A New Beginning

Mike Brown is the 32nd head coach of the New York Knicks.

Good morning! For just the 32nd time in their history, the Knicks have hired a new head coach. Perhaps more than any of the 31 men who came before him, Mike Brown will enter the job with incredible expectations, but early indications are that he’s more than up for the challenge. Next up: potentially prying away James Borrego from New Orleans to be his associate head coach, although the Pels are able to block such a lateral move if they desire. We’ll see what happens there, but regardless of who it ends up being, Stef Bondy guesses that Brown will have “something resembling offensive & defensive coordinators."

All stuff to look forward to, but right now, let’s talk about the man of the hour…and about breakfast.

Oh, and today’s newsletter is completely free for all. Enjoy!

A New Beginning

15 years ago, an Egg McMuffin changed my life.

Or at least that’s how it felt at the time.

I was finishing up my third year of law school, and for most of that time, I was in a serious relationship with one of my classmates. Being the head-first guy that I am, we moved in together after dating for about nine months, and for a while, I was pretty happy.

A big part of that happiness stemmed from the fact that I was finally living the sort of life I always envisioned. After a few years tending bar and falling asleep as the sun came up, I was ready to be an adult. Law school started that process, but this girl really kicked it up a notch. She kept me focused on all the right things and helped me avoid all the wrong ones. I got heavily involved in trial advocacy and started to carve out a niche for myself. I was doing OK for myself.

But my newfound happiness came with a cost. The girl, well…how can I put this nicely…

Life with her wasn’t easy, and rules & regulations, there were many. No shoes in the apartment was a big one. If you left the apartment during the day, you couldn’t lay down on the bed wearing the clothes you had worn outside, even if it was on top of the comforter. A shower was most certainly required. We were also required to attend dinner at her great grandmother’s house every Sunday, without exception, which I might not have minded so much if they didn’t exclusively speak Russian and didn’t watch only Russian television stations¹. Game 7 of the NBA Finals is on? I’m sorry, that interferes with the borscht.

But more important than anything - anything in the world - was that every meal had to be discussed before it was eaten. It didn’t matter where we were or how hectic our schedule might have been. If I wanted a sandwich from the deli, I must first call and say “honey, I’m hungry and thinking of getting a sandwich from the deli. What are you doing for lunch?” Sometimes I’d get to have my sandwich, but other times she might also be free for lunch, in which case a conversation would ensue about whether we might have lunch together, and what might that entail in terms of food selection, location, timing, etc. These conversations were often longer than you might imagine.

This became such a part of my daily routine that you’d have had better luck getting me to eat a BLT laced with arsenic than enjoy a meal without prior approval.

Finally, after a few years of this sort of life, I’d had enough and decided to end things about a month before we both graduated. She had no idea it was coming, and the breakup went like you might have expected, starting in the afternoon and lasting late into the night. I was completely wiped. Thankfully I had a friend who lived nearby and had a couch to spare.

Having bypassed dinner in favor of some hearty emotional trauma, I woke up starving the next morning. Walking out of my friend’s apartment, I spotted a McDonalds across the street. Instinctually, I took out my phone to make the call.

And then it hit me: after years of oppression, I was, in that moment, the author of my own culinary destiny.

Of the tens of thousands of meals I’ve had in my life, none stay with me more than that first bite of muffin, egg, ham and cheese. You could have offered me a winning lotto ticket for that sandwich and I’d have turned it down without a second thought.

It wasn’t food; it was liberation.

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Longtime readers of this newsletter know my fondness for Tom Thibodeau quite well.

Even among more neutral observers though, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks he’s a bad coach. More than that, the majority of Knick fans recognized that he was as good as anyone at raising the floor of his teams. Whether he could hit a championship ceiling had become a major question of the last 12 months, but few if any coaches come with a higher level of certainty. If those coaches are in Tier 1, Thibs is firmly in Tier 2, and it’s not like we haven’t seen Tier 2 coaches hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy before.

