CLEVELAND — The journey to this moment, all of New York spellbound by a basketball team that doesn’t seem to ever lose anymore, began years ago.
Before the Knicks tore through the Eastern Conference with blowout after blowout.
Before the trades for Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby or Josh Hart.
Before the team’s captain, star guard Jalen Brunson, ever arrived.
On Monday, the Knicks demolished the Cleveland Cavaliers, sweeping them from the Eastern Conference finals. It was New York’s 11th consecutive victory, tied for the third-longest winning streak in playoff history. But forget about the trivia. The Knicks — the same clumsy team that tripped over itself for most of this century — are going to the finals for the first time since 1999.
And their quest to arrive where they are now, just four wins short of their first championship in 53 years, goes back to long before today.
Even in the winter of 2022, while mired in another losing season, signs that these were no longer the same, old Knicks flashed. And they came from Texas.
Back then, the Dallas Mavericks were in a bind, their point guard slipping away. Dallas had already declined to offer Brunson the now-infamous four-year, $55 million extension that never materialized. Having just hired a new general manager, the Mavericks practiced what they considered the best strategy to maintain flexibility: They would not dole out long-term money.
But in an effort to keep options open, they left the back door ajar, with a smidgen of daylight for the Knicks to swoop in for the man who would improbably carry a once-inept franchise over the hump.
As the 2022 trade deadline approached, murmurs reached Dallas that the Knicks were on the verge of hiring Brunson’s father, Rick, as an assistant for head coach Tom Thibodeau, the same role Rick had held in Thibodeau’s two previous stops with the Chicago Bulls and Minnesota Timberwolves. The relationships in New York already existed. Knicks president Leon Rose was Rick’s agent and the Brunsons’ closest family friend. Jalen had known Thibodeau for so long that he could not recall the first time the two met because, whenever it happened, he was literally too young to form memories.
A family connection: Rick Brunson was hired to the Knicks’ coaching staff shortly before the team pursued his son, Jalen. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
The Mavs deemed New York their strongest competition for Brunson, whom Dallas drafted in 2018 and was set to become a free agent in the upcoming summer, but they also identified a roadblock for the Knicks, who had spent most of the previous three decades hungry for a competent point guard. New York projected to be above the salary cap in the ensuing season. It would not have the money to sign its guy.
So, the Mavs made a call.
Not long before the 2022 trade deadline, they and the Knicks began negotiations on a deal that would have brought Brunson to New York, league sources told The Athletic. The two sides discussed various constructions. One included young bench guard Immanuel Quickley. Another incorporated promising rookie Quentin Grimes. Numerous other iterations emerged. But across all of them was one common denominator:
The Mavericks wanted first-round picks.
More specifically, they wanted their own first-round picks.
Three years prior, the Knicks had traded a 23-year-old supposed franchise pillar, Kristaps Porziņģis, the organization’s greatest draft pick since Patrick Ewing, in a controversial move. New York wanted to open up cap space to sign All-Stars in the summer of 2019. Sending Porziņģis and others to Dallas would make it happen. The trade inspired an uproar. The Knicks were in the midst of a cellar-dwelling eight-year stretch. The previous decade wasn’t too hot, either.
Most cultural references to the organization had punchlines. The Porziņģis trade was another gaffe to add to the list.
But in hindsight, the deal gave the Knicks an element that would define one of the NBA’s most unlikely turnarounds: flexibility. And in this moment in 2022, with most of the front office that dealt away Porziņģis gone, with Rose and company running the show, and with the Mavericks on the phone, it had given them leverage.
Dallas had delivered the Knicks two first-round picks for Porziņģis. And it wanted at least one of those in return for Brunson, league sources said.
The Mavericks made a reasonable argument to the Knicks. Because New York projected to be over the cap, it would need to unload tens of millions of dollars in salary to sign Brunson in the upcoming summer. The Mavs had determined it wouldn’t be able to do so without unloading a first-rounder or two. The Knicks, they figured, might as well give up those picks now while also guaranteeing that they secure their top target.
But New York would not budge.
Because these were not — and especially now are not — your same, old Knicks.
Rose has run the front office since 2020, when owner James Dolan hired him away from Creative Arts Agency, where he oversaw the company’s basketball division. His longtime confidant, William “World Wide Wes” Wesley, joined him. Neither had ever worked for an NBA team. Their first front-office hire was a little-known salary cap aficionado in Cleveland, Brock Aller.
Rose might be first in charge. Wesley might be second. In 2020, Scott Perry was third; now, it’s Gersson Rosas. But Aller, an obsessor of the margins, someone who former Cavaliers lead executive David Griffin dubbed a “diabolical genius,” makes more trade calls than anyone else in the organization.
And Aller adores his precious draft picks.
One time, shortly after he joined the Knicks, Aller left an empty pizza box in his office for a curiously long time. A joke emerged in the building: That box must be where he stored the Knicks’ valuable first-rounders.
