Steve Popper: Knicks' Mike Brown — 'I truly believe' we are good enough to compete for crown
Knicks coach Mike Brown reacts during the second half against the Detroit Pistons at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 19. Credit: Jim McIsaac
MILWAUKEE
It’s understandable if you are concerned about the Knicks as they ready for the 60th game of the season, still riding a roller coaster through the schedule — and fresh off troubling losses to Detroit and Cleveland.
But Mike Brown is not going to join you on the ride.
Brown has spoken since the preseason about expectations for the team and Thursday, in the wake of one of the ugliest losses, he insisted he believes that the Knicks are a championship team this season.
“I truly believe it,” Brown said. “Now, having said that, there are things that have to go right. You got to be playing your best basketball. You have to be connected. The things that I talk about. You got to sacrifice. If you got guys on your team that aren’t sacrificing, you could be in trouble, because it’ll mess with your connectivity, which is huge. You got to have a competitive spirit. You got to want to compete every night.
“And you’ve got to believe. You’ve got to keep believing. Even when things are going bad. Even when you go through stretches of 2-7 or 2-9. You got to believe not just in the process — because it is a process — but you got to believe in each other.“
With a day off and a day of practice to recover from all of the troubles in Cleveland — Jalen Brunson described it as “Cleveland was just a bad game for us” — the Knicks were all in line again, putting that game behind them and insisting the goal isn’t a late February game, but instead the postseason where any judgment on this team will be made anyway.
The Knicks aren’t built for the regular season. When they fired Tom Thibodeau after he led them to the Eastern Conference finals, talking all the way about peaking in the postseason, the expectations for Brown and the team were set. If that wasn’t clear you only had to listen to Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan when he went on the radio last month and said he believed the team should reach the NBA Finals and can win it.
“Everything is geared toward being your best toward the end of the season and going into the playoffs and hopefully throughout that run,” Brown said. “I’ve never been a guy who put stocks in everything and it’s the end of the world if it doesn’t happen in this game. That’s not life in general. Things are going to average out to however they need to at the right time. And hopefully after 70 games or whatever it is, you feel pretty good where you are going into that postseason.”
“We’re still a work in progress,” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “New system, a new coach, new philosophy, so we’re just making sure we can do the best we can to maximize all of our opportunities of who we are in our team.”
Towns was optimistic and focused on the present as he spoke after the workout session at FiServ Forum. He had no complaints about the five shots he’d taken in Cleveland and he dismissed questions about the possibility that he could have been playing in Milwaukee after all of the trade rumors that included him over the summer at the trade deadline.
The trade deadline is past and the Knicks are what they are now, and even if you don’t believe they seem to accept and believe that the goals remain the same as when the season began.
“At the end of the day, in anything you do, starting with me, everybody has to be held accountable, because everybody has slippage,” Brown said. “I have slippage. Guys on my staff have slippage. Obviously, the players have slippage, too. So we all have to hold each other accountable and I can’t get mad if I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing and somebody tells me — they’re not telling me to put me down. They’re telling me so I can be better. And help uplift the group better.
“So those things, which are our standard, are huge for us. Those things are not necessarily what the outside world can see. The outside world sees the shots, the points, the defense and all that. If you want to win a championship, you gotta have a team that’s talented. We have that. Can we make sure we maximize and embrace our standard every time we step on the floor? If we can, that’s what’s going to get us over the hump more than anything else.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