Given this understanding, when Thibodeau was fired exactly one month ago, everyone immediately expected an upgrade.

Is Jay Wright finally ready to coach his guys again? Would Dan Hurley make the leap? Will Leon make a run at Spo?

Whoever it was, they must have been going after someone special. After all, you don’t fire the guy who just took you to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in a generation without having a big name in mind.

Pretty soon, it became apparent that if the Knicks did have a name in mind, it wasn’t the pie in the sky many imagined. Even Jason Kidd, coming off a Finals run, has more playoff losses than wins. As Mike Brown and Taylor Jenkins emerged as the prime candidates, many began to wonder if New York’s decision makers had committed a grievous error.

What happens this season and in the next few years will ultimately render that verdict, but after their month-long search for a coach, one thing seems clear:

As far as the Knicks are concerned, the most important thing about the head coach after Tom Thibodeau is that he isn’t Tom Thibodeau.

This isn’t to say Thibs was bad, or that he couldn’t have won it all, or that he didn’t have his supporters, both in the locker room and higher up in the organization. Just like other former players swear by him to this day, I’d bet that Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart will be Thibs guys for life.

But we also know that Thibodeau wasn’t for everyone. From certain players all the way on up, he rubbed some the wrong way. If this wasn’t apparent already, it certainly became clear after Stef Bondy’s report about what the Knicks were looking for in their next head coach. As Fred Katz commented to me on our recent pod, Thibs’ worst enemy couldn’t craft a more frontal attack. They might as well have said “if you list all of Tom Thibodeau’s most pertinent qualities, we want the opposite of each one.” The bit of PR from yesterday’s hiring news was a final twist of the knife:

If you can’t collaborate and can’t lead, well, you probably aren’t fit to coach an NBA team, are you?

Nothing about this was subtle. The Knicks wanted everyone to know that for all the good Tom Thibodeau brought to this franchise, not only would he not be missed, but his ouster led them directly to all the things they’ve been craving.

After five long years, they had been liberated.

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You think you know what’s coming, don’t you?

That this is the part where I compare Mike Brown to 310 calories worth of eggy deliciousness?

Well I’m sorry to spoil your appetite, but if Tom Thibodeau is a very good head coach, Mike Brown might be an even better one. As I laid out last week, he probably doesn’t get enough credit for his successes and has taken on too much blame for his perceived failures. 31 men have held the title of Knicks head coach before Mike Brown. Of those, only one had a higher winning percentage in the job than Brown does for his career, and he slunk his way to Miami 30 years ago.

More importantly, Brown is someone who espouses many of Tom Thibodeau’s best qualities while steering clear of some of his more questionable ones. Like Thibs, his accountability is old school, while unlike Thibs, he reportedly likes to practice…a lot. That should be a welcome change for a group who rarely looked like they were on the same page last season. Brown has also adapted along the way, taking bits and pieces from the Warriors and instituting them in Sacramento’s record-breaking offense three years ago. Like Thibs, he won’t back down from a challenge, but unlike Thibs, he might be more open to other ideas about how to attack it.

All of that matters, and if the Knicks reach new heights next year, Mike Brown’s coaching acumen will no doubt have a lot to do with it.

But for all that he brings to the table, none of it may be as important as what he doesn’t. After five years, Thibodeau’s unrelenting approach just became too much for too many people to deal with. We’ve all been in situations like that before, and after a while, the good stuff just gets buried underneath the bad.

In those scenarios, change for change’s sake is exactly what we need, regardless of what that next chapter entails².

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. I do not speak Russian.

2. As for my next chapter after the break up, I went on a six month bender making up for lost time. It nearly torpedoed my law career before it ever started, but I eventually righted the ship and landed a nice job at a firm where I met my wife. Looking back, I’m better off because of the sum total of all of those experiences, including the time with my ex. And I’m proud to report I haven’t had an Egg McMuffin since.