Despite still coaching through the first season of a four-year, $40 million contract, Mike Brown has seen his job security get thrust under the rumor mill’s microscope. If it turns out the speculation has any legs, we can be sure of two things: The New York Knicks will have been handed an early playoff exit, and they’ll be in the market for a Leon Rose replacement, too.
According to The Athletic’s Sam Amick, the “noise surrounding the Knicks’ Mike Brown won’t die down unless they reach the NBA Finals, and even that might not be good enough for the first-year New York coach to be safe.” That last part is jarring.
Reaching the NBA Finals would constitute linear progress over last season, when the Knicks were jettisoned in the Eastern Conference Finals. Ditching the head coach who steered you there would be a wild development—the culmination of maniacal impatience, intimation that something is irrevocably rotten behind the scenes, or some combination of both.
Regardless of the motives, the decision to fire Brown wouldn’t just be about the head coach himself. It’s an ax that most likely only falls if team president Leon Rose is no longer the one calling the shots.
The Knicks can’t fire Mike Brown, and keep Leon Rose
If Mike Brown doesn’t work out this soon, the Knicks can’t let Rose make another hire. The optics of doing so would be so unbelievably bizarre, confusing, cringey, inexplicable, you name it.
Granted, the extent to which Rose had a say over his homie Tom Thibodeau’s dismissal remains to be seen. The decision seems to have been primarily driven by certain players, and team owner James Dolan. But unless the ladder bound-and-gagged Rose and prevented him from choosing any other candidate, Brown is his guy. You can’t get rid of him after one season, and then claim you trust the judgment of the dude who hired him to go find his replacement.
It’d be one thing if Rose had the benefit of the doubt in excess. He doesn’t. He can’t. Not anymore. He burned through that goodwill already, and not with his head-coaching decisions. On the contrary, Brown is just the second head coach the Knicks have employed since 2020. That is an all-time-great level of avoiding turnover at Penn Plaza.
Rose is responsible, however, for the construction of this core. He negotiated the deal that sent a trillion first-round picks to Brooklyn for someone currently playing fewer minutes than Jordan Clarkson. Then, he signed him to a four-year, $150 million. He greenlit the acquisition of New York’s resident lightning rod, Karl-Anthony Towns.
He failed to get anything done—or opted against striking a deal—for Giannis Antetokounmpo over the summer, when the Knicks were given an exclusive negotiating window with the Milwaukee Bucks. He decided against making changes at the trade deadline bigger than landing Jose Alvarado. And he has brought this team to the precipice of crossing into the prohibitively restrictive second apron.
It seems anything is possible in New York
The list of prospective errors goes on, and Rose’s cover is wearing thin. Stumbling into Jalen Brunson can buy you only so much time. If the Knicks lose early enough in the playoffs that Brown’s arrival is added to his list misfires, it would take some magical rewriting of history for Rose to emerge from this unscathed—which is to say, employed.
Of course, if we’re being brutally honest, this all feels like jumping the shark. The playoffs are still happening, and the idea that Brown can’t get at least another season following an NBA Finals appearance is truly unhinged.
Then again, it’s not every year your media-averse owner comes out and infers that anything other than a championship is a failure.
So maybe Brown’s seat is getting hotter after all. Which is terrible news for Rose. Because if Brown’s seat ends up catching fire, his own will probably have gotten burned to smithereens.
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