Within minutes of when Mike Brown was named Knicks coach July 7, two distinctly possible and passable pathways were built for him by those who’ve seen a little bit of New York sports the last 35 years or so. Both comps were automatic mostly because both seemed so plausible, given the parameters at work.
The first was a road to nowhere nobody really wanted repeated. That was the Pat Riley/Don Nelson transition of 1995-96 for the Knicks. Riley had inherited a dysfunctional mess of a team in the dying hours of the Gulf + Western years and by the dueling forces of sheer will and sweat equity built a Knicks team that within three years came within one game of a championship.
When he faxed in his resignation in June 1995 — and for those who really like their history neatly served, that was right in the middle of a U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, where it will return in a few weeks — the Knicks opted to find a coach whose personality couldn’t possibly have been more different than Old Man Riles.
Don Nelson was laid-back where Riley had been in-your-face; he had out-of-the-box ideas about how his offense should be run, contrasting with Riley’s run-it-all-through-Patrick, old-school manner. Nelson had won a lot of games (though never reached an NBA Finals). And that experiment failed miserably, lasting only 59 games.