Knicks Fans Question Mike Brown as New HC amid Rumors After Tom Thibodeau Firing

The New York Knicks are expected to land Mike Brown as their new head coach, per ESPN's Shams Charania.

Brown has been the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Lakers and, most recently, the Sacramento Kings before that franchise parted ways with him last December after a 13-18 start.

Fans didn't have a wholly positive reaction to the move on Wednesday.

Despite some pessimism, Brown is most certainly an accomplished coach. He's led seven of his 11 teams to the playoffs, including once to the NBA Finals in 2007 with the Cavs.

Brown also won Coach of the Year in 2022-23 after leading the Kings, who hadn't been to the playoffs since 2006, to a No. 3 seed in the Western Conference and 48 wins.

That was an incredible accomplishment considering Sacramento's many franchise failures over the previous 15-20 years that saw a Western Conference contender become a laughing stock.

The Kings won 46 games in his next season but missed the playoffs. Then Sacramento got off to a rough start in 2024-25, and Brown was fired before the calendar turned to 2025.

It was a tough parting of ways given the success Brown led the Kings to just a couple years ago. The same could be said for the Knicks and Tom Thibodeau, who had just led the franchise to their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance since 2000. However, the Knicks fired him despite Thibodeau guiding the team to four postseason appearances in five years, or as many playoff appearances that the team amassed from 2001-02 to 2019-20, the year before his arrival.

On paper, this doesn't look like an "upgrade," per se, and it makes the Thibs firing all the more puzzling when he just led the team to a round it hadn't reached in a quarter-century.

However, Brown, who also won Coach of the Year when leading the 2008-09 Cavs, is a very solid coach in his own right who could very well be the answer in New York. Time will tell, of course.