A Different World?

With Mike Brown in charge, just how different will New York's offense look? Today we dig into some key areas to find out.

Good morning! Several Knick moves became official yesterday, as the team announced the signings of Jordan Clarkson and Guerschon Yasusele and the hiring of Mike Brown, who will join the MSG studio crew for an intro presser today at 2:30. In other news, New York released their summer league roster, and it contains all the names you were expecting:

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A Different World?

Three years ago, Sacramento lit the world on fire. It was certainly a long time coming.

Prior to Mike Brown’s first season as head coach, the Kings had ranked outside the top 10 NBA offenses for 17 consecutive years. The last time they were among the league leaders, C-Webb, Peja and Mike Bibby were leading the attack and Brown was still an assistant with the Pacers, still months away from being hired to guide a 21-year-old LeBron James in Cleveland.

The unexpected nature of that offensive ascension is a big reason why Brown was awarded the second Coach of the Year award of his career, but it wasn’t just that the Kings had a great offense that garnered so much attention; it was how they scored that turned heads across the league. There are many different ways to score efficiently in the NBA, and Sacramento’s brand of offense was the most exciting thing going this side of Golden State (which is conveniently where Brown borrowed from so liberally).

For proof that not all efficient offenses are created equal, look no further than the league’s second ranked offense in the 2022-23 season, which was more blunt object than operatic ballet.

While their run of futility hadn’t been quite as long as the Kings, the New York Knicks had ranked in the bottom 10 in league-wide offense for seven of the previous eight years before finishing second to Sacramento¹. Despite their own prior ineptitude, New York’s rise to prominence didn’t get nearly as much attention as Sacramento’s because many wrote off their efficiency as a product of smoke and mirrors. The question many asked was how an offense could be considered good while shooting the ball so very bad.

It stretched the boundaries of common sense. How could the league’s best offense have the second best effective field goal percentage while the second best offense ranked 20th in the same metric?

The simple answer is that the Knicks nailed everything else, ranking 10th in free throw rate, fifth in turnover rate, and most famously, second in offensive rebounding. Often times, a missed shot was their best form of offense as either Mitchell Robinson or Isaiah Hartenstein was waiting to gobble up the carom.

That methodology translated at times to the postseason, but in both the 2023 and 2024 playoffs, the offense had a tendency to die when opposing defenses took care of the boards. Even this season, when New York’s offense was less reliant on nailing the fringe stats, their playoff offense was far too inconsistent. They finished the postseason with a 112.7 offensive rating (good for 7th of 16 teams) but had just a 51.9 effective field goal percentage that ranked 10th.

In moving on from Tom Thibodeau, there seems to be a clear imperative to be more than a low turnover team that crashes the offensive glass and relies on individual brilliance from their top offensive players.

Which brings us back to the Kings. How did a team whose entire roster had made two combined All-Star games (both courtesy of Sabonis when he was in Indiana) set a new mark for offensive dominance, and what might it tell us about how the Knicks plan to operate this season? Let’s look at three key areas to find the answer…

1. Small Ball

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Tom Thibodeau likes size. Size in the backcourt. Size at the rim. Size everywhere.

As a result, he often took heavy criticism for avoiding lineup pairings that skewed on the smaller side. The most famous example of this was his reluctance to start Immanuel Quickley, but we’ve seen it more recently with Deuce McBride and even arguably Tyler Kolek.

That wasn’t the case with Sacramento.