The Knicks Are the Perfect Champ For the NBA's Weirdest Era
New York ended 53 years of frustration not with a textbook superteam or an alien-level superstar, but with a roster built perfectly for a league where nobody stays on top for long.
They did it — they actually did it. For the first time in 53 years, the New York Knicks are NBA champions.
It’s a sight that many fans (of the Knicks or otherwise) aren’t quite sure how to process yet. On the one hand, a championship for this franchise probably ought to have happened a long time ago. On the other hand, given how this franchise spent the previous half-century lighting draft picks and cap space on fire, under the direction of one of the worst owners in sports, it feels like an absolute miracle — especially considering this particular team seemingly broke every conventional rule of how modern NBA champions are supposed to be built and come together.
I wrote 14 years ago about the bizarre New York-Los Angeles paradox between the unsuccessful Knicks and the hyper-successful Lakers: In a league often driven by stars choosing where to play, how could the two biggest markets (and arguably most desirable destinations, in theory) be so different? Shouldn’t the gap in all-time titles — 12 for the Lakers since moving to L.A. versus just 2 for the Knicks — be less lopsided?
The explanations I found back then ranged from the Knicks whiffing on the acquisition of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — the original sin of N.Y. basketball history — as part of the Lakers’ massive advantage on the trade market, to New York’s salary-cap mismanagement, preoccupation with trading draft picks and general habit of betting on the wrong players (with much-loathed owner Jim Dolan sharing plenty of blame for the dysfunction).
It wasn’t like the Knicks still didn’t come close a time or two anyway — they were a Game 7 away from beating the Rockets for the 1994 title, for instance, (Yes, John Starks went 2-for-18 — 0-for-11 on 3-pointers — though none of the Knicks’ best players were especially good in that game.)1 But the Knicks were always the NBA’s most underutilized asset, a flagship brand with little on-court success to show for it.
If you had to pick a year when that trend would reverse itself all at once in a flurry of postseason dominance, however — and the Knicks did finish with the highest PPG differential of any playoff team with double-digit wins, ever (see below) — this would not have been that year… at least, not in a normal NBA era, under normal NBA circumstances.
In fact, if you think about it, the 2025-26 Knicks broke a lot of the rules we’ve come to accept as gospel for how to build a champion.
Supposedly, your best player needs to be an alien like Victor Wembanyama… or LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić. Barring that, he must at least be a savant like Steph Curry (the greatest shooter ever) or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (the statistical second coming of MJ). Jalen Brunson, by contrast, is famously short and never made first-team All-NBA.
The conventional wisdom also held that a top-heavy team collecting a few huge superstars was preferrable to one with less star power but more quality role-players and depth. The Knicks subscribed to this a bit when they shopped for Karl-Anthony Towns, to be sure, but they also made significant investments in the rest of their starting five — OG Anunoby actually has a bigger contract than Brunson, and Mikal Bridges is pretty close too — and bench support, a number of whom went to college (and won) together at Villanova.
This has left the Knicks looking very different from the typical NBA title-winning blueprint, with far less top-level star power but a lot more depth — something we can see in the numbers, when we compare the regular-season LAKER Wins Above Replacement per 82 team games for their nth-best player (i.e., 1st, 2nd, etc.) with that of other NBA champs, or the typical NBA champ, since 2000:
And so, as much as any team, the Knicks fully represent the NBA’s unprecedented Parity Era — as they sealed the league’s eighth different champion in the past eight seasons:
Maybe that is what it was always going to take to bring the Knicks their long-awaited championship. The NBA’s most strangely underperforming franchise was not rescued by the same superstar-market team-building logic that they tried — and failed — to pursue in the shadow of the Lakers (and others). It didn’t win by making by a freakish, obviously franchise-altering talent the centerpiece of their buildup.
Instead, New York finally broke through with a roster that was less a one-man squad or a superteam than a deep collection of very good players who complemented each other perfectly, and peaked at exactly the right time in a league where nobody else wanted to stay on top for long.
Which is fitting, really: All it took to end the Knicks’ half-century of frustration, and turn them into a champion at last, was just the weirdest era the NBA has ever seen.
Filed under: NBA
Derek Harper was the only Knick who really showed up and played like New York’s season depended on him.
So interesting to visually see how this team is different than past champs. Is that saying that Brunson is the #1 option with the lowest LAKER to win a title this century?