How the NBA’s Perpetual Doormat Set Up the Finals

SAN ANTONIO — In his 13 years as Kings owner, Vivek Ranadivé has come nowhere near the NBA Finals. His team has played in just one playoff series in that time.

But Ranadivé’s fingerprints are all over the Knicks–Spurs Finals.

In Dec. 2024, the Kings fired Mike Brown as their head coach amid a 13–18 start. Two months later, they traded De’Aaron Fox to the Spurs after the star guard requested a trade.

Brown’s firing was shocking in NBA circles. Two years after he led the team to its first playoff berth since 2006, he was fired over the phone.

“I’m not surprised that Mike Brown got fired, because I got fired by the same person,” then-Nuggets coach Michael Malone said at the time. “And what really pissed me off about it was the fact that they lost [Thursday] night, fifth game in a row, I believe. Tough loss. … They had practiced this morning. He does his postgame media, and he’s in his car going to the airport to fly to L.A. and they call him on the phone.

“No class, no balls. That’s what I’ll say about that.”

Less than two years later, Brown and Fox are reunited—on opposite sides of a championship series. Brown is the head coach of a Knicks team in its first Finals in 27 years, while Fox was an All-Star for the Spurs this year.

At media day on Tuesday, both Brown and Fox spoke highly of each other.

“Fantastic player, fantastic human being,” Brown said of Fox. 

Fox said he can see the parallels between how his former coach runs his teams compared to his current one. 

“I think the biggest thing is just how open he is,” Fox told reporters. “That’s from an organizational standpoint. Whenever he came in, the first thing he’s like, well, I want the entire organization to be in, from ownership to front office, coaching staff, players, medical staff, everybody on down. Whenever you have that—and I’ve seen it since I’ve been here—and I’m like, well, that’s probably where he got it from. That’s why he wants to do it that way.”

The Knicks and Kings both dumped their coaches in bold, expensive firings. When Ranadivé fired Brown, he had just given him a three-year extension six months before. The man Brown replaced in New York, Tom Thibodeau, was owed about $30 million from a recent extension when he was fired last summer.

The bet obviously paid off for the Knicks. In Sacramento, the bottom fell out after Brown and Fox left. The Kings were 22–60 this year, one of the worst records in the league. The “light the beam” teams that Brown and Fox led to the playoffs remain the only winning teams of Ranadivé’s tenure as owner.