To understand how Mike Brown ended up in New York coaching the Knicks, you must first understand the fragility of his profession.Head coaches are often the first to blame and the last to receive praise. They’re the easiest scapegoat. It’s easier to cut a check and sell a new head coach to the fanbase than it is to acquire a new star player. Coaches, more often than not, at some point, have to do better than good enough.Both Brown and the Knicks have experience with this. That’s how they became intertwined. Brown was fired in Sacramento in 2024 because, ultimately, he did too good a job and raised the bar. In his first season, 48 wins. The next was 46. It was the first time the Kings had won 40 games in back-to-back seasons since 2004-06. Midway through Brown’s third season, though, he was fired after the Kings got off to a slow start.A franchise that had been a laughingstock for two decades thought to explore greener pastures. Sacramento hasn’t had a winning record since.New York made a similar bet last summer, believing a new coach was the only change needed to propel the franchise even further. Under Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks, too, went from the butt of jokes to respectability. The peak was last year’s trip to the Eastern Conference finals, the organization’s first in 25 years. Decision-makers pulled the plug on Thibodeau shortly after his team fell in six games to the Indiana Pacers. Per league sources, the Knicks wanted a collaborator, someone willing to experiment and bring a different voice.This is where the marriage between Brown and New York begins. And at this rate, who knows when it’ll end.Brown, in one season, has the Knicks in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, facing the San Antonio Spurs, the organization that gave Brown an opportunity as an assistant coach in the early 2000s. New York is two wins away. Getting to this point felt like a mandate when Brown took the job. That was the vibe coming out of New York during its extensive coaching search. Brown could have been out of a job just as quickly if New York had fallen short in the postseason. Instead, the Knicks have put together, arguably, the most dominant postseason run the NBA has seen en route to the NBA Finals.Not bad for a guy who had come to grips with the possibility of not being a head coach again.“First of all, I have to thank (Kings owner) Vivek Ranadivé for giving me an opportunity. Obviously, it didn’t work out,” said Brown, who hadn’t been a head coach since 2014 before being hired by Sacramento in 2022. “When I got fired, I really didn’t think much of anything. My wife and I, we went to Sydney, Australia, to see UFC 313. We went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We went to St. Barts … I just wanted to have fun.“If an opportunity came up, great. If it didn’t, I felt lucky, blessed and fortunate. I had a good run. I hoped at some point I’d get another opportunity as a head coach or assistant coach. I just rolled with it and didn’t think much about it.”Last summer, when the Knicks called Brown, they also called several teams to inquire about the availability of their head coaches. It’s not uncommon, but it was rare given the volume of teams the Knicks reached out to. New York knocked on the door of Chicago (Billy Donovan), Houston (Ime Udoka), Dallas (Jason Kidd) and several others. All kindly declined New York’s request, and the franchise found itself staring at Brown as the lead candidate. (Oddly enough, two of those three coaches — Donovan and Kidd — are no longer with those teams at the end of this season.)Only the Knicks’ front office knows if Brown was high on the list when the search began. They did know that he came well-recommended as a collaborator and communicator from his time as an assistant with Steve Kerr and the Warriors. They also knew that Brown had experience coaching stars, as he was once the head coach of LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and was part of the staff when Steph Curry and Golden State were a dynasty. That appealed to New York.