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All paths to glory differ, but the road the Knicks took to the title feels particularly hard to replicate. Can they pull off a repeat?
For one thing, the NBA hasn't seen a repeat champion since the 2017 and 2018 Golden State Warriors. A decade into Adam Silver's "parity of opportunity" era, picking the field over the champs seems like a reasonable decision.
For another, it's hard to blame the oddsmakers for dispassionately favoring a larger 82-game sample over a smaller 19-game one . Heading into the 2026 NBA playoffs, both win-loss record and most advanced metrics pegged the Knicks as something like the fourth- or fifth-best team in the NBA, behind the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics and arguably Detroit Pistons.
Heading into the new season with the fourth-best odds of once again hoisting the Larry O'Brien championship trophy, behind OKC, San Antonio and Boston, is understandable, from a removed, quantitative view. Beyond that … I mean, of course the Knicks aren't considered the favorites to win next season. They weren't considered the favorites to winChampionship runs don't always work this way.
Sometimes, the favorite heading into the season winds up atop of the mountain come mid-June, and everyone's just sort of like, "Yep. That sounds about right.
" Bridges or the floor-spacing and more geometrically resonant Karl-Anthony Towns. Not overreacting to last spring's Eastern Conference finals loss to the Indiana Pacers or this January's post-NBA Cup swoon by damning the torpedoes and going all-in for Giannis.
Continuing to believe in the collected talent, the underlying fundamentals, the bones of the house.. Moving RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley at arguably the peak of their values for Anunoby at what might've been the nadir of his, with a giant new contract looming.after he brought you to your first Eastern Conference finals in 25 years, in favor of a coach in Mike Brown who youbest basketball of his life over the past two months .
New York's roster features two other lottery picks: Mikal Bridges, picked 10th overall in 2018, and Jeremy Sochan, chosen ninth overall in 2022. , though? Second-year forward Pacôme Dadiet, whom New York selected with the 25th pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, and who played a grand total of 176 minutes this season.
The entire rest of the roster consists of late-first-round picks , second-rounders and undrafted free agents . Yes, some entered the league with pedigree: The Villanova guys had all won national championships, Alvarado had been named ACC Defensive Player of the Year, Kolek and Jones had won Player of the Year honors in their respective college conferences, etc. And sure, Anunoby likely would've been a mid-to-high lottery pick had he not.
But all of these players — even No. 1 pick Towns and lottery selections Bridges and Sochan — have been in some way passed over, undervalued and questioned, and have had to answer those questions and push through those doubts to get where they are today.
"I think everybody to a certain degree at some point in life is overlooked, you know? " coach Mike Brown — who, for the record, was fired from four different head coaching jobs before winning it all in New York — said after the Knicks'. "I mean, I've had people in my own family who, I see more potential in them than maybe what the world sees.
And you know, just to have the ability to stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, especially when you get knocked down — to me, that defines who you are. Even if you don't have the 'ultimate success' that you think you deserve, if you get knocked down in life, and you're able to get back up and keep fighting, that's a freaking win.
" That shared willingness to keep fighting, a character trait that Rose and Co. clearly seemed to prioritize in building this roster, paid dividends for the Knicks throughout the treacherous climb to the summit. Hart saw and felt it firsthand after missing a fast-break layup that could've given the Knicks the lead late in Game 4 against the San Antonio Spurs — a moment where he felt as low as he could imagine … only for his teammates to sprint over and immediately pick him up.
"When you have a team that has that kind of togetherness in the most adverse situations, that breeds championship habits and a championship team," Hart said. "I feel like we can go down the line of every guy in that locker room that has had moments like that during the season, and everyone has been there to pick each other up.
When you have a team that can do that, no matter what happens in a game, you feel like you can get through it.
" While the Knicks aren't built around high-profile in-house draft picks of their own, that's not to say that their drafting and player development work didn't have any role in assembling this title roster. Far from it. Robinson, their longest-tenured player, has grown from a scratch-off ticket full of athletic tools in 2018's second round into a fundamentally different player — less live-wire jumping out of the gym to block 3-pointers, more grounded interior defense and offensive-rebounding dominance.
That evolution proved massively important to the Knicks' overarching approach — hammer the offensive glass, limit turnovers, create turnovers, win the possession battle — and found its greatest expression with 26.1 seconds left in Game 5, when he bulldozed through Victor Wembanyama to grab Hart's missed free throw, kick the ball out to Shamet, and force the Spurs to foul Anunoby, who made it a two-possession game. While Robinson was on the floor to put his fingerprints on the victory, his fellow former Knicks draftees weren't.
Barrett, the last first-round pick of the previous regime, didn't reach the All-Star/All-NBA heights of the two players picked before him in the 2019 NBA Draft . But he turned into a dependable-enough,first-round pick of Rose's tenure — and one that, according to reporting at the time, senior basketball advisor William Wesley, a.k.a.
"World Wide Wes,"After playing key roles on the Knicks teams that went to the playoffs in 2021 and 2023, Barrett and Quickley wound up being— the central casting 3-and-D big wing whom the Raptors likely wouldn't have been able to re-sign in unrestricted free agency that summer, and whose arrival transformed the Knicks into a team that could seriously harbor bona fide dreams of contention. Since joining the team midway through the 2023-24 season, the Knicks have gone 141-68 with Anunoby in the lineup across all competitions — a .675 winning percentage, a 55-win pace — and haveAlso part of that package heading to Toronto?
A 2024 second-round pick that the Knicks originally got from the Clippers in a 2021 draft-night deal that sent Keon Johnson to L.A. in exchange for Quentin Grimes — who wound up being a starting 2-guard on a Knicks team that made the second round of the 2023 playoffs, and who was later dealt to Detroit in a trade that brought back Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks, both of whom contributed to another second-round appearance in 2024. All the pieces matter.
