Inside Knicks' imperfect yet historic season — and how they build off it

New York Times

3 days ago

INDIANAPOLIS — A victory away from team history, the New York Knicks needed to remind each other of the moment.
The team had just absorbed a 25-point fist to the mouth the previous evening, a defeat that narrowed their second-round series advantage over the Boston Celtics to 3-2.
The day after the Game 5 loss, Knicks players organized at the team's practice facility in Tarrytown, N.Y., a meeting that veteran forward P.J. Tucker called to order. Tucker joined the squad at the end of the season for reasons like this. The front office believed the locker room needed more leadership, a presence to help with communication issues that had plagued the group both on and off the court all season.
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This was the Knicks' time to talk.
The gist of the meeting was blunt: We are one win away from the conference finals, the franchise's first in a quarter century; get it together already. The Knicks did not approach Game 5 with enough seriousness, players said in the meeting.
The result of all that talking was the greatest performance from a batch of players wearing these colors and that logo in that building since the last millennium. The Knicks destroyed the defending champs by 38 points in Game 6, the largest playoff margin of victory in franchise history.
The message to tighten up got through, but it didn't stay forever.
The next game, the first against Indiana, the Knicks let go of a 14-point lead with 2:51 to go in regulation and lost in overtime, the first-ever collapse of its kind in the playoffs. In the middle of the Indiana series, the players had to hold court again.
On Saturday, their season finally ended, as the Knicks fell to the Indiana Pacers in six games. Though they wound up two wins short of the NBA Finals, this was the organization's most successful year in decades.
New York tallied 51 regular-season wins, its most since 2013, and its first trip to the conference finals for the first time since 2000. The Knicks downed the Detroit Pistons in the first round, severing them on Jalen Brunson's ankle-breaker of Ausar Thompson, one of the franchise's most dramatic shots of all time. They upset the Celtics a round later.
Brunson or Karl-Anthony Towns could propel untameable scoring binges. The conglomerate of defensive wings — Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby and Josh Hart — could lock down the perimeter. On the Knicks' best nights, they could shoot, defend and create for others. On their worst, however, any of those abilities could vanish without warning.
They have progressed over each of the past four seasons — from not making the playoffs; to losing in the second round; to losing in the semifinals in seven games during an injury-riddled series; to reaching the conference finals.
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But of course, this year's Knicks, while prosperous, were also imperfect.
New York organized multiple players-only meetings after embarrassing defeats throughout this postseason run, all with various degrees of intensity, per league sources. It's not uncommon for teams to hold meetings without coaches, but it is rare for squads that went as far as the Knicks did to do it as often as they did during the playoffs, and for the kick-in-the-behind reasons they occasionally deemed necessary.
The 2025 Knicks dealt with disputes on the bench, criticism about their starters playing too many minutes, one of which came from the inside, and public comments about 'sacrifice,' 'egos,' and 'agendas.' On one night, they would roar back from down 20 points to ruin the Celtics. On the next, they would mail in a potential series-clincher so obviously that it would require a kumbaya moment.
Now, with the season over, the Knicks must decide which version of themselves is the one worth projecting into the future.
After years of saving up draft picks, New York went all-in last summer.
In July, the Knicks traded five first-rounders for Bridges, a supposed plug-and-play complement alongside his former college running mate, Brunson. A couple of months later, they flipped two starters from the previous season's squad, three-time All-Star Julius Randle and sharpshooter Donte DiVincenzo, and a first-rounder for Towns, a move that emerged after the front office learned big man Mitchell Robinson would miss the beginning of the season with an ankle injury. In canvassing the league for a replacement at center, it landed on Towns, whom it had inquired about for years.
The entry of Towns gave the Knicks a starting five they hoped would compete with the league's best. Brunson, Bridges, Towns, Anunoby and Hart could all score. The three wings, whom Hart affectionately dubbed 'Wingstop' at the beginning of the season, would ideally insulate the offense-slanted Brunson and Towns.
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The Knicks' first unit was supposed to dominate. At the beginning, it seemed it might.
Until it did not.
The play type that was supposed to storm the league, the Brunson-Towns pick-and-roll, turned less frequent and less successful as the season continued. From Jan. 1 until the end of the season, the starters got outscored by 1.4 points per 100 possessions. The group was a minus-33 heading into Game 6.
Opponents put their centers on Hart, who is not a 3-point shooter, and athletic wings on Towns, which bogged down the Knicks' offense. On bad nights, the two All-Stars, Brunson and Towns, exacerbated each other's worst defensive traits and didn't enhance each other enough on offense, regressing as a duo during the second half of the season and into the playoffs. That was highlighted in the Eastern Conference finals, when Brunson assisted on just five Towns baskets. The Pacers, especially, targeted Brunson and Towns throughout the series, bringing whomever those two were manning into actions and attacking from there.
