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CLEVELAND — One down, one to go.
It sounded silly, if not foolish, when New York Knicks owner James Dolan went on local radio to proclaim his expectations for his team: reaching the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.
“I’d say we want to get to the Finals and we should win the Finals,” Dolan told WFAN radio on Jan. 5. “This is sports; anything can happen. Getting to the Finals, we absolutely have to do. Winning the Finals, we should do.”
The Knicks were in the middle of their most trying stretch of the season, going 2-9 from Dec. 31 to Jan. 19. Just hours after Dolan’s proclamation, they absorbed their worst loss to date, a 31-point drubbing to the Detroit Pistons at Little Caesars Arena.
The Finals seemed like the last thing on the Knicks’ mind — after all, the Pistons destroyed them in every meeting this season, and the Boston Celtics were cruising without Jayson Tatum, who was scheduled to return ahead of the playoffs.
Now, the Knicks are one of the three teams left standing, having won 11 consecutive playoff games, all by double digits. Boston was eliminated in the first round by the Philadelphia 76ers, as the Knicks were waiting. Detroit fell in seven games to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team the Knicks just swept to get to the Finals.
Improbably, New York stands on the doorstep of history, with its strongest chance of hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the first time since 1973 — three years before the landmark ABA/NBA merger that paved the way for the modernization of basketball.
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Everything about these Knicks feels improbable yet modern. Jalen Brunson aims to join a very small club — just two members — of players 6-foot-2 or under who are the undisputed headliners for a championship team.
Isiah Thomas and Stephen Curry are the only ones who can make that claim, and Brunson, the Eastern Conference Finals Most Valuable Player, is four wins away. When the Knicks signed him in free agency in 2022, he was viewed as a piece but not the centerpiece for a Knicks revival. The Dallas Mavericks bungled extension talks, but Brunson’s signing didn’t set off alarms across the league — though it did lead to a tampering investigation in the league office. Instead, the reaction was that the move was very Knicks-like, and not in a complimentary way.
There’s a long list of players who’ve been hyped to carry the Knicks to contention since Patrick Ewing left the Garden, but it has been more conjecture than substance. The Brooklyn-born Stephon Marbury birthed disappointment in the late 2000s. After the pipe dream of LeBron James vanished in the summer of 2010, the franchise invested in Amar’e Stoudemire, whose back was a ticking time bomb.
Carmelo Anthony made his desires known to be the King of New York, and whatever the Knicks might’ve been building detoured to that — always falling for the newest object of desires, but rarely having a discernable plan that aligned with where the league was going, let alone being ahead of the curve.
The Knicks going all-in on Brunson seemed like another road to nowhere, not with the figurative — and literal — giants running the East at the time.
Giannis Antetokounmpo with the Milwaukee Bucks, Tatum and Jaylen Brown in Boston and even Joel Embiid in Philadelphia. But at some point over the past couple years, Brunson took down the Celtics duo and Embiid in the playoffs and was a major reason Antetokounmpo wanted to team up in New York last summer.
Everything the Knicks have done — from trading five first-round picks for Mikal Bridges, to acquiring Josh Hart in 2023, to adding OG Anunoby the next year, to dealing for Karl-Anthony Towns on the eve of training camp in 2024 — has been to maximize Brunson’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses.
While team president Leon Rose & Co. were clearly chasing the Celtics, the front office was also looking at what wins in today’s NBA. Bridges and Hart — both teammates of Brunson’s at Villanova — and Anunoby are there to protect him on defense, to prevent him from being hunted by opposing guards the way Brunson hunted James Harden in Game 1 of the conference finals. They fight over screens to ensure he has enough energy left to carry them on the offensive end, where he has become almost unguardable the last two seasons.
In acquiring Towns and sending away Julius Randle, the Knicks wanted there to be no doubt who was the dominant personality in the locker room and gave him all the space he needed to operate on offense.
The Knicks bet against history and conventional wisdom, which says a defensive liability at the point of attack and the rim couldn’t anchor a contender, and yet, here they are. The flaws exist, but in today’s NBA they’ve done as good a job as any in ensuring those flaws aren’t fatal.
Resisting temptation has been as important in this Knicks run as any individual personnel move. They’ve stuck to the plan, steadfast in belief, but not rigid. Getting Antetokounmpo over the summer would’ve been reminiscent of Knicks personnel moves of the past, chasing the press conference, abandoning prudence and embracing the possibility of chaos.
They’ve seemingly avoided every possible pothole on the road to June, and it began last June when Dolan spearheaded the firing of popular coach Tom Thibodeau, according to sources, even after he got New York back to the conference finals for the first time since 2000. Dolan believed Thibodeau wore the players down every season with his hard-driving style, and that it caused physical and emotional breakdowns in series losses to the Indiana Pacers the past two years.
Not even a win over the favored Celtics last spring was enough for Thibodeau to keep his job, and bringing in oft-fired and affable Mike Brown — who hadn’t coached a team to the Finals since 2007 — seemed like patchwork, not a championship move.
Brown was questioned at every turn this season and seemingly was coaching for his job this postseason. He showed his chops where they were needed most, however, spearheading this winning streak that has seen his team rarely challenged. Even when they were trailing by 22 in the fourth quarter of the series opener against the Cavaliers, they stormed back to decisively win in overtime.
“We can get out of any situation,” Towns reported following Monday morning’s shootaround. “Regardless if it’s [a] 2-9 run in the season or if it’s a [22]-point deficit in Game 1, as long as we continue to believe in the goal and continue to lean on each other.”
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That shift effectively ended this series. The Knicks proved their mettle and stamina, while the Cavaliers wilted and haven’t shown they truly believed since. Perhaps it was forged from Thibodeau, similar to Golden State with Mark Jackson before Steve Kerr stepped in — there were vestiges of a championship contending DNA.
Even Dolan admitted as much in January.
“The team is really built on Tom Thibodeau. He built that core,” Dolan reported. “We went as far as we did last year, so you really have to take your hat off to Tom. But we did come to the conclusion on how we wanted to organize the team, and that meant we needed to evolve, beyond the old traditional coaching formulas.”
In stepped Brown, who has to feel some measure of satisfaction after being fired by the Sacramento Kings in December 2024, and having been dismissed twice by the Cleveland franchise his team demolished on the way to the Finals.
Dolan and Rose are likely breathing a sigh of relief, absorbing the scorn in the immediate aftermath of Thibodeau’s firing in the hopes, or rather the expectation of getting to June.
What they couldn’t have foreseen is these Knicks squeezing until teams quit, the roster that often had broken bodies this time of year flipping the script, breaking the minds and spirits of every playoff opponent along the way to June.
Atlanta by 51. Philadelphia by 30. Cleveland by 37.
June belongs to no one, but she’s calling the Knicks and they’ve answered.
One down, one to go.
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