Mateo’s Hoop Diary: The 2025-26 New York Knicks were a special team

It’s a special day for the New York Knicks and their fans now that the team delivered a championship. They hadn’t gotten it done since 1973, and some of their alumni — Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston — were present in San Antonio for the coronation. 

Going into Game 5 must’ve been quite the experience for their fans. Unless they lived through the 1970 and 1973 titles or witnessed the three losses in the ’50s and two in the ’90s, they always thought about how to get to the big game and finally had to think about the team closing it for the first time. 

They were down double figures in their fifth-straight first quarter, and were down 10 points again with eight minutes left in Game 5. They also mounted the greatest Finals recovery ever three nights earlier (29 points), and laid a solid case for being one of the greatest comeback teams in NBA history. Keep in mind that they won 13 straight playoff games after going down 2-1 to the Atlanta Hawks in round one. 

A lot had to happen to finally raise that trophy. They made Jalen Brunson their leader, traded RJ Barrett for OG Anunoby, moved five first-round picks for Mikal Bridges, swapped Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Karl-Anthony Towns and fired Tom Thibodeau for Mike Brown. Add these Knicks to the list of fortune favoring the bold.

This title is also rare because Brunson joins Stephen Curry and Isiah Thomas on the exclusive list of short guards who led their team to one. Every other small guard did it as the second or third option. 

As many Knicks fans recall, the thrice champion Las Vegas Aces head coach, Becky Hammon, said a few years ago on ESPN that Brunson could not be that guy because of his size, despite being built like a running back. He proved her wrong, too. Since the NBA is a copycat league in some ways, time will tell how many how many execs take more gambles on shorter, dynamic scorers, trying to find the next Brunson. Good luck to them because he’s the top 0.1 percent of small guards.

On top of that, one also wonders what Jimmy Butler thinks about the two guys he threw under the bus having championship jewelry and him not. He was a bad teammate to Towns and Andrew Wiggins when they were youngsters on the Minnesota Timberwolves, and he didn’t need to be. It wasn’t their time yet, and both have now debunked the tainted reputation he left them on the way out.

The Knicks won 53 regular-season games, and they defeated the San Antonio Spurs, the second West seed with 62 wins. Throughout the playoffs, the Knicks had the top defense, were the best rebounding team and were more accurate than 15 others.

New York is the center of the basketball universe once more. It’s well deserved.