NEW YORK – Peaks and valleys tell the story of the New York Knicks' season thus far. Their path to the NBA Finals was open and clear when they were 2025 NBA Cup Champions in Las Vegas. Their blockbuster trades and offseason coaching change were in question throughout the 2-9 slump that followed. And all was well in the eight-game win streak that came after that.
The Knicks have flashed brilliant, championship-level potential that had superstar point guard Jalen Brunson in MVP conversations. And they have flashed essentially all of the issues off of which pundits and scribes base their doubts.
Head coach Mike Brown has preached the importance of selectively poor memory. The goal is to stay grounded, much similar to the philosophy of Knicks teams led by Tom Thibodeau. The coach, two-thirds of the way into his first season with this group, maintains that their midseason struggles are necessary evils helping lay a foundation for eventual playoff success. He declared ahead of their overtime loss to the Indiana Pacers that, based on his experience, the Knicks are on the right path.
“You hate to lose games, and I'm not signing up to lose games. But I'm a believer that we need to struggle a couple times this year. … It's going to test our resolve as a group. You have to be connected if you want to give yourself a chance. Playoff runs, there's nothing more stressful than that on the NBA level. Seven-game series, there's four of them, so that really tests your resolve. … To be able to hit some adversity, go through it, stay connected, and come out of it hopefully a little stronger than what you were going into it, it's something that I look forward to,” Brown told reporters ahead of the All-Star break.
Knicks' post All-Star break path to NBA Finals run is clear, just not easy
The logical and methodical Brown is focused on his group playing winning basketball. The coach was asked about the relative dip in All-Star center Karl-Anthony Towns' production and focused solely on the games comprising an eight-game win streak. And when asked about what he's learned about the Knicks' players this season, he told media that the locker room's solution-oriented approach to handling adversity has impressed him.
“To see the way they handled that 2-9 stretch, was really good. Because it could have been a lot of finger-pointing, infighting, it could have been a lot of that. And our guys were pretty steady in trying to find ways to right the ship,” the coach affirmed last Tuesday.
The same structured, step-by-step approach that the Knicks' front office employed to build their current roster – do research, gather assets, wait for opportunities to strike, and execute aggressively when they arise – is similar to Brown's systematic approach to coaching.
He, like many coaches, has baseline principles that he wants his team to execute. And the coach seems to have noticed the detail-oriented fervor with which he assigns roles to assistants or reportedly challenges players in practices, within team captain Jalen Brunson, and his teammates. Their responses to adversity thus far have involved acknowledging the issues at hand, discussing them as a team, and working with their coaches on executing solutions.
That process has been a winning formula thus far, all things considered. The ultimate test will still be the postseason, and whether or not the Knicks can make it to that fourth seven-game series.
