It's Atlanta!

Get ready for a rematch five years in the making. Plus, a moment to appreciate just how far the Knicks have come.

Good morning! Well THAT was an eventful Sunday of basketball…

Hornets 110, Knicks 96

53-29 (L1); 30-10 at home (9th most home wins in franchise history)

Let’s start with the game, which I’m going to challenge myself to sum up in one paragraph:

With the Hornets needing a win to ensure a home game in their 9/10 play-in matchup with the Heat, they played all of their regulars, and yet this game was about as close as the last time these teams played three weeks ago, when the Knicks played all of their healthy regulars¹. Yesterday was a very different story with New York having nothing to play for, but you couldn’t tell from the effort the backups gave. Every Knick rotation player sat besides Deuce McBride (4-for-7 from deep in 24 standout minutes) and Jordan Clarkson (16 minutes off the bench), but Jose Alvarado, Jeremy Sochan, Ariel Hukporti and especially Kevin McCullar Jr all had nice moments, at least making the Hornets sweat this out until the final minutes. Despite the loss, it felt like the perfect way to end the season.

Did I miss anything? Oh…congrats to Mikal Bridges for 23 glorious seconds to keep his consecutive games streak alive. Pretty sure that’s about as long as I lasted on my wedding night.

And with that, we move on to the only thing anyone should be caring about today: the rematch that nobody was expecting 24 hours ago and I’m not sure a ton of us are terribly excited about.

Knicks vs Hawks, round two…in round one of the 2026 NBA Playoffs.

How did it happen? For one, the Hawks needed to lose, but with them resting their starters against the Heat, that wasn’t exactly a surprise. Did they sit their normal guys because they didn’t want to risk injury? Or because they were secretly hoping to play the Knicks? Maybe we’ll find out that answer this week.

Second, the Raptors needed to win, which they did against the Nets, although that game was closer than it should have been for about three quarters.

Lastly, and most egregiously by far, the Orlando Magic - finally healthy after a season plagued by injuries and riding a five-game winning streak that gave them a chance to host the 7/8 play-in game with a victory yesterday - needed to lose to a Celtics team resting their top six guys. After allowing Boston to hang around the entire first half, the Magic were outscored 42-20 in the third quarter as the Celtics came at them like they were the team with something to play for.

Orlando looked like a deer in headlights for the first 15 minutes of the second half, putting forth one of the most feckless displays of basketball you could ever hope to see. They shot 1-of-8 from behind the arc in the third period compared to 9-of-16 from Boston, who was quicker to every loose ball and dominated every facet of the game. Orlando made a late run and briefly tied it up, but a Luka Garza triple gave Boston back the lead, and that was that. Three different Celtics wound up with career highs for their trouble, the first time that’s ever happened in the same NBA game.

The craziest part of this whole thing (other than the fact that Jamahl Mosley hasn’t already been let go) is that Desmond Bane started the game, played just six minutes, and then sat until the opening minute of the fourth quarter, when his team was down by 11. Mosley’s explanation for this afterwards reeked of a guy who knew he’d screwed up massively and was just trying his best to sell himself some leeway. What a fall from grace for one of the league’s hot young coaches not long ago.

With that Magic loss, the Hawks could officially book their ticket to New York City for next weekend, when Game 1 will tip off on Amazon Prime at 6pm. In no uncertain terms, this shapes up to be a far more challenging series than the Raptors would have been, as should be obvious from the game these teams played one week ago today. Atlanta is very legit, can bother New York in a few key ways, and it’s going to take the version of the Knicks we’ve seen over the last two weeks to win this thing, hopefully without going seven games.

We’ll have a full week to get into the nuts and bolts of this series, looking at film, key matchups, big questions, and much more. Before we get to all that though, I thought we might take one last deep breath and appreciate the journey to get to this point, where the Knicks are nearly 3-to-1 favorites to beat a team that has won 20 of its last 26 games.

From third world poverty to first world problems…

Slow and Steady

The narrative almost writes itself.

Following a an unparalleled stretch of success that included multiple trips to the Finals, the Knicks had fallen on hard times. After those hard times lasted longer and reached deeper nadirs than anyone could have imagined, change - finally - was on the horizon.

It started innocently enough, with a new lead executive and the emergence of a cinderblock of a man who had been slept on before he came to New York. Was he a power forward? Or a small center? Those questions took a backseat when he gave the Knicks something they lacked for far too long:

Hope.

The arrival of a four-time All-Star one year later was supposed to turbo charge the return to glory, but that didn’t quite work out as expected when the new arrival and the face of the franchise didn’t mesh. Thankfully, things were only temporarily sidetracked. The rest of the roster filled out over the next few years, including the addition of a point guard no one had any idea was this good.

