knicks were efficient offensively last season under Tom Thibodeau, and efforts to try to change the styles of stars Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns — both of whom are tremendously skilled but more methodical — is a risk. But Brown believes you don’t have to be fast to play fast.
“In my opinion, you just have to be mentally tough,” he said. “Because anybody can run fast in this league, in my opinion, because these are the best athletes in the world.
“Now, there might be some guys that are faster than others. But if you have the mental toughness to consistently do it 10 out of 10 times, you’ll be a guy who is faster three out of 10 times. And I love the toughness of our guys mentally, so to see that come to light is a fun thing to watch.
“We’re still learning, though. It’s hard. It’s not as easy as what a lot of people say. But all our guys I think will get there.”
And they did Saturday. On two straight possessions in the second quarter, Brunson ran out ahead of the pack, taking long outlet passes and scoring. Brown believes that what he’s learned and seen with other teams can translate to this, making the other players more of a threat and opening up easier opportunities for the All-NBA pair.
This current system, refined from what he’s used before and tinkered with along the way, is focused on speed — rushing the ball inbounds and up the floor, with movement and reads determining the shot rather than a scripted play.
“Everybody grows, everybody evolves,” Brown said. “My six years in Golden State, you can’t replicate what Steve Kerr and Draymond [Green] and Steph [Curry] and Klay [Thompson] and those guys do there or what they did during my time there. But try to take a lot from them and form my own system. I did it.
“I experimented with it when I was with the Nigerian national team. And then I took it to Sacramento and have run it for years. We feel confident in it. We feel confident teaching it. And we feel if you play a little bit of defense, that you put just as much pressure on your opponent offensively, that you’ll have a chance to win ballgames.”
Brunson has accepted the change, commenting early in camp, “Yeah, I mean, could get us more open looks, easier baskets at the rim, when we run the floor after stops. But I think the most important thing is when we get stops, we’ve just got to run. So it starts on the defensive end and us getting out and pushing, making plays for each other. I’m excited for this change.”
While Brown has been coaching as an assistant or a head coach since 1997, it is the time in Golden State that he credits for really setting the basis of what his system is now.
“The veterans there, they did a fantastic job of understanding how to play off one another,” Brown said. “And so it was harder for our young guys to fit in because they had to have a certain feel that our veterans had.
“And so I tried to put together some of the concepts that they used, make it almost like just a system so that it’s easily teachable, in my opinion, and to where all the concepts fit and flow, and out of two different looks.
“And so I spent the six years doing that as an assistant coach while learning. And then when I coached the Nigerian national team, that was the first time I had a chance to experiment with it. I hired [current Nets coach] Jordi Fernandez and [former NBA assistant and current Florida State coach] Luke Loucks to come with me to the Nigerian national team.
“So I taught them that. They added some wrinkles to it, and then we brought it to Sacramento, where we hired Jay Triano. He added some cuts, and there were two main cuts that he added within the concepts of what we were doing, and I was like, ‘Wow, these cuts are interesting and they’re nice.
“We want to add these cuts. What should we call these cuts? Jay being from Canada, he dubbed them Canada cuts. So we have two different types of cuts that are mainstays within the concepts that we do.”
Will they work as well with the Knicks as they did with Sacramento, where speedy De’Aaron Fox led an offense that was ranked first in the NBA in Brown’s first year there as he won his second NBA Coach of the Year award? Brunson is a different player, excelling with a different style. Any system must adapt to its talent, whether it is Brown’s plans for LeBron James in Cleveland, for Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles or the players he inherited in Sacramento.
For Brown, to advance is to grow. A bit of the past melded with the present, and maybe the future.
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