With the Knicks trailing the Pacers 2-0, head coach Tom Thibodeau opted for his biggest change of the season. For the first time, he would alter the starting lineup for basketball reasons, replacing Hart with the 7-foot Robinson.
Towns moved from power forward, where he had started alongside the rim-diving Rudy Gobert in Minnesota, to center after the trade to New York. By the end of the conference finals, he was back to the four.
Going forward, will the organization view Towns as a four or five?
Moments after his trade from Brooklyn became public last June, Bridges' phone rang — as did Brunson's, as did DiVincenzo's. Hart had four-way FaceTimed the quartet, which won an NCAA title while competing together at Villanova.
Yet, the 'Nova Knicks' existed only in a fantasy … and in one AT&T commercial. New York dealt DiVincenzo in the Towns deal just before training camp began. And Bridges' fit, thought of as seamless because of his shooting and dogged reputation, was not as slick as DiVincenzo's had been the previous season.
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The Bridges experience was choppy. He shied away from physicality all season, clanked too many jumpers and vacillated as a point-of-attack stopper before rising defensively against Detroit and Boston. Two of the greatest clutch steals in franchise history occurred at the ends of Games 1 and 2 versus the Celtics. Both were from Bridges. He played a hand, and sometimes was even the main catalyst, in the Knicks' three 20-point comebacks during the postseason. But he backed off from physical play once again during the Pacers series.
His reliance on midrange jumpers benefited him but wasn't conducive to creating advantages for his teammates. In March, Bridges violated one of the no-nos in playing for Thibodeau, questioning the heavy minutes the starters played under the coach during a news conference with reporters. The comments rubbed the coaching staff the wrong way, sources said, and showed a disconnect.
Bridges may have been near the end of his first season with the Knicks, but he was still acting like the new guy, though the drama hardly led to anyone's demise.
Thibodeau did not stop playing Bridges, who led the NBA in total minutes during the regular season.
The rest of the starting five endured their own search for answers.
Towns, one of the sweetest-shooting big men ever, attempted only 4.7 3s per game during the regular season. It was his lowest mark since 2019. Hart, despite his constant energy, struggled to shoot 3-pointers, which allowed defenses to guard him with centers and clog the paint. Anunoby would score in bunches, then sometimes revert into droughts. People around the team pinpointed that his enthusiasm was too often tied to touches on the other end.
'Sacrifice' became a buzzword around the locker room.
'We have to go out there with no egos,' Hart said in January. 'We have to go out there with no individual agendas.'
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The team showed mental fortitude during the first-round series against Detroit, trailing in the fourth quarter of Game 1 before reeling off a 21-0 run to pull away. The Pistons brought physicality. The Knicks, against their reputation, matched and then exceeded Detroit's. The final five games were all within one possession with under a minute to go. New York made enough plays close and late to move on.
During the playoff run, the coaching staff remained cautious of its future, understanding that a first-round loss to the Pistons or even a second-round defeat to the Celtics could mean changes, according to league sources. Thibodeau absorbed criticisms about heavy minutes for the starters, hardly a new critique, but New York's roster was one of the NBA's healthiest all season and concluded the playoffs with no one injured. The coach has the backing of team president Leon Rose, league sources said, as well as full buy-in from Brunson, who signed with the Knicks in 2022 in part because he wanted to play for Thibodeau. But ultimately, owner James Dolan is the final decision-maker.
Thibodeau opted against using five 3-point shooters at once. He began experimenting with lineups more than ever once it was too late and the Knicks were already down 2-0 to Indiana.
The Knicks found ways to win more often than not during the regular season, in large part due to the individual talent in the starting lineup as well as late-game heroics from Brunson, who garnered the NBA's Clutch Player of the Year award. But the offense, which roared at the start of the year, fell to the middle of the pack over the second half of the schedule, and they faltered against elite competition, going 0-10 during the regular season against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Celtics, the league's top three teams in the standings.
In the middle of April, in the time between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs, Brunson was asked to reflect on the previous seven months. He called it 'interesting' and acknowledged that it was a rollercoaster full of ups and downs, like most seasons are. On the surface, Brunson's comments were vague – even harmless. However, the Knicks had just wrapped up their best record in over a decade. Those descriptors Brunson used don't usually follow success of that magnitude.
High expectations weren't just grand outside of the locker room, they were permeating inside of it, too. New York's ability to be connected as one rarely matched the individual talent on the floor. The latter was just so great that it covered up the team's flaws on most nights.