And just like that, the wins started to pile up.

The Knicks increased their win total once, then twice, then one more time, and then a fourth time. In total, it was four consecutive years where the win total was higher than the previous season. The only thing left to do was win the whole…damn…thing.

And at the end of that last season, that’s exactly what they did.

For the 1969-70 New York Knicks, winning the title wasn’t quite the surprise that it would be for the 2025-26 club. Maybe it would have been if Bill Russell had come back to the Celtics a’la Jayson Tatum returning to the court this season, if only because the Knicks - like everyone else - could never seem to beat that guy.

With Russell finally gone though, the ‘69-70 season was thought to be New York’s time. Following a 23-1 start and a franchise record 60 wins, that never really changed, at least until the aforementioned cinderblock Willis Reed went down in the Finals. We know how that turned out.

There’s no way to look up betting odds ahead of the 1970 NBA Playoffs, but it’s fair to assume that New York’s title chances were shorter than 18-to-1, which is where they currently stand ahead of the 2026 postseason. For that reason alone, it’s harder to believe that we’re at the precipice of a journey that will end in similar fashion to the one from 53 years ago, with Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns sipping champaign in a celebratory locker room.

We’ll have lots of time to analyze how they can scale that particular mountaintop, but before we move forward, I think it’s worth taking a few moments to look back. The rise to prominence we just witnessed isn’t something to be taken for granted.

It also wasn’t always smooth sailing, and several key figures along the way didn’t make it to the final stretch.

The most prominent of those is Julius Randle, who unlike Reed, won’t be around to witness the conclusion of a journey he was largely responsible for starting. Neither will Kemba Walker, who made the acquisition of Walt Bellamy look like the trade of the century. At the same time, just like Bellamy was exchanged for final puzzle piece Dave DeBusschere, the failure of the Walker experiment led directly to the signing of Jalen Brunson.

Jalen, of course, is now viewed as the catalyst of the current era far more than Julius, and with KAT potentially on the verge of his second straight All-NBA nod as a Knick, even the biggest Towns skeptics aren’t likely to have Randle regret anytime soon.

Still, as we look back and appreciate the rising win totals - from 37 to 47 to 50 to 51 to 53 this season - the Julius Randle piece is a huge one. Just as GM Eddie Donovan plucked Reed from Grambling State with the first pick of the second round in 1964, Leon Rose saw enough potential in Randle to avoid offloading him as soon as he took the job, nor did he attempt to sell high in the midst of his Most Improved Player campaign. With Towns playing perhaps the best and most complete ball of his career, the divisive trade sending Randle to Minnesota is looking better today than it ever has.

That’s true even considering the loss of Donte DiVincenzo, whose departure many a Knick fan - including yours truly - have lamented on more than one occasion. Donte’s lone season in blue and orange (and really, half a season, because Donte didn’t become Donte until after the injuries to OG and Julius²) is one for the ages, but like Randle, it’s hard to view his absence as one the team hasn’t recovered from. Just like signing DiVincenzo to the midlevel exception was viewed as one of Leon Rose’s great coups, so has the signing of Landry Shamet to the vet minimum. Throw Jordan Clarkson into the same boat now that he’s re-emerged as a key piece.

Today isn’t the day to sing Leon’s praises - his hosannas (or obituary) will be penned after New York plays its final game - but its hard to properly appreciate the organization’s steady rise without looking at all the moves that have been made along the way.

In total, 75 different players have been on the active roster during Rose’s tenure³. That includes the likes of Bobby Portis, Allonzo Trier, Mo Harkless, Wayne Ellington and Kadeem Allen, all of whom were on the roster Leon inherited but whose Knick journey effectively ended with the onset of the pandemic. There are also 42 players who both arrived and departed under Rose’s watch⁴.

It’s not that roster churn is unusual in the NBA. The Detroit Pistons, for example, have had over 100 players in uniform in the same time span that Leon Rose has been president, but they also had four seasons of cellar dwelling in that stretch. The Spurs just ended a drought of six consecutive seasons with 34 or fewer wins. Even the mighty Thunder had consecutive last place finishes in the time since Leon has been here.

The Knicks, by contrast, have only had one year out of the playoffs in the last six, when they finished in 11th place in the ‘21-22 season with a record that was better than two West play-in teams. In that sense, they’re much closer to the Boston Celtics, who have more wins than any team in the league since the start of the ‘20-21 season. The Knicks are sixth, trailing Boston, Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee and Cleveland.

