These Knicks Prove You Don’t Need a Megastar—Just Good Vibes—to Win

Somewhere permanently lodged in the back of my mind, there’s a rusted, creaking file cabinet. Open up any of the overstuffed drawers and you’ll find it crammed with ex-New York Knicks: Utterly forgettable failed prospects, botched draft picks, bored and surly free agent signings, journeymen nobodies.

The truly remarkable failures are there, too. But these odd spreadsheets are mainly littered with the likes of Chris McNealy, Lou Amundson, Randolph Morris, Quincy Acy, Jerrod Mustaf, Lee Nailon, Sergio Rodriguez, things of that nature.

Fans of any bedraggled and misbegotten franchise probably have a similarly well-worn mental inventory tucked away somewhere. It’s an act of self-preservation, in a way. Or at least it is for me. During the truly execrable Knicks seasons—and there have been so, so many—I’ve found myself frequently thumbing through it, maybe lingering on a two-week period where I thought Alexey Shved could be a rotation-grade NBA player. The present may seem hopeless, sure, and the past just as nightmarish, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Perhaps, I’d tell myself, time spent devoted to a thing that doesn't love you back, that never seemed to care, really, whether you paid attention or not, is in its own way not just admirable, but beautiful.

Except now, all those misspent hours are being repaid—with interest. The Knicks are a frighteningly good team.

More than that, they’re a smart, well-constructed outfit, with a clear path towards improvement and, perhaps most shockingly, a wholly competent front office capable of executing their best-laid plans. And yet they’re still owned by James Dolan. James Dolan!

As the final seconds ticked off the clock of the New York Knicks’ 118-115 victory over the Philadelphia 76ers on Thursday night, I could barely muster the energy to move. It was a truly bonkers series, in which every game came down to the wire. The Knicks won four games to two, and by a cumulative total of three points. As a longtime Knicks fan, I watched every single second alternating between an anxiety-riddled, sweat-soaked fetal crouch and howling with joy at decibel levels that pissed off the neighbors.

The best part of all this is that it shouldn’t have worked, or at least not this well, not this soon. Instead, the Knicks, a team defined by its insular, self-destructive paranoia, and short sightedness for most of the 21st century, now boasts an incredibly fun, lovable roster—and here’s the most improbable part of this whole yarn—one that’s been built on the power of friendship.

A brief primer for the uninitiated: In the 1990s the Knicks were good. Goonish, brutish, and ugly, but quite good. The only way to beat Michael Jordan, they surmised, was to play basketball with a hammer in one hand and a burlap sack filled with doorknobs in the other. They failed. For the next 20 years, they went desperately and thirstily hunting for stars. Said stars chose functional teams or ignored the Knicks altogether. They failed again. The on-court product was godawful.

As the calls for Dolan to sell the team grew more persistent—and the owner banned and/or got into petty and occasionally litigious fights with famous and non-famous fans begging for his ouster—they decided to double-down on the very practices that had dug this hole in the first place: cronyism and nepotism. For most of the 2000s, the Knicks were dismissed as a weirdly unsuccessful (but highly profitable) branch of the ur-agency CAA. That is, when they weren’t subcontracting out their corporate strategy to McKinsey & Company.

So who did they put in charge back in 2019? Leon Rose, formerly CAA’s co-head of basketball (who’d never worked in an NBA front office). Rose’s first front-page transaction was signing his godson, Jalen Brunson, who also happened to be the son of a former Knicks player and current Knicks assistant coach. Brunson’s current agent is Leon’s son, who still works for CAA. Coaching the team is Tom Thibodeau, who happens to have been a close confidant of the Brunsons for decades. Then they imported other CAA clients as free agents and peeled off a couple of Brunson’s old college pals for good measure. From afar, it looked less like standard roster construction than getting cozy, well-paying gigs for friends and family members. They weren’t shy about laying it out explicitly. “Family is how we’re building this team,” is how William “Worldwide Wes” Wesley, himself a former shadowy NBA power broker turned Knicks front office member, put it back in 2022. Brunson said the same that year when explaining why he chose New York: “It’s family.”

Shockingly, this particular family is anything but dysfunctional. Watch this team for a good stretch of time and you can’t help but feel that they genuinely care about one another. You know, like a family, one with, again, per Brunson, immaculate vibes.

You see it the podcast he co-hosts with Josh Hart, a 6’4” position-less wrecking ball whose job description is to “Run around like an idiot and fuck shit up,” he said. You can see it in the tears Brunson choked back on the night he made his first All-Star team, or even in the way every man on the roster has embraced Thibodeaus’ grinding, growling maxim: “The magic is in the work.”

They scratch and claw for every loose ball and attack the offensive glass like it owed them money. Up and down the roster lie formerly discarded after-thoughts are rotating on defense with shocking alacrity, wearing down opponents sheer force of will. At the same time, they’re not hockey goons without skates. Somehow, for the first time since the halcyon days of Clyde Frazier, they’re playing beautiful, unselfish ball, a constant whir of picks, backdoor cuts, and deft passing. At the center of it all, is Brunson, the actual star Knicks fans have dreamed of seemingly forever. Of course, he looks nothing like the part.

Standing 6’2” at best, he’s the alpha and the omega of the Knicks’ offense. Every scoring possession revolves around his uncanny ability to shake loose from defenders. Unlike other NBA stars who can soar over or overwhelm an opponent with pure athletic ability or physical superiority, Brunson reaches into an endless bag of feints, changes of speed, pivots, and downright ballentic footwork to carve out inches of space in the paint. If that fails, he’ll rely on his surprising strength to bludgeon a defender till they're broken. And his shot is something else. It’s somehow the most delicate, gentle part of his game, a pillow-soft heave lofted with just enough force to gently settle in the basket, as opposed to snapping the nets.The question of whether Brunson could function as a true “1A” star became prime fodder for shouty basketball talking heads in December. Asked and answered.

Knicks fans have embraced Brunson like no player since, well, Jeremy Lin, an equally improbable but unfortunately brief star. Just watch this mob of delirious New Yorkers storm Philadelphia’s home arena, after Brunson painted a 47 point, 10 assist masterpiece to seal game 3, despite Philly moving heaven and earth to get the ball out of Brunson’s mitts and shove him away from his favorite spots. As an encore, he dropped 40 and 41 in the following two, including a bonkers final quarter.

Losing one’s mind is a perfectly reasonable response to all these blessings. Of course they’re burning jerseys in the streets and at home, and the rafters of MSG rattle and hum with orgiastic glee whenever Brunson rocks Embiid off his size 17 Under Armor Ones. And of course Knicks (flawed) legend John Starks has been courtside every game, rallying the troops with as much fervor as any fan.

It’s only been one round, but the Knicks have already been gifted at least one magical moment, where a few botched calls and unexpected bounces leads them to overcome a five-point deficit in the final seconds of play.

This, I’ve always been told, is the grand bargain of sports: You suffer, and in return, you are bequeathed honest-to-goodness miracles. The true dopamine hit at the heart of fandom isn’t found in the thrill of victory; it's the illusion of a moral and just (or at least functioning) world. That heart can overcome a lack of talent; that the perceived good guys can occasionally prevail. I’ve had a rough year personally, thanks in large part to matters that were entirely beyond my ability to affect it. And so I’ve started caring about this Knicks team in particular, in ways I haven’t since I was a small child. I never saw it coming, but they’ve been a balm, a diversion in the best sense of the word.

Regardless of what happens throughout the rest of the playoffs, the vibes will remain immaculate. Maybe then I finally can get rid of that file cabinet.

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