Mike Brown has already outrun the least favorable comp name that immediately resurfaced when the Knicks hired him as Tom Thibodeau’s replacement last July, and he did that with relative ease. Maybe there was a time during that 2-9 stretch in January when you started to hear folks around the Garden and among Knicks fans whisper, “Nellie.”
Maybe the adjustment between Brown and Karl-Anthony Towns, which took a good 50 games or so, recalled how Don Nelson made the ever-curious decision back in 1995 to minimize Patrick Ewing and maximize Anthony Mason — all due respect to the late, great Mase, even 30 years later it sounds like someone is punking you when you say the words — but that one seems to be in the past, too.
KAT made the All-Star Game. It’s a fair bet he’s going to land back on the All-NBA Third Team. And if Brown isn’t a candidate to siphon off many votes from the favored foursome of Coach of the Year candidates (Joe Mazzulla, J.B. Bickerstaff, Charles Lee, Mitch Johnson), it’s less an indictment of Brown than the reality of the team he inherited.
The Celtics, Pistons, Hornets and Spurs did not fall two games shy of the NBA Finals last year, after all. The Knicks did. Someone else coached them then. And the truth is, other than Nellie, there’s really no past Knicks coach with whom to compare the mission Brown accepted when he took the job. Nobody else ever inherited a team dubbed Finals-ready besides Nellie.
