The Bounce Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox.The next time we speak to each other, we may have a new NBA champion. The Knicks are on the cusp of breaking their 53-year championship drought. It would be the first “double” in league history, with New York winning the NBA Cup and the Larry O’Brien trophy. James Dolan would have to put a banner up for both.What a journeyMike Brown’s adaptation should be appreciatedI’m always fascinated by the assumption that coaches are who they are for the rest of their careers. Yes, sometimes that ends up being true. Coaches can be tyrants. Coaches can be stubborn. Coaches can be limited in how they adapt. But solid coaches will find ways to adjust to whatever is best for their team.Legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is a good example of this. Did you know that he abhorred the 3-point shot? And yet, he still worked it into his game plan — early and often — because it was best for the team. He talked about it early in the 2018-19 season when he was discussing the prevalence of 3s:“I’ve hated the 3 for 20 years. That’s why I make a joke all the time (and say) if we’re going to make it a different game, let’s have a 4-point play. Because if everybody likes the 3, they’ll really like the 4. People will jump out of their seats if you have a 5-point play. It will be great. There’s no basketball anymore; there’s no beauty in it. It’s pretty boring. But it is what it is, and you need to work with it.”That takes us to the Knicks’ Mike Brown, who at one point was viewed as a limited NBA head coach. During Brown’s first coaching stint, he had incredible success with a young LeBron James (yes, he was young once) and the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2005-10. The Cavs were 305-187 (.620) with a 42-29 playoff record (.592) under Brown, including a finals appearance in 2007 (they were swept). The knock on Brown’s coaching was that he had a genius mind for defense but ran uncreative offense. Any success on the latter end of the floor was credited to James, and the playoffs were used as examples of that.His offense was stagnant, iso-heavy and too predictable. In his next spot, with the Los Angeles Lakers from 2011-13, Brown was fired after a lockout-shortened season (41-25) and five games into his second season. He wasn’t the proper voice with the gravitas to command a team full of stars in L.A.He returned to Cleveland for a season and was then replaced by David Blatt when LeBron came back to the organization. Brown spent the next six seasons under Steve Kerr with the Golden State Warriors. Three titles later, he got his shot to be the latest coach to try to pull the Sacramento Kings out of the cellar in 2022-23.