Visions of the Knicks winning an NBA title are now blurry. They were much clearer last month when they defeated the San Antonio Spurs to capture the NBA Cup.
Perhaps the trophy is fool’s gold. But the Knicks’ principal decision makers, team owner James Dolan and team president Leon Rose, decided against hanging the tournament’s championship banner in the Madison Square Garden rafters along with the franchise’s 1970 and 1973 league championship banners, an implicit message that while the Cup win was an accomplishment worthy of celebrating, an NBA title would be the true crowning achievement.
Going into last night’s game at MSG versus the Brooklyn Nets, the Knicks’ 2025-2026 season can be analyzed as pre-and post-Cup. Head Coach Mike Brown’s squad was 18-7 before beating the Spurs and 25-18 prior to facing the Nets, a record of 7-11 since December 16. The Knicks tipped off against Brooklyn seeking to end a four-game losing streak, having dropped nine of their previous 11 games and wobbling as the tenuous No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference.
They were seven games behind 31-10, No. 1 seed Detroit Pistons, and 1.5 behind the 26-16, No. 2 Boston Celtics, who have been without five-time All-NBA superstar Jayson Tatum all season as he recovers from a ruptured right Achilles tendon that occurred last May at Madison Square Garden against the Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Let’s forgo digging too deeply into statistics and analytics to determine why the Knicks have been faltering. Suspend studying offensive and defensive ratings. Use simple basketball common sense, intuition, and the eye test. The Knicks’ 106-99 home loss to the Phoenix Suns on Saturday, followed by perhaps their most concerning defeat to date, getting rocked by the Dallas Mavericks at the Garden on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday, exposed a seeming lack of chemistry and symbiosis, salient and indispensable team qualities that cannot be quantified.
“There’s been a lot of things to pinpoint, but as a team, we know what we have to do. It’s either we do it, or we care enough to do it, or we don’t,” said Knicks guard Jalen Brunson after falling to the Mavericks.
Center Karl-Anthony Towns minimized emphasizing the timeline of the Knicks’ plunge and instead underscored reversing the trend.
“It doesn’t matter…it matters that it did happen, you know,” he ascertained. “So, we got to figure it out, you know. We have a special team and a special opportunity, and you know, we can’t just let it go to waste.”
So is it just unbalanced chemistry that is plaguing the Knicks or a flawed roster? Do the Knicks need to address their issues externally by fervently pursuing the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, a force multiplier and arguably the best player in the world, or fill their fissures internally by their two most prominent players, team captain Jalen Brunson and five-time All-Star Karl-Anthony Towns, demonstrating galvanizing leadership?
The answers will soon come.