However you feel about the long-term cost of all the moves Leon Rose and Co. made to put this roster together, and however dismayed fans might be about how the series against Indiana played out, it's hard to call the 2024-25 season anything but a smashing success for New York.
Great expectations came along with the pricey offseason transactions, but dethroning the defending champs en route to the franchise's first conference finals appearance in 25 years should qualify as exceeding those expectations. Until this year, no team had ever authored multiple 20-point comebacks in the same postseason. The Knicks did it three times. This was a very good and exceptionally resilient team.
They also were clearly flawed, in ways that led to serious struggles against elite competition during the regular season (they lost all 10 games they played against the league's top three teams by record) and ultimately prevented them from capitalizing on a golden opportunity to make the Finals. For as great as they were offensively, Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns represented two defensive liabilities that the Pacers picked apart in the East finals. And their at-times dominant two-man game couldn't reach its full potential, in part because opposing defenses frequently cross-matched their centers onto the poor-shooting Josh Hart and put big, switchable wings on Towns.
Hart contributed in myriad other ways, and OG Anunoby slotted in perfectly as a defensive destroyer who could insulate Brunson and Towns on one end and capitalize on their gravity at the other by drilling spot-up threes and attacking ferociously off the catch. But the team's triple-wing vision didn't fully come to fruition, in large part because Mikal Bridges struggled to find consistency at either end of the floor after the front office forked over five first-round picks for him in the summer.
So, what should the Knicks do with all that information? What
can they even do if they decide to shake things up?
They have the security of their top seven rotation players (the starters, plus Mitchell Robinson and Deuce McBride) being under contract for next season. They also have approximately $189 million committed to those seven guys, which already puts them slightly over the luxury tax and only gives them about $7 million of wiggle room beneath the first apron to backfill the roster. And that's before considering potential extensions for Bridges or Robinson, whose team-friendly contracts expire next summer. Towns, who's owed $110 million over the next two years and has a $61-million player option for 2027-28, is extension-eligible as well.
On the one hand, it's fair to wonder whether it makes sense to double down on a starting lineup that didn't entirely work. That quintet (the most used fivesome in the league) won its minutes by a modest 3.3 points per 100 possessions during the regular season, then got outscored by 6.2 points per 100 during the playoffs. Tom Thibodeau swapped Hart for Robinson after the Knicks dropped their first two games against Indiana, but that lineup didn't fare much better, getting outscored by 3.7 points per 100 despite sporting a monstrous 43% offensive rebound rate.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine New York cutting bait on Bridges or Towns just a year after acquiring them, especially considering the success those guys helped engender and the fact that the team would surely be accepting a huge net asset loss in any Bridges deal. It's also hard to picture a scenario in which trading one or both of those guys makes the Knicks better. It might make them deeper or more financially flexible, but the front office will probably be wary of taking any kind of short-term step back when the Eastern Conference figures to be wide-open in 2025-26.
Bottom line: Even without a ton of upward mobility, New York's in a good spot. Each of the top seven players is 30 or younger, and this group has a chance to be better next season simply with a full campaign and lengthy playoff run under its belt. Even if no such gains are made, the Knicks will have a decent shot at coming out of the East. They might well have done so this year if not for the Pacers
pulling off the impossible in Game 1.
There's a real chance for sustained success here. The Knicks obviously have to be open-minded if the right opportunity comes along, but I'm not sure aggressively rocking the boat would be the right approach. -
Joe Wolfond
Every year, 29 teams fall short of the ultimate goal, and every year, those 29 teams ask themselves how they can take the next step.We previously looked at how the first-round outs in the East and West might go about answering that question, and then we examined the decisions on the horizon for...
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) thibs will win you a bunch of regular season games but not real ones
