New Delhi, June 15 -- SAN ANTONIO - The championship podium had barely been assembled at Frost Bank Center when Mike Brown looked around the building and started laughing. Not the relieved laugh of a man who had just exhaled five decades of Knicks suffering. Something quieter than that. Something that looked, to anyone watching closely, like a man who had been waiting a very long time to be proven right.

Brown had won before. He won in 2003 in this same city, as an assistant under Gregg Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs, the franchise that never threw away a coach it trusted. He won three more times with Steve Kerr's Golden State Warriors dynasty in 2017, 2018, and 2022, building a reputation as perhaps the finest defensive mind of his...