LAS VEGAS – Stan Van Gundy, fresh off his meeting with Mike Brown as part of NBA Cup coverage, applauded the new Knicks coach for checking his ego in the locker room and not reinventing what Tom Thibodeau set in motion.
“I give Mike Brown a lot of credit because he knows Tom is a great coach,” Van Gundy, the longtime coach and current analyst for Amazon Prime, said in an interview before Brown’s Knicks faced the Magic in Saturday’s NBA Cup semifinals. “He said that today at our meeting. So he didn’t try to change everything. He tried to tinker a little bit. And then he went back on a lot of the things (that Thibodeau did).
“But he’s taking advantage of the continuity they have with their squad rather than throwing everything away in an attempt to do it differently.”
Brown began his Knicks tenure emphasizing the importance of pace and depth, but lately the team has adopted more similarities to last season. Brown returned to the same starting lineup, with the inclusion of Josh Hart sending Mitchell Robinson to the reserves.
The rotation was cut so only two players got significant minutes off the bench, which was also a result of the injuries to Miles McBride and Landry Shamet.
The team’s pace had fallen to 26th in the NBA before Saturday, the same ranking as last season.
The offensive and defensive ratings were better under Brown, but were on par with Thibodeau’s last campaign before he was shockingly eliminated following the conference finals elimination.
Before Saturday’s game, the Knicks were second in offense (they finished fifth last season) and 10th in defense (they were 13th last season).
“Tom Thibodeau is a great basketball coach. I think everyone in this league recognizes it. Mike recognizes it,” Van Gundy said. “And what I really give Mike credit for is that you control your ego so well that you don’t feel the need to show everyone how different you are and everything else.
“They had a great performance last year. He’s trying to build on that. So here we go. Mike has been great all around. He’s extremely competitive, but I don’t think he feels the need to prove himself individually. It’s not a competition between him and Thibs. We’re just trying to take this team as far as we can.”
Yet there has been a remarkable and successful change under Brown. The Knicks are launching many more 3-pointers this season — an increase of nearly seven per game — and were efficiently hitting them at a 37.8 percent clip before Saturday.
But the best success came after returning to last season’s starting lineup, which Van Gundy felt was the right maneuver for “a number of reasons.” He highlighted two: removing Robinson’s erratic availability from the starting lineup and moving Karl-Anthony Towns from power forward to center.
“The No. 1 thing is Mitchell Robinson’s injury history and getting in and out of the lineup. I think you’re always going to deal with injuries, but the more stability you have in your starting lineup, I think it helps everyone’s comfort zone,” Van Gundy said. “I don’t know if they could ever have done that if Mitch was starting a whole year, because, ‘Okay, he’s not starting back-to-back, so now we have a different lineup.’ So I think it was a good move for that reason.
“I also think (Towns) – I still think he gets his best offense when he’s in the 5 spot. Even though a lot of teams play their 5s against Josh, he’s in his comfort zone. He’s behind and he’s on top. The ball is more in his hands. And I think when you start the game that way, even when you play together against the bigs later, KAT has gotten into his rhythm a little bit easier.”
About a third of the way through the season, the outcome feels like a continuation of the battle for the NBA Finals.
“I look at them and say, they’re the favorite to come out of the East,” said Dwyane Wade, the Hall of Fame player who is also an Amazon Prime analyst. “And it’s not just because they were there last year (in the conference finals). It’s just the development that’s happened in New York over the last few years. And when you see the new coach come in, you kind of think, what’s he going to be like? And you’ve seen how they lost the essence of what they’ve built over the last few years.”
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