Knicks’ Mike Brown wants to have roles set in stone before season opener

The roles of the players on the New York Knicks this upcoming season remain largely undefined. While the main stars know what to expect, many others do not, as the starting five itself is still not confirmed by any stretch.

Knicks’ Mike Brown wants roles defined before season opener

Head coach Mike Brown said after Thursday’s practice that he would ideally like to have everything set in place before the Oct. 22 season opener.

“Ideally, it would be great to have everybody’s role defined before the first game. Now, they can change throughout the course of the season, but hopefully going into Game 1, we as coaches — and Billy Lange — get to a point where we have everybody’s role defined. And not only that, but they embrace it so that everybody knows specifically what they need to do,” Brown said (h/t Posting and Toasting).

Brown acknowledged that with the new staff and new system that players will need to adapt to, it may be after the season opener when roles are perfectly defined. The Knicks are transitioning from five seasons of Tom Thibodeau as their head coach and are going to have to adjust to a much different play style under Brown.

“We’ve got a lot of guys, and we’re a new staff. So if we get a little behind, maybe it doesn’t happen until after the first or second game. I don’t know. But ideally, I’d like to have all that done before Game 1,” Brown added.

The Knicks will have interesting lineup decisions to make

The main discussion points have been who should start between Josh Hart, Miles McBride, and Mitchell Robinson. Hart was the starter for all of last season but lost his starting spot to Robinson during the playoffs.

Brown has consistently emphasized the notion that he wants to play fast and score quickly. That is something that would be tougher to achieve with Robinson, especially with him likely starting the season on some form of workload limitation.

Nevertheless, training camp and preseason will be the time to try out many different lineup combinations to see what works best. The regular season begins against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Oct. 22, so they will be up for a big task right away.