Mike Brown Is Turning Skeptics Into Believers

Amid all the joyful preening and proclamations of destiny deferred but no longer denied, the most obstreperous of New York Knickerbockers fans arose today to the knowledge that they were dead-ass wrong about coach/reformed pariah Mike Brown. At least for now, anyway. There is still another series to be played, and the team the Knicks will face in their first NBA Finals since 1999 will have just emerged from a ferocious rock fight that is barely halfway done. This means that there is still time for them to turn back to their original position on him, which was "We should have hired Tiago Splitter instead of this retread boob." Doctrinal error is always something that the person committing the error will try to justify as soon as possible. For the moment, though, Mike Brown is on citywide scholarship. The man condemned on day one for replacing Tom Thibodeau—and remember that Brown didn't fire Thibs, just replaced him—has on day 323 become a genius in the town that wanted so much to hate him. Indeed, if the Knicks had behaved as they normally do, and wrapped their season up when they usually do, the demand for Brown's immediate firing would be a rare point of consensus among New Yorkers. This is what Knicks fans do, mostly: believe, hope, hallucinate, binge-eat disappointment, demand heads on pikes, repeat. They're like most other fans in that sense, only louder, surer, and more insistent. Some of them are also famous.