The Athletic has live coverage of Knicks vs. Spurs in Game 1 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
Nearly four decades before the New York Knicks took a big chance on Mike Brown, Tom Bennett was the first basketball figure in the United States to do the same. The Mesa Community College coach offered the relatively unknown high school player in Germany and son of an Air Force man a spot on his team.
Brown accepted and later credited Bennett as a mentor who “helped me mature into a man.” They remained close over the years, with Bennett tracking every move his former player made right up until the Knicks came calling last summer.
“I was worried about Mike in New York when he first got the job,” Bennett recalled, “because, I don’t know how to say this, but Mike is really a friendly person and he’s good to other people. And I think sometimes the reputation of New Yorkers is they can be really hard on other people.
“So I was concerned about him in that situation. But it’s turned out to be quite different.”
Quite different would be the official understatement of the 2026 NBA Finals, which start Wednesday night for Brown’s Knicks and the Spurs in San Antonio.
Bennett was hardly the only basketball lifer who worried that Brown, a card-carrying Mr. Nice Guy, would get chewed up and spit out by the big city.
On the Straight Game Podcast, Matt Barnes, a 14-year NBA veteran who played on Brown’s Lakers team, called the coach “a great person” who is “too nice for his own good” and “not a leader of men.” Though he had his moments in the regular season, Brown has used these playoffs to obliterate every criticism or concern about him.
He has turned out to be exactly what the Knicks needed at exactly the right time in their development as a championship contender. Brown has inspired his players to win 11 consecutive postseason games by a record-setting margin. He has elevated the Knicks in a way that his accomplished predecessor, Tom Thibodeau, could not.
Brown’s personal touch, open-mindedness and seen-it-all experience helped him lay waste to Quin Snyder’s Atlanta Hawks, Nick Nurse’s Philadelphia 76ers and Kenny Atkinson’s Cleveland Cavaliers. New York has not seen such an ideal match between an incoming coach and an established team in a long, long time.
And that is why the NBA championship feels so much like a now-or-never proposition for a franchise that hasn’t won it in 53 years. The 1994 Knicks had a 3-2 finals lead over the Houston Rockets and couldn’t close it out. Five years later, New York had a chance to beat a 23-year-old Tim Duncan before he had won any of his rings and lost in five games because Patrick Ewing was out with an Achilles tear and Larry Johnson was slowed by a bum knee. It only took the Knicks 27 years to make it back to this point.
They are better than the ’94 and ’99 teams, and they have a chance to beat 22-year-old superstar Victor Wembanyama before he wins any rings. Better yet, New York’s starting five — completely connected on both sides of the ball — is as healthy as a lineup can be this time of year.
Yeah, Mitchell Robinson will have to manage his broken pinkie finger, and that is a problem when trying to throw enough active big bodies at Wemby. But consider what the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder just endured without their second-best player, Jalen Williams, falling short of another trip to the finals.
Chances are, if the Knicks are fortunate enough to return to this stage next season, they will be dealing with an injury more impactful than Robinson’s fractured finger.
So, this is their time. This has to be their time. Jalen Brunson is good enough to join Steph Curry and Isiah Thomas as small lead actors in a winning championship drama, and Karl-Anthony Towns is versatile enough as a scorer, passer and rebounder to be his co-star.
The Knicks are playing defense and hitting the open man with enough regularity to draw all kinds of comparisons to the Red Holzman teams that won the franchise’s only titles in 1970 and ’73. The city has fallen hard for these Knicks.
Camelot is only four victories away.
New York has been through a lot on the climb from first-round playoff dropouts, in Thibodeau’s first year, to second-round, third-round and now fourth-round participants. Brunson has competed in 81 playoff games, 56 of them with the Knicks.
Wembanyama has competed in a mere 17, so no, these aren’t the Gregg Popovich Spurs. They are brand new at this. Mitch Johnson, 39, has a great future ahead of him as their coach, but for Mike Brown, 56, the future is right now.
He has been part of four championship teams as an assistant, including one with Popovich’s Spurs, and he has taken a team in a previous head-coaching life (Cleveland Cavaliers, 2007) to the finals, where he was swept by those same Popovich Spurs.
Brown has been a head coach in more than 100 postseason games, and he has won nearly 60 percent of them. He has also been fired four times by three organizations.
Again, he has seen it all in the NBA — the good, the bad and the very ugly. But Brown has been perfect for New York, and New York has been perfect for him.
His basketball journey started in the desert, after a former Arizona State player named Ron Johnson, a coach in Germany, recommended Brown to Bennett, who watched the kid work out for the first time and noticed that he was pulling the ball over his head on his jumper and throwing it more than shooting it.
“Are you serious about this?” Bennett asked him.
“I’m very serious,” Brown replied.
“We have to change your shot,” the coach told him
“When do we start?” Brown asked.
Dripping sweat like mad, he took an extra 300 shots in the gym every day of the year, including the summer, spring break, and all those nights his college friends were out partying. When Brown was out with a back injury, he lay on his stomach during practice, with ice on his back, and studied his teammates.
“And the first day Mike got up to practice, he was giving people instructions on where to go and how to run things,” Bennett said. “He was always helping the young players. His leadership was unreal. I don’t think we ever had a better leader.”
Together, they won 30 straight games at Mesa and were ranked the No. 1 junior college team in America before Brown moved up to Division I ball at San Diego, and then started his non-playing career as an unpaid summer intern with the Denver Nuggets. What a winding road it has been.
In his only previous trip to the finals as a head coach, Brown had no shot against the Spurs, even with LeBron James. He’s got a real shot against the Spurs this time. Brown might never get another one. His best player, Brunson, might never get another one.
“Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the captain said, “(that) you can’t take for granted.”
It’s all come together for the Knicks. They need to win four games before the Spurs do, because this sure feels like it’s a now-or-never pursuit.
