SAN ANTONIO \u2014 In his 13 years as Kings owner, Vivek Ranadiv\u00e9 has come nowhere near the NBA Finals. His team has played in just one playoff series in that time.<\/p>\n
But Ranadiv\u00e9\u2019s fingerprints are all over the Knicks<\/a>\u2013Spurs<\/a> Finals.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n In Dec. 2024, the Kings fired Mike Brown as their head coach amid a 13\u201318 start. Two months later, they traded De\u2019Aaron Fox<\/a> to the Spurs after the star guard requested a trade.<\/p>\n Brown\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not surprised that Mike Brown got fired, because I got fired by the same person,\u201d then-Nuggets coach Michael Malone said at the time. \u201cAnd what really pissed me off about it was the fact that they lost [Thursday] night, fifth game in a row, I believe. Tough loss. \u2026 They had practiced this morning. He does his postgame media, and he\u2019s in his car going to the airport to fly to L.A. and they call him on the phone.<\/p>\n \u201cNo class, no balls. That\u2019s what I\u2019ll say about that.\u201d<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Less than two years later, Brown and Fox are reunited\u2014on 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.<\/p>\n At media day on Tuesday, both Brown and Fox spoke highly of each other.<\/p>\n \u201cFantastic player, fantastic human being,\u201d Brown said of Fox.<\/p>\n Fox said he can see the parallels between how his former coach runs his teams compared to his current one.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the biggest thing is just how open he is,\u201d Fox told reporters. \u201cThat\u2019s from an organizational standpoint. Whenever he came in, the first thing he\u2019s 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\u2014and I\u2019ve seen it since I\u2019ve been here\u2014and I\u2019m like, well, that\u2019s probably where he got it from. That\u2019s why he wants to do it that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n The Knicks and Kings both dumped their coaches in bold, expensive firings. When Ranadiv\u00e9 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<\/a> from a recent extension when he was fired last summer.<\/p>\n The bet obviously paid off for the Knicks. In Sacramento, the bottom fell out after Brown and Fox left. The Kings were 22\u201360 this year, one of the worst records in the league. The \u201clight the beam\u201d teams that Brown and Fox led to the playoffs remain the only winning teams of Ranadiv\u00e9\u2019s tenure as owner.<\/p>\n The post How the NBA\u2019s Perpetual Doormat Set Up the Finals<\/a> appeared first on Front Office Sports<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN ANTONIO \u2014 In his 13 years as Kings owner, Vivek Ranadiv\u00e9 has come nowhere near the NBA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,12835,12845,15566,590,2656,85,24942,259846,240307],"class_list":["post-712787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-deaaron-fox","tag-knicks","tag-mike-brown","tag-nba","tag-nba-finals","tag-sports","tag-spurs","tag-the-knicks","tag-vivek-ranadive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}