A Calvin Basketball Star Just Won an NBA Championship
Jordan Brink was a Division III All-American, and his video work was key to New York's victory
A Calvin University grad just became a huge part of one of the NBA’s greatest stories.
Yesterday, the New York Knicks won the NBA championship with a 94-90 win in game five of the championship series, a game which they would not have won without assistant coach Jordan Brink.
In game two, Brink’s expertise in video review was enough to convince Knicks Head Coach Mike Brown to challenge an out-of-bounds call late in the fourth quarter after New York had blown a 14-point lead to the San Antonio Spurs, and the referees had originally ruled the ball had gone out-of-bounds off of guard OG Anunoby.
However, after Brink had time to watch the replay, he convinced Brown to challenge the call, looking for a foul on San Antonio, which led to an overturned call and sent Anunoby to the free throw line for three shots, all of which he sunk.
Before he was on the sidelines for the NBA finals, Brink was a guard for the Calvin University Knights. His senior year, he averaged over 18 points, battling other small Michigan schools like Hope, Alma, and Kalamazoo College. He was a DIII All-American, as well as being a part three teams that advanced to the NCAA Division III tournament.
After graduating from Calvin, Brink moved from the west side of Michigan to the east. He had been a student intern for the Pistons in the video department and became an assistant video coordinator right after graduation. He then became a player development coordinator under Casey in 2021 before taking the video director job for the Knicks under head coach Tom Thibodeau.
Now Brink has won his first NBA championship, and has made a name for himself. “Jordan, he’s been a master at this,” Brown said after Game 2, “He’s been doing this now two years in a row. I rely totally on him. Every once in a while I lose my mind, get emotional, and try to stick it to the refs, even though I like all of them. But that never works. So I try like heck to follow Jordan’s lead, and it was 100 percent his call.”
Erik Spoelstra, the head coach of the Miami Heat and currently the longest tenured coach in the NBA, started in the film room as a video director. There is clearly precedence for a path from the video room to the first seat on the bench, and with an NBA championship on his resume, Brink may find himself in that seat soon.