, however, turned what seemed like fairly limited draft capital into cornerstone players in a number of other deals. Rose and Co. turned New York's 2023 first-round pick, along with Cam Reddish and Ryan Arcidiacono, into Hart, the Jay to Brunson's Silent Bob, and the, after just 35 underwhelming games highlights another strength of Rose's tenure: the ability to recognize when something he thought would work wasn't working, and to pivot quickly.
See: The, turning that into three future first-round picks and enough cap space to sign Brunson — part of a multi-year pattern of trading down in the draft to accumulate more future draft capitalThat includes the aforementioned Dadiet, the 25th pick in 2024, who played a surprisingly pivotal role on this title team that belied those scant 176 minutes. Asat the time, his willingness to sign for 80% of his rookie-scale slot — a break of about $900,000 from what he could have gotten — was critical in the Knicks' efforts to crowbar openfor Towns back in 2024 while fitting his supermax contract underneath the second apron.
, which saw them send out five first-round picks for a player they believed profiled as a perfect complementary wing next to Brunson, Anunoby and Hart. The full freight the picks they sent to the Brooklyn Nets — New York's unprotected 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031 firsts, plus an unprotected 2028 pick swap — have, at times, been a millstone around Bridges' neck, an easy talking point for frustrated fans to hammer when his shot went cold and he appeared to float through games. But after he bounced back from a dire start to the 2026 playoffs to turn inas the Knicks ascended to a new plane of postseason existence, capped by a monster performance in Game 2 against San Antonio and 14 points with four assists in the Game 5 closeout, nobody seemed to be particularly concerned about all that draft capital.
Nor is anyone hemming and hawing over the 2025 first that the Knicks sent Minnesota along with Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Towns — a pick that, again, originally came from Detroit before being redirected through Houston and Oklahoma City and eventually landing in New York as part of the aforementioned 2022 Brunson-aimed draft-night arbitrage that landed Ousmane Dieng in OKC.
Even with the draft picks added to the kitty, though, the Knicks needed to get creative on the margins to grease the skids on the Bridges and Towns deals. , they had to guarantee the contracts of Mamadi Diakite and Shake Milton in sign-and-trade deals to add them to the Nets package to make the math work for Bridges while avoiding the hard cap.
Then, they had to redirect Keita Bates-Diop and the similarly signed-and-traded Charlie Brown Jr., Duane Washington Jr. and DaQuan Jeffries along with Randle and DiVincenzo in what wound up being a three-team deal to get Towns. Every roster spot, every player and pick under team control, every cent of extra cash a team can send in a deal — all the pieces matter.
That includes hitting on the margins in the players youafter flipping Barrett and Quickley to Toronto in the Anunoby deal, locking in what was about to become an extremely important two-way rotation piece for what soon became an extreme value contract. It's creating attractive enough conditions for mid-career veterans that you can land guys like Shamet and Clarkson, both of whom had vital moments during New York's season and run to the Larry O'B, for the minimum.
It's turning a swing-and-a-miss on Guerschon Yabusele into a quick-pivot correction — first, sending him to Chicago for wing Dalen Terry, and then flipping Terry to New Orleans for Alvarado — that returned a better-fitting player who played ain the summer of 2024 rather than waiting a year to sign a five-year deal that could have netted him an, if you're getting technical about it) created the financial conditions that allowed the Knicks to conduct all the big business that followed — re-signing Anunoby, fitting in Towns' supermax, extending Bridges, being able to use the taxpayer midlevel exception on Yabusele, which later turned into Alvarado — without going into the second apron and being subject to the myriad restrictions on trades and signings that come with it.
We can hold two thoughts simultaneously. On one hand, players shouldn't be put in the position of needing to take less than the top dollar they can make, in a system that artificially caps their earnings as it is, in order to facilitate the construction of the best roster possible.
On the other, though, Brunson — from the day he got to Manhattan, a partner in this family business — seems exceedingly pleased with what giving up that up-front money wound up getting him on the back end..
"He's very happy. I know he is. But if you don't think that not ready for another run?
Then y'all don't know JB.
" It's unlikely that the Knicks will become the first team since the Kevin Durant-era Warriors to go back-to-back; there's a reason the oddsmakers set the lines the way they do, after all. Surviving one 100-game season, coming back and doing it all over again … well, it'd take a miracle, wouldn't it?
Mikal Bridges NBA Championship Jalen Brunson San Antonio Spurs Oklahoma City Thunder Detroit Pistons New York Knicks NBA Playoffs Isaiah Hartenstein Boston Celtics Mitchell Robinson Josh Hart Immanuel Quickley Jose Alvarado Jeremy Sochan Jordan Clarkson Giannis Antetokounmpo Donte Divincenzo Dillon Jones San Antonio Tyler Kolek Landry Shamet Julius Randle Golden State Warriors OG Anunoby Miles Mcbride Charlie Brown Jr. Bojan Bogdanovic Dalen Terry Victor Wembanyama Ryan Arcidiacono Karl-Anthony Towns Donovan Mitchell Ariel Hukporti Indiana Pacers Cam Reddish Keon Johnson Zion Williamson Guerschon Yabusele Shake Milton RJ Barrett Joel Embiid Toronto Raptors Kevin Mccullar Mamadi Diakite Quentin Grimes Trey Jemison Oklahoma City Mohamed Diawara Milwaukee Bucks Ja Morant Evan Fournier Alec Burks Ousmane Dieng New Orleans Brooklyn Nets Daquan Jeffries Duane Washington Jr Kemba Walker Clippers Houston Chicago Minnesota
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