Mike Brown: Mad Scientist
How Mike Brown’s willingness to experiment has started opening new doors for the Knicks this season.
With 52 seconds left in the third quarter of the NBA Cup Championship, Jalen Brunson trotted over to the scorer’s table.
Knicks fans had seen this before: Brunson had exited just two minutes earlier, but the Knicks were down and could not risk the deficit growing larger. And while Brunson’s replacement, Tyler Kolek, had performed admirably, it was approaching crunch time. These are the moments you lean on your best players.
But then a funny thing happened.
Kolek was not subbed out. Instead, he remained on the court with Brunson for the next nine minutes of game time (and 12 of the final 14) as the Knicks saw a 7-point deficit turn into a 5-point lead and ultimately a decisive victory over the San Antonio Spurs.
While this game was merely an exhibition to the majority of NBA fans watching, for Knicks fans it was a validation of an evolution they have been watching develop for almost two months: Mike Brown is a bit of a mad scientist.
This may seem hyperbolic — in a vacuum, it likely is — but analysis is relative, and objectively grading the malleability of a head coach fresh off of five seasons of Tom Thibodeau is damn near impossible. Thibodeau had many strengths as a coach, but his defining characteristic (and perhaps the one that doomed him) was his rigidity.
Last season, the Knicks had five players average over 35 minutes per game. This season, only Brunson is over 35 mpg (35.1), and only four Knicks are even over 30 mpg. Why does this matter? Because it’s reflective of a team searching for answers building its rotation and general strategy.
For example: last season, Karl-Anthony Towns played 81% of his non-garbage time minutes with Josh Hart on the court. 1803 of Towns’ 2237 minutes were played with Hart. This season, Towns has played 388 of his 710 minutes (55%) with Hart. Naturally, this has led to far more true five-out lineups where the Knicks can maximally leverage Towns’ greatest gift (the threat of his shooting).
And this has benefited Hart as well! Playing fewer minutes while simultaneously appearing in more lineups has allowed the Knicks to emphasize Hart’s versatility. Whether it’s crashing the offensive glass in bigger lineups or pushing the pace in lineups that lack a singular initiator (non-Brunson lineups), Hart can be a Swiss army knife who gives a lineup what it needs. He’s being used as a luxury rather than a necessity.
Brown’s influence is about more than lineup diversity as well. The lineups are informative of how the Knicks are trying to play at any certain moment. Fast, slow, big, small, chaotic, stagnant… it appears very little is off the table in this pursuit to discover what the best version of this Knicks team looks like.
Take Brunson, whose usage and touches per game have increased this season. But his average seconds per touch AND dribbles per touch have decreased drastically. Brown is leveraging Brunson’s off-ball gifts in a way that is not only allowing him to maintain his offensive impact, but simultaneously elevating the offensive impact of guys like OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, and Miles McBride — all enjoying career-best seasons per Dunksandthrees’ Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM).
The Knicks’ path to a championship was always going to require a fully maximized roster. A team where the whole approached or even surpasses the sum of its parts. Finding out how to keep Brunson as an All-NBA level player while elevating the players around him was not just smart, it was essential.
Perhaps the scariest aspect for the rest of the Eastern Conference? It’s only the middle of December.
This feels almost completely the opposite of last year’s December that saw the Knicks rattle off nine straight wins in the middle of a 19-4 stretch that ended up being the peak of their regular season. That team saw that stretch as confirmation of what they already knew to be true. But this one appears to be just getting started. They’re not done throwing darts at the board and seeing what sticks. Far from it.
They’re moving like a team with confidence, that knows its place is at the top of the Eastern Conference and has the humility to acknowledge that what they don’t know precisely is the “how.” And Mike Brown seems determined to use these games to give his team the best odds of reaching the end of this season with a confidence that they know what lineups and strategies will give them the best chance of reaching that destination. Even if it costs them a regular season game or two.
Replacing Thibodeau with Brown was never about a lack of appreciation or discontent with the status quo. I think most Knicks fans, if put to a lie detector, would have embraced a Jalen Brunson era that looked a lot like 2023-2025… even if it meant no championships. Those teams were tough, prepared to play every night, and gave the city of New York a gluttony of memories and emotions that had been sparse this millennium.
Moving on from that was a signal that the front office was determined to see what the ceiling of this core is, even if it meant lowering the floor. They were (finally) prepared to introduce risk and potentially take a step back if it increased the chances of taking multiple steps forward.
What Mike Brown has done across the board only reinforces that. The Knicks are mixing and matching to see what works. One moment they’ll dominate the paint with a gigantic lineup with Mitchell Robinson, Towns and Anunoby sharing the court (+28 per 100 possessions in 42 minutes), and the next they’ll be running and gunning with Brunson playing next to McBride and Bridges (+17 per 100 in 180 minutes already, despite McBride’s injury issues).
Once again, this team has the talent to make this season special. If they wanted to, they could limit their rotation and play style to what they know will work and probably win a lot of games. But they’re not trying to confirm what they already know works, they’re trying to discover what works best.
It’s a subtle difference, but it’s entirely about maximizing their preparedness come playoff time. And it could very well be what gets them over the hump.