That’s pretty impressive on a few fronts. For one, this Celtics regime inherited Tatum and Jaylen Brown, both of whom were drafted third overall. The Nuggets and Bucks have had the benefit of multi-time MVP’s. The Cavs had three consecutive top-five picks from 2019 to 2021, landing two All-Stars with those selections. Even the Suns had a top overall pick to help their resurgence, albeit one they squandered in retrospect. The Knicks began this run with the eighth pick in what was viewed as a weak draft, plus one other player previously taken in the top half of the lottery. That’s it.

The staggering lack of high end lottery talent on the roster at the start of this run leads us to the second impressive aspect of this era, which is that in the six seasons that preceded this six-year period, New York had fewer wins than any organization in the NBA:

Even the Jets had a higher winning percentage over the same time frame, if you can believe it.

Looking at things from this angle, I want to give kudos to the subset of fans out there who have managed to keep the struggles of the last two seasons in perspective. In the last three years, the Knicks have accumulated more wins than they did in the six years from from 2015 to 2020. That doesn’t even include the postseason, when they’ve piled up more victories in the last five years (24) than they did in five separate regular seasons from 2005 to 2020.

Heading into yesterday’s games, I thought about how appropriate it would be for New York to have a round one matchup against the two non-Randle former Knicks who were most responsible for the team’s ascension, but in some ways it’s even more fitting to be playing the Hawks, the team that fully exposed New York as a flawed (but fun) group that needed major reconstruction. Sure enough, not a single player who was on the active roster in that series is still here⁵.

If we’re going to talk about folks who didn’t make it to this leg of the journey, the most looming presence among them isn’t even a player. Tom Thibodeau’s shadow still hangs over the organization (although maybe not for long, depending on how the next month or two go), but he isn’t the only off-court figure who deserves some love. Scott Perry stayed on as GM for a few years after Leon was hired, and while his Sacramento tenure hasn’t exactly supported the notion that he played a big part in New York’s revival, Rose kept him around for a reason. Kudos should also go out to Mike Woodson, Kenny Payne and Johnnie Bryant.

On the court, six different players who played during this stretch but have since left - Randle, Barrett, Hartenstein, Quickley, Rose and DiVincenzo - made our 25 for 25 list last summer. That’s the same number of current players who made the list⁶, and it would be seven if we redid the ranking today (Mikal Bridges finished 28th, much to Andrew Claudio’s chagrin). That means half of the most important Knicks of this century have all been here during this run.

And that doesn’t even include guys like Taj Gibson, Derrick Rose, Alec Burks, Quentin Grimes, Obi Toppin, Reggie Bullock, Cameron Payne, and - don’t laugh - Precious Achiuwa, all of whom had massive moments in a Knick uniform and left mostly positive memories in their wake.

(Notably, with the exception of Obi, it’s hard to find a single player who has had a more #meaningful impact on winning basketball after they left the Leon Rose Knicks than they did when they were here. Say this for the current regime: they tend to cut bait at the right time.)

Put it all together, and this has truly been a unique era in the history of a franchise that has had only four stretches of sustained winning:

• The 50’s, when there were between eight and 11 teams in the entire league.

• The championship years, when they employed three of the top-75 players of all time (and five if you count Earl Monroe and Jerry Lucas).

• The 90’s, built on the back of the most coveted first overall pick since Lew Alcindor.

• Now, with a team built not from shameless tanking or a superstar trade, but from a series of savvy decisions that have added up over time

It hasn’t been perfect, but perfect is the enemy of the the good, which is probably why previous GM’s who shot for the stars wound up floating adrift in the hopeless void of outer space.

The only thing left to do now is see how good they can really be. There is no super-team in their path. No KD/Steph or LeBron/Wade to topple. Other teams may have fewer flaws and thus more consistently strong performances, but few - if any - can say they are better than the Knicks when the Knicks are at their very best.

That’s as good a hand to play as any.

The chips are in the middle of the table. Everyone has their cards.

Time to show the world what you got.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. Deuce was still out.

2. His scoring average increased from 11 to 21 after January 27. HGe averaged 18 in the playoffs.

3. The last player to depart the Knicks before Rose officially took over? Marcus Morris, who was dealt away a little more than a month before Rose was introduced as team president.

4. That includes Derrick Rose, who was re-acquired by Rose after an underwhelming first stint with the team, as well as Damyean Dotson, who is the only player with the specific designation of being on the team Rose inherited, went to a different team, and then was brought back at a later time, albeit for two 10-day contracts.

5. Mitchell Robinson, you’ll recall, was injured and did not suit up.

6. Jalen, KAT, Hart, Mitch, OG and Deuce