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Mike Brown got an invitation from Tom Coughlin and immediately picked up the phone.
“When he asked me to come by the event, I actually called my dad,” Brown said after Knicks practice Saturday. “I said, ‘Hey dad, I just spoke with Tom Coughlin and going to go do this and this,’ and my dad got excited, too.”
Brown joined the two-time Super Bowl-winning Giants head coach on stage at an event for Coughlin’s Jay Fund Foundation on Wednesday.
Brown is now part of that exclusive club of championship-winning head coaches in New York.
He raved about getting the chance to meet Coughlin for the first time — and admired what the 2007 and 2011 Super Bowl teams represented.
“I’ve always been a fan of his from afar,” Brown said. “… What he did was really, as a coach, was remarkable. And that’s what I knew him as back then. To go through a year at 9-7 [in 2011] and [10-6 in 2007], to me that’s what a season is about. You figure stuff out over the course of the year. You may not be in first place all the time, but you’re preparing for the postseason. And both those teams, in my opinion, they did it textbook.
“They took their lumps, they figured out how to get through the challenges and adversity throughout the course of the year and when it was time to go for it, they did it.”
There is one notable difference between the two, though.
“His presence and demeanor were almost the opposite [of me],” Brown said. “I’m a little goofy, he’s more serious, he’s not goofy at all. And you can feel his presence.”
Brown has been impressed by Bruce Brown, who is fighting for the last roster spot, through two preseason games and over a week of training camp.
“He’s been doing a nice job,” Mike Brown said. “He was with the group [against the Wizards on Thursday] — him, Jaden [Akins], Tyler Nickel, James Wiseman and [Pacôme Dadiet]. Those guys made a couple of mistakes, but man, they played hard. And I’m not just saying hard defensively. Even offensively, getting to their spots in transition, moving the basketball, touching the paint.
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“And then defensively, speaking on Bruce, he was great on the ball. … Watching him still do those things, knowing that he’s fighting for a spot, with the success he’d had in a year, he’s still embracing his journey, is a lot of fun to see because he’s going about it the right way.”
Saturday was the four-month anniversary of the Knicks’ miraculous Game 4 comeback against the Spurs in the NBA Finals.