Publicly, Knicks players made veiled comments all season about poor communication causing their inconsistencies. Behind the scenes, they and coaches expressed frustration with Towns' defensive habits — less concerned with his talent level and more with his process on that end. Too often, Towns executed incorrect coverages without communicating why he did it. After it became a theme, players worried Towns didn't grasp the importance of the matter.
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The ability to constructively critique became a point of emphasis.
'They all talk to me,' Tucker said after Game 1 of the Boston series when asked what he witnessed with a set of fresh eyes. 'But they didn't talk to each other in real-time, in those situations.'
Some people in the organization wanted to use the 15th roster spot to sign a player who could contribute on the floor, while others wanted a veteran who would be OK with not playing and helping behind the scenes, per league sources. The latter group won out and Tucker signed with the team near the end of the regular season to be a veteran voice.
'The situations to get stops, to have help, you know what I'm saying?' Tucker continued. 'That, to me, we have talent, but that's 80 percent of everything else – being able to communicate, be able to get stops, to be on the same page on offense and be able to read each other. We needed to do those things instead of putting our hands up and looking at each other.
'It's changed. Do I think it needs to get better? One hundred percent. But it's come a long way since I've got here, for sure.'
In comparison to last year's team, which brought juice back to the franchise after narrowly missing out on the Eastern Conference finals, the synergy within this year's group wasn't as strong.
Healthy conflict is good within an organization. Expressing it is important. Last year's team excelled at that. DiVincenzo used to talk about how Knicks players would approach each other after mistakes. The message wasn't always fluffy, but it was consistently honest. He and others attributed the team's ability to fix errors game-to-game to that dynamic.
This year's team was in the playoffs and still trying to learn how one another tick.
'That comes with familiarity and trust and a lot of times you only get that when you go through adverse situations together,' Hart said during the Pistons series when asked about the team's comfort level in correcting one another in real time. 'So, it takes time. And there's times where — there was a play with J.B., a pullup, he had KAT wide open, I'm not sure if KAT said something to him, but I know that if KAT goes, 'Look at the pop, I'm open on the pop,' he's going to look at that. Same thing with KAT, same thing with all those guys.
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'So it's definitely a feeling-out process. It comes with time. But we're all old enough. I think our hearts are in the right place. So you know it's not coming out of any selfish intent. So that's something we can do more, and we will do more of.'
Such was the paradox of this season's Knicks. Even as they fought to stay on the same page and learn about one another, they turned over more success than they had in a quarter of a century.
It appeared that this team grew closer throughout the postseason with each improbable win. There were still issues that spilled into the public view, like when Anunoby and Towns were caught on camera arguing on the bench following a blown defensive assignment during the collapse in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. This group went through challenging situations together, several of them, and often came out the other side as victors. There were some within the organization who went into the postseason worried about how this team would handle adversity. Those concerns were quickly erased after capturing multiple nail-biting victories in the first round.
'You can't get experience without getting experience,' Brunson said. 'It's helped out a lot, brought us closer together. I think, for the most part, we see a lot, we hear a lot, but we make sure we're on the same page together. Regardless of what anyone else says, we got each other's back.'
Sometimes, the Knicks looked like world-beaters, like when they turned that 38-point dagger into the heart of the Celtics. Other times, they disassembled, like when they let go of Game 1 against Indiana.
Now they enter the offseason with Anunoby, Brunson and Hart signed through 2028 and Towns and Miles 'Deuce' McBride signed through 2027. Bridges and Robinson are entering the final years of their contracts.
It's too early for them to lock in any major decisions about the roster, though Bridges' next deal will be a story of the summer. He becomes eligible for a four-year, $156 million extension before next season.
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The already weak Eastern Conference will take another hit next season, with multiple contenders missing star players for the majority of the next 12 months. Up-and-comers still have to show that they're ready to make the leap. Even after losing to Indiana, the Knicks, a veteran team with individuals all in their prime, could be the favorites to come out of the conference next year without a single change.
How New York chooses to build next season's squad will depend on its perspective.
On one hand, the 2025 Knicks were a success. Over the last four years, they've gone from missing the playoffs; to a second-round defeat; to a second-round defeat in seven games that occurred amid injuries aplenty; to the conference finals. Each spring has yielded a new, positive step.
On the other hand, the Knicks had enough talent to survive the Pacers, and a group that was built to enhance each other could not consistently become better than the sum of its parts.
(Top illustration: Demetrius Robinson/ The Athletic; top photos: Gregory Shamus, Charly Triballeau/AFP, Elsa,)