The Mavericks, even with the Knicks all-in on Brunson, could not flip the lid of that pizza box.
For years, the Knicks displayed a more philanthropic approach to draft picks and young talent. Chases for big names produced the energy of an 8-year-old after spotting a chocolate bar at the checkout aisle. Their transactions were so hasty that one can inspire a diatribe from any Knicks fan merely by mentioning the names of the subjects.
Andrea Bargnani. Eddy Curry. Antonio McDyess.
At the behest of Dolan, they packed every asset they could into the deal that landed them Carmelo Anthony. Anthony is an all-time great and a Hall of Famer, but his acquisition was yet another example of the Knicks caring not for the margins. And they did not prosper. Over a 19-year span before Rose took over, New York totaled only three winning seasons and just one playoff series victory. It won a mere 39 percent of its games, yet paid the luxury tax 10 times.
The new front office would still key in on stars but in a more pragmatic way, saving up draft picks to use as currency and then pouncing on a trade once it believed the roster was ready.
At this point in 2022, the Knicks were not there. They had made the playoffs the previous spring, Thibodeau’s first season coaching the squad, but had fallen off the following year on the way to a 37-win campaign. They continued talks with the Mavericks about Brunson into deadline day. But neither side would change its mind regarding draft picks, and negotiations stalled.
The Knicks were patient. Four months later, after Brunson helped the Mavs to the conference finals, after Thibodeau had hired Rick Brunson, they were rewarded.
Aller swindled deal after deal on 2022 draft night, garnering future draft picks and getting off enough salary to sign Brunson and more.
Four years later, Brunson is a three-time All-NBA member, the captain of a team that is just four victories short of inspiring New York City to combust. The Knicks, more than a half century after their last championship, are within shouting distance of another.
Leave it to an organization that has never been conventional to rescue itself in such an unusual way.
Jalen Brunson has outperformed even the rosiest expectations since joining the Knicks. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
Many on the outside panned the Brunson signing when it happened. He was too small, a product of nepotism, not deserving of the $104 million the Knicks had handed him. But the Knicks understood Brunson so well that they could see potential to which the rest of the world was blind. Even after his first season in New York, a breakout that placed Brunson into the conversation for an All-Star spot, Thibodeau assured anyone who would listen that Brunson, against the insistence of many, had not peaked. Brunson had averaged 30 points a game on excellent efficiency during the team’s second-round playoff series, which ended in a loss. Thibodeau believed he could do that for a full season.
Leading into 2023 training camp, the coach repeated that he expected Brunson to be an MVP candidate. Brunson ended up finishing fifth in the voting that season.
The Knicks had found their star — nay, their north star, the man who every person in the organization followed, the one who now owns a higher playoff scoring average than Kobe Bryant. And for the first time in years, they did not overpay to acquire him.
This was the alignment of an uncommon star, an uncommon organization and an uncommon front office with an uncommon strategy. The Knicks built a cast around Brunson, not with drafted players or via free agency, but with trades.
They turned Cam Reddish and a late first-round selection into Josh Hart. They flipped RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley for OG Anunoby, notably not parting with a first-rounder in the process. They held onto big man Mitchell Robinson, their longest-tenured mainstay, and identified which youngsters to keep, such as Miles “Deuce” McBride. By the summer of 2024, following a second consecutive second-round elimination, they pushed their pizza box to the middle of the table, executing two risky moves, one that sent five first-round picks to the Brooklyn Nets for a zero-time All-Star who the front office considered the stylistic ideal, Mikal Bridges; and one that swapped two members of the core, Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo, for All-NBA big man Karl-Anthony Towns.
The Knicks understood when to hold back and intuited when to become aggressive.
For years, people claimed the Knicks could never win as long as Dolan, who was more hands-on in his early stage of owning the franchise, was at the top. Those allegations can no longer exist, though the irony is that it took Dolan looking elsewhere for the front office to operate more autonomously.
In 2018, Dolan’s passion project began in Las Vegas, the construction of a high-tech, globe-like venue on the Strip that would change entertainment forever. The process of building his Sphere was bumpy. The venture climbed over budget, ending up with a $2.3-billion price tag, which diverted much of Dolan’s time to Vegas. Basketball dropped down the list of priorities.
Then the Sphere opened in 2023. He’s been around the team more since. Though his opinion was not the only factor in firing Thibodeau just days after last year’s Eastern Conference finals, the deepest playoff run the Knicks had made in a quarter century, he spearheaded the coach’s ousting, as The Athletic’s Ian O’Connor detailed.
Now, after three clinical series and a constant stream of innovative, strategic adjustments from the new head coach, Mike Brown, the Knicks will play deeper into the spring than they have since Dolan’s first year at the helm.
The wager paid off.
As did the one to hire Rose. As did the one to acquire Towns. As might the one to trade for Bridges, especially if the Knicks win four more games by the end of June. As did every aspect of the way they acquired Brunson, the man who has led the Knicks back to dignity.
