Good morning! Before we get to today’s entrant on the Knicks 100, a quick (and belated) Happy Birthday shoutout to the man who changed all of our lives for the better, Jalen Brunson.
Brunson turned 30 on Monday, which is a significant birthday in anyone’s life. It was 13 years ago for me, but I still remember the feeling well. I recall thinking that the dicking around portion of my life was officially over and it was time to get serious. Something tells me Brunson may have had a different sensation.
Whatever it is that he’s feeling, I’m convinced that for as good as Brunson’s late 20’s were, the best is yet to come. His rise to prominence, both in New York and in the NBA, has been relatively rapid. Now, he’s on the mountaintop, which for some is an intimidating place to be. Not Jalen. The most frightening thought for the rest of the league is that now he knows exactly what is required to finish first. He’ll take that blueprint and run with it.
Here’s to the best decade yet.
The Knicks 100: No. 20 - Josh Hart
I’ll say up front that I’m higher on Josh Hart than just about anyone, either here at Knicks Film School or in the general basketball-watching population.
Case in point: For our summer series on the KFS Pod counting down the Top 20 Games of the Leon Rose era, I nominated Josh Hart’s 2023 debut against the Utah Jazz as a possible entrant. It did not receive any votes.
My logic - which I stand by fully - is that for two and a half years before Hart’s arrival, the Knicks were largely in talent acquisition mode. We knew generally what sort of team they wanted to be (look no further than their head coach at the time for proof of that) but they were still searching for an identity. Even the acquisition of Jalen Brunson didn’t quite do the trick, as the team started 10-13 and nearly got said head coach fired. When Hart arrived, they were a mere three games over .500, without much to distinguish them on either end of the floor.
But something changed once he slipped on that No. 3 jersey, and it took all of 36 seconds for us to realize it.
That’s the amount of time that passed between Hart when checked into the game and when he scored his first field goal. It was a classic transition layup created from thin air, when Hart simply out-ran the defense to get himself a bucket. The assist came from Jalen Brunson, naturally, who was more excited than anyone to have Hart as a teammate once again.
You could say that Brunson was just happy to have his best friend back nearby, and I’m sure that was a big part of it. But we’ve also come to learn that no player in the NBA cares about winning as much as Jalen. He knew that for as great as it would be to have Hart around as equal parts tormenter & tormentee, it would be even better for the Knicks’ chances of making noise come playoff time.
From that day forward, Jalen and Josh became dual organizational tentpoles, setting the tone both on and off the court. In Brunson’s case, that’s never a bad thing. He never gets too high or too low, and between the lines he’s as good as anyone in the league when the stakes are at their greatest. In Hart’s case, the results are, shall we say, more volatile.
When Hart is right, you’d swear he’s the most important role player in the NBA. A confident Hart basically checks every box a modern wing needs to, giving you shooting, defense, playmaking, finishing, and of course the intangibles that have come to define him.
A Hart that isn’t as focused as he needs to be? Or worse, is stuck in his own head? That’s the guy that has had segments of Knicks fandom begging for him to be pulled from the starting lineup over the years.
Admittedly, I take great pleasure in chiding these factions anytime Hart has a great game, which works out nicely for me because he has so many of them. Still, they have a point. Unlike his college and pro teammate Mikal Bridges, who can occasionally disappear from games but almost never makes you wish he was on the bench, Hart has a much higher frequency of making fans scream at their televisions for [insert Knick not named Josh Hart here]. Some of the biggest moments leading up to the 2026 title came without Hart on the floor. It’s why I wrote the other day that if we’re doing a pecking order specifically for the 2026 playoffs, Hart slots in comfortably behind Bridges as the fifth most important Knick
So why is he three spots ahead of him here? For one, he has an additional season and a half under his belt, including the 2023 and 2024 playoffs. His 3-pointer to beat Cleveland in Game 1 of the ‘23 postseason might no longer be a top 10 shot of the Leon Rose era following this finals run, but it’ll always be one of my handful of most memorable Knicks moments - the first sign that we might finally be the ones to dish out playoff heartbreak instead of always receiving it. He had a bunch more where that came from against Philly the next season, and even though they didn’t make the conference finals, the fact that he played at all in Game 7 against Indiana is one of the guttiest things I’ve ever seen a professional athlete try to do.
His 2025 and 2026 postseasons were conspicuously devoid of all-time moments (and truthfully, his near-foul on THJ at the end of Game 4 vs Detroit and his blown layup in Game 4 vs San Antonio are the two that stand out the most), but that doesn’t change his overall impact. The reality is that we’ve had Josh Hart in our lives for so long that we’ve started to take some of what he does for granted.
For proof of that, ask yourself: when’s the last time you’ve heard someone mention his performance in Game 5 against the Spurs? The man played 39 minutes, had a double double, made half of his threes, and was a team-high plus-15.
Ho hum. Another day at the office.
That’s Josh Hart in a nutshell. He might have been the fifth most important player for this run, but there is no run, or any run, without him. The “Hart/heart of the Knicks” thing was so perfect that it became passé without ever really having a moment, but he truly is the organ that makes them function. Jalen Brunson is one of one, but so is Hart in his own way. If we think about all of the qualities that have defined this era of Knicks basketball - toughness, grit, perseverance, overcoming the odds, never say die, and all the rest - Hart epitomizes them as much as anyone. There is no other player in the league quite like Josh Hart.
Years from now, when someone asks me to describe Hart as a player, I’ll surely wax poetic with platitudes for a bit, but ultimately might just give them this stat from the 2026 playoffs to make my point:
During this postseason, only three men accumulated at last 170 total rebounds: 7'6" All-Star Victor Wembanyama, 7'0" All-Star Karl-Anthony Towns, and 6'4" hard hat-wearing Josh Hart.
The tenacity that got him in this company is the biggest reason why he checks in at 20, just behind a couple of hall of famers who defined the first two decades of Knicks history and a couple of one-time All-Stars who defined the nineties more than anyone not named Patrick Ewing…
