Knicks’ James Dolan Talks Brown, Towns, Bridges, Rose

Sitting down for another rare interview ahead of the Finals, Dolan explained to Steve Serby of The New York Post why he essentially gave the club a Finals-or-bust mandate over four months ago.

“That’s why I don’t do a lot of interviews — I’m usually very frank,” the Knicks’ owner said with a smile. “I did not go into the interview thinking, ‘Oh I’m gonna say this.’ But it was on my mind, and I knew that the rest of the organization knew it too — we all knew it.

“We knew it from the moment that we said goodbye to (Tom Thibodeau) and we hired Mike (Brown), that we were gonna be in a hot spot because we just made the conference finals. We didn’t win, but you don’t make a change unless you’re expecting to do better. We didn’t change ’cause we wanted it to be worse! To me, it was a little obvious, so I just said it because it was obvious.”

While the Knicks didn’t make any major roster changes last summer ahead of the 2025/26 season, they did make a coaching change, as Dolan notes, controversially firing Thibodeau on the heels of the club’s deepest playoff run in a quarter-century.

New York was linked to several other coaching candidates before hiring Brown, which made it seem as if he wasn’t the team’s first – or second – choice. However, Dolan told Serby that president of basketball operations Leon Rose was convinced Brown was the right man for the job.

“We knew we had a good coach in Thibs. We weren’t just going for a change, right? There was something we wanted, and we laid it out, really on paper, what we were looking for in a coach,” Dolan said. “I would say the number one quality was collaborative, that was a big piece … somebody who strategically could avail himself of all the minds around him and put it together, particularly at game time, between halves, that was a big thing. And we were looking for flexibility.

“So we laid out all these sort of characteristics that we were looking for, and then I set Leon loose. And he interviewed a lot of different guys, and he came back with Mike, and I’m like, ‘OK.’ Leon did all the work. I just blessed it.”

Here are a few more highlights from Dolan’s interview with Serby:

On the Knicks’ decision to trade for Karl-Anthony Towns ahead of the 2024/25 season:

“First off, we had Isaiah (Hartenstein) before KAT, and we lost Isaiah because the rules did not allow us to hang onto him. By the CBA, etc., we were only allowed to offer him X amount of money. Other teams were allowed to offer him more. Probably should try and correct that in the next CBA with KAT. Our first preference would have been to keep going with Isaiah.

“So once we lost Isaiah, we knew we needed a big man, we needed a center, a focal point there. I knew KAT from before, I actually know him for about four or five years. I knew that he liked New York, he wanted to come. I was thrilled because to have an option like KAT was heaven-sent.”

On how difficult it was to give up five first-round picks in the trade for Mikal Bridges:

“It took a little thought (smile). Look, that’s the NBA. The idea was that Mikal was a building block for the team we wanted, which is the team we have on the floor now. We didn’t think we’d be in a lottery — we don’t expect to be in a lottery for quite some time. So, (the picks) weren’t quite as valuable … and Mikal is another player who I think we’re starting to understand just how impactful he could be.”

On hiring Rose to run the front office in 2020:

“I obviously have been doing this for a while before Leon showed up, and it was much more about just getting convinced that no matter if you get the most brilliant strategist in the world, you have to have talent in order to win. And so I thought about the guy who would be best in bringing talent to New York, and Leon’s name was at the very top of the list.

“The way he deals with the whole organization is different. He almost has an agent’s mentality about it. He’s very collaborative. He’s very big on creating a feeling of family inside of the team. It starts with him and (William Wesley) who do that. When he took the job, I think he thought long and hard about how he wanted to do it. I think this is how he wanted to do it.”