NEW YORK — By the time Jalen Brunson and the Knicks returned home, it was as easy to find something orange around New York as at Halloween.
The city was caught up in this championship run for nearly two months and the party will last at least a few days more, with the Knicks’ first parade through New York — they didn’t have one in 1970 or ’73 — scheduled for Thursday.
The team will be remembered long after the confetti is picked up off the streets of Broadway — and not only in New York.
The 2025-26 Knicks have a place in NBA history.
Their post-season performance is in the discussion for the best in the 80-year history of the league, a run of routs and then comebacks for their first championship since 1973.
“What a run!” former President Barack Obama wrote in a tweet congratulating coach Mike Brown, Brunson and the rest of the Knicks.
One that was arguably as good even as any of Obama’s beloved Bulls.
The Knicks finished 16-3, an .842 winning percentage that matched the 2024 Boston Celtics for the second best since the format switched to best-of-seven series in all rounds beginning in 2003. The 2017 Golden State Warriors finished 16-1.
The Los Angeles Lakers went 15-1 in 2001 and the Philadelphia 76ers finished 12-1 in 1983. Five teams finished a post-season with two losses.
The Knicks won 13 consecutive games at one point, second only to the Warriors’ 15 in a row in 2017. They set records by winning nine straight on the road and outscoring their post-season opponents by 283 points.
They were still midway through the NBA Finals when rapper Fat Joe, one of the Knicks’ orange-and-blue dressed celebrity fans, came to Brown’s news conference and said what the team had spent weeks making clear.
“Let’s just wait until it’s over, but right now you analyze the numbers, we might be looking at the greatest team ever, like if you analyze the numbers,” he said.
And when things stopped coming easily, the Knicks set records for the other ways they won. Their comeback from a 29-point deficit in Game 4 was the biggest rally in an NBA Finals game since detailed play-by-play began in 1997, and the Knicks capped it off by coming from 16 down in the clincher.
Add it up, and the Knicks can make a compelling case for the most dominant postseason ever.
“It’s absolutely one of the greatest ever,” said Mike Breen, who calls Knicks games on MSG Network during the regular season and has been ABC’s lead announcer for the NBA Finals since 2006.
“It’s impossible for me to rank it, but when you take into account the point differential, the nine straight road wins, clinching all four series on the road, the two losses by one point, the two record-setting comebacks, it’s in the conversation as the best ever.”
Two of the Knicks’ losses were by one point to Atlanta in the first round. The other was by four points in Game 3 against the Spurs, leaving them six points from a perfect post-season.
On the other side, they won clinching games by 51, 30 and 37 points in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
The Knicks were never going to care about how they won, just that they did. Before the playoffs started, all-star centre Karl-Anthony Towns summed up the pressure the players faced in trying to get back to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 by saying: “At the end of the day we’ll be judged by what we do in this run.”
They will be judged well — historically well.
“We went through a lot this season, a lot of ups and downs, but we just stayed with it,” forward OG Anunoby said. “We’re resilient, mentally tough and we won.”
