{"id":1980141,"date":"2026-06-09T09:30:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T06:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1980141"},"modified":"2026-06-09T09:30:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T06:30:55","slug":"mike-brown-picked-the-wrong-time-to-make-excuses-for-the-knicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1980141","title":{"rendered":"Mike Brown picked the wrong time to make excuses for the Knicks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NEW YORK \u2014 Mike Brown has been pitching a perfect game for a very long time, so yes, the man deserves some space and grace. One wild pitch in the heat of the NBA Finals will not define his impeccable work as the first-year head coach of the New York Knicks.<\/p>\n

But man, what he was selling after his first defeat since April 23 \u2014 which feels like nine months ago \u2014 was ripped straight from somebody\u2019s sore loser manual. Brown essentially blamed the second-half officiating for the end of his team\u2019s historic 13-game postseason winning streak, and that was hardly fair to the refs working Game 3 in Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n

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Of greater consequence, it wasn\u2019t fair to the San Antonio Spurs, who beat the Knicks 115-111<\/a> on Monday night and did not deserve to hear from Brown that the home team was screwed by the impartial arbiters of the court.<\/p>\n

Their names are Marc Davis, John Goble and Curtis Blair, though Brown didn\u2019t identify them in his postgame news conference. But moments after he sat down at the podium, Brown made it clear the refs were more responsible for blowing the first finals game in the Garden in 27 years than some of his old reliables during this staggering run \u2014 Mikal Bridges (two points on five shots), Landry Shamet (three points on 1-of-8 shooting) and Karl-Anthony Towns (completely outplayed by Victor Wembanyama).<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all,\u201d Brown opened, \u201cI want to make sure I get something clear. Coach Mitch Johnson and the Spurs, they won the game tonight. They came and took the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a good start, actually. Brown has been all about accountability and honesty with his players, his staff and his fanbase. With Donald Trump in the house as the first sitting U.S. president to attend a finals game, and with enough celebrities ringing the court to fill a dozen after-hours parties at the Oscars, the Spurs came right in and took this game from the Knicks. That is exactly what they did.<\/p>\n

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\u201cBut I will say this,\u201d Brown continued, \u201cI never thought I would be in the NBA Finals and see a team get 24 free-throw attempts in the second half to another team\u2019s eight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The losing coach was suddenly heading for a cliff with this line of thought. He didn\u2019t mention that the Knicks were awarded 14 foul shots to San Antonio\u2019s eight in the first half, or that the final tally of free throws (32-22) didn\u2019t represent a particularly egregious disparity, especially when the Spurs are a 62-win team with a 7-foot-4 megastar known as \u201cThe Alien.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Brown mentioned that he doesn\u2019t complain much about officials or fairness, and that is a fact. He called San Antonio a great team, but then he went right back in on the not-so-great refs.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s going to lower our odds big time, big time, if we play Game 4, and in the second half, they get 24 free-throw attempts to our eight,\u201d Brown said. \u201cMaybe we were fouling. Maybe we were fouling. But they fouled, too. (Towns) gets the ball off of a loose-ball rebound and he shoots it, and he gets whacked across the arm, and they hit the ball and it goes out of bounds on the baseline. There\u2019s no foul.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were opportunities for fouls to be called, to at least try to even the free throws out.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This was bad form. For more than six weeks, Brown and the Knicks have been rightfully celebrated for their likability as they obliterated their opponents over those 13 consecutive games, the second-longest postseason streak in league history.<\/p>\n

You heard it a million times. The Knicks hit the open man. They play team defense. They play the game the right way. They play for one another.<\/p>\n

Jalen Brunson, Captain Clutch, was running the show on the floor, while Brown was running it from the bench. It\u2019s easy to root for the Knicks\u2019 coach. He doesn\u2019t take himself too seriously, and he\u2019s never feared the consequences of failure when making some of the bold moves that have put the Knicks in position to win their first championship since 1973.<\/p>\n

He deserved his flowers, locally and nationally. Once more, with feeling, his basketball team had forgotten how to lose, and it was a remarkable thing to see.<\/p>\n

The love fest ended abruptly Monday night, and that\u2019s OK. Nothing lasts forever. The Spurs aren\u2019t the Atlanta Hawks or the Philadelphia 76ers or the Cleveland Cavaliers. They weren\u2019t about to let the Knicks embarrass them in a sweep, and most of us should have known better.<\/p>\n

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But an apparent byproduct of his team forgetting how to lose was Brown forgetting how to handle defeat. In one breath, he admitted that the Knicks made their share of unforced errors in Game 3, and in the next, he said of the free-throw numbers, \u201cI never thought I\u2019d see that in an NBA Finals game, and I saw it tonight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s tough to overcome when you\u2019re playing against a great team.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Brown talked about how wonderfully Wemby and Stephon Castle played, and he talked about the Spurs\u2019 extreme level of physicality and their ability to get into the paint. He didn\u2019t want to take anything away from the Spurs, yet he kept taking things away from them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take away the fouls and the free throws that should have, in my opinion, been a little bit more even,\u201d Brown said, \u201cand again, maybe we fouled that many times. But they fouled too, and it\u2019s not shown at the end of the day on this box score.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Brown had outcoached Atlanta\u2019s Quin Snyder, Philly\u2019s Nick Nurse and Cleveland\u2019s Kenny Atkinson on the way to this championship round. Atkinson, in particular, sounded flustered by the matchup with Brown, all but calling the Eastern Conference finals an analytical triumph for his blown-out Cavs.<\/p>\n

Brown didn\u2019t sound that crazy after Game 3, and certainly there was some of that old Pat Riley-Phil Jackson gamesmanship in his remarks, trying to get an extra whistle in Game 4. And yet, there are times to work the refs and times to let it go.<\/p>\n

Losing in the playoffs for the first time in 14 games is definitely a time to let it go. In the end, the players knew the Knicks lost because they were stagnant on offense and reckless with the ball.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we turned the ball over a lot and \u2026 we were definitely fouling a lot,\u201d Brunson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat (didn\u2019t) cost us the game,\u201d Towns said of the officiating.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThey were more physical,\u201d Shamet said of the Spurs. \u201cThey hit first. Give them credit, they played a hell of a game. They kicked our ass tonight. \u2026 There are questionable calls every night. That\u2019s not something new. We can\u2019t sit here and make excuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

The players didn\u2019t make excuses, but the coach did. Mike Brown lost his perfect game and needs to dust himself off for Game 4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Mike Brown has been pitching a perfect game for a very long time, so yes, the man deserves some space and grace. One wild pitch in the heat of the NBA Finals will not define his impeccable work as the first-year head coach of the New York Knicks. But man, what he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,241],"class_list":["post-1980141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-nytimes-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1980141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1980141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1980141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1980141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}