Are the Knicks ready for what's next? New York's repeat bid begins with nowhere to hide in wide-open NBA

NEW YORK — Everywhere you looked, it seemed, there they were.

Fresh off the run of a lifetime — a 16-3 sprint through the postseason, headlined by some of the most remarkable blowouts and comebacks in NBA playoff history, capped off by an all-time individual performance in the NBA Finals to clinch the franchise’s first NBA championship in 53 years — the New York Knicks spent their summers basking in the afterglow, enjoying the fruits of their labors.

Jalen Brunson heard MVP chants at City Hall. Karl-Anthony Towns heard “Knicks in five!” during a honeymoon trip to the Serengeti. Mike Brown heard a standing ovation when he and his wife walked into the Polo Bar.

Everywhere the head coach turned, another well-wisher. More congratulations. Another hand to shake.

“I had nowhere to hide,” Brown said at the Knicks’ media day session last month.

On Tuesday night, the Knicks will experience one final celebration of what they accomplished in June. They’ll watch a banner raised to the rafters of Madison Square Garden. They’ll receive championship rings laden with enough ice to turn autumn into winter. They’ll revel in it all one more time, feeling the adulation of the New York faithful wash over them …

… and then look down from the rafters and see Joel Embiid, LeBron James, Tyrese Maxey, Jaylen Brown, VJ Edgecombe and the rest of the Philadelphia 76ers, all champing at the bit for the opportunity to knock the newly anointed kings right off the top of the mountain.

“I mean, obviously, you look at it on paper, and that’s a hell of a group,” Knicks guard Landry Shamet said at Monday’s practice ahead of Tuesday’s season opener. “We know that, and I think that’s why a lot of our focus has got to be on that, and the ring and the celebration has kind of gotta be secondary. Because our job is our job, and it is 0-0, and I don’t think any of us are satisfied with going home with just this championship. We’ve got things we’re still striving toward.”

You’ve surely heard it by now. No NBA champion has repeated since the 2017 and 2018 Golden State Warriors. The last Eastern Conference champion to return to the Finals the following year? The LeBron-led Cleveland Cavaliers that did battle with those Dubs.

Such is life in Adam Silver’s Parity of Opportunity Era, a moment in NBA history in which it seems champions are built to be broken. We can’t pin this entirely on the advent of aprons, though; the head that wears the crown has always been heavy.

After the parades and the TV appearances and the ovations and the banners and the rings, there’s one more reward awaiting a champion: the proverbial bullseye on your back. You survived the 100-game marathon to reach the top of the mountain and hoist the trophy? Congratulations. All your hard work has earned you is … more hard work. Harder work. Every opponent’s best shot, every single night.

“To repeat is gonna take an even higher sense of discipline and execution, and we’re gonna have to even be better than what we showed in the playoffs,” Towns said. “So, all of us are aware that we’re gonna have to bring a whole other level to the table if we expect to have a chance to repeat.”

Jalen Brunson and the Knicks will enjoy Ring Night, but their focus is on what lies ahead. (Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

Coming off their fever-dream postseason, the Knicks awake in a conference that has risen to meet them. After taking on the new-look Sixers on ring night, the Knicks head to Boston to play a Celtics team featuring a healthy Jayson Tatum, new arrival Paul George and old pal Mitchell Robinson. Then, it’s back to Manhattan for a visit from the Orlando Magic, led by new head coach Sean Sweeney, who just four months ago was devising schemes to try to stifle New York as the defensive coordinator in San Antonio.

Two nights later, the Pistons come to MSG, eager to pick up where they left off last season, when they won all three of their regular-season meetings with the Knicks — by a total of 84 points. In early November, they’ll have a pair of meetings with the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom they swept in the Eastern Conference finals, and who bring back a core of four All-Stars — Donovan Mitchell, James Harden, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen — while adding a plug-and-play big wing in Peyton Watson.

They’ll renew unpleasantries with the Indiana Pacers, the last team to beat the Knicks in a playoff series, who are eager to get back up to speed now that Tyrese Haliburton is back and in full form. They’ll face off with the Toronto Raptors, who added All-NBA game-breaker Kawhi Leonard to their playoff core. They’ll welcome the Miami Heat, who dealt for former MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Nowhere to run to, baby; nowhere to hide.

“The first couple of weeks or whatever of the season is going to show us who we are and where we are,” Brunson said.

On the bright side, the Knicks should enter this season with a pretty good handle on who they can be and where they can go.

The loss of reserve center Robinson, who went to rival Boston in free agency after Knicks owner James L. Dolan made it clear he would not allow his front office to spend past the second apron line to fully run back the title rotation, figures to hurt, even if veteran replacement Andre Drummond can carry his strong preseason form into the games that count. So, too, could the overarching unpleasantness surrounding stalled talks on contract extensions for Towns, Hart and reserve guard Miles “Deuce” McBride — though all parties involved insist they’re entering the season focused on competing, producing and repeating rather than on the ins and outs of their negotiation frustrations.

Even without Robinson, though, nine of New York’s 10 most frequently used players from the title team return, accounting for more than 92% of their postseason minutes — a considerable level of continuity, cohesion and shared experience from which to draw as the group starts the climb anew.

“I think what’s most important is that, I mean, last year we took everything one day at a time,” Brunson said. “We were talking about — obviously, the topic was getting back to the conference finals [where they’d been eliminated by the Pacers in 2025] and trying to advance. And I think for us now, the way we approached it last year was to take it one day at a time, every single day. Obviously, we know what it takes, but just going into this with the same mindset for this journey. Even though it’s a new journey, it’s a different journey. The approach has to be the same, if not better.”

Throughout training camp and the preseason, Brown has preached that message, emphasizing that the only way for the Knicks to hope to achieve the same results they did last season is to maintain the same zealous adherence to the step-by-step, brick-by-brick approach that produced them — to the collective standard of sacrifice, connectivity, competition and shared belief that brought them to the promised land.

“We can’t afford any slippage in our process,” Brown said. “We’re going to have our ups and downs. We have to understand that the media scrutiny and the public scrutiny is going to come. It is what it is, and there’s going to be a lot of comparisons, but we have no control over that. The only thing we can control is: what’s our daily habits? Where is our focus and our energy going every day?”

It looked like it might take some time to re-establish those habits, that focus and that energy. Brown didn’t ask his players to get back into the Knicks training facility until after Labor Day, giving them some extra time to decompress after the championship run and subsequent celebration. The early preseason returns didn’t look particularly promising, with the Knicks dropping their first four games, and Brown pointedly calling out their lack of competitive toughness in the preseason opener against Philly.

“What bothers me is our lack of physicality throughout the ball game, and that’s the whole roster up and down,” Brown told reporters. “We weren’t great on the ball physically and we weren’t great with our defensive positioning physically. […] I can’t help with the physicality. That they’ve gotta find individually, which will then turn into collectively, and that’s how you find minutes. That’s how you make the team.”

Which, as Brown made clear, was not a guarantee for everybody past New York’s high-priced, big-name title core.

“I specifically went down the line talking about Jalen, Mikal [Bridges], OG [Anunoby], KAT and Josh [Hart],” Brown told reporters during the preseason. “I said, ‘Those five, they gonna play. If they do something wrong, I’m gonna get on them and we’re gonna figure it out, but they still gonna play.’ I said, ‘Everybody else in this gym, you fighting. You fighting either to make the team or you fighting for minutes.’

“I said, ‘Look around. This is not just because we won last year. This has nothing to do with last year’s team. Those five guys are the same. But everybody — this is a new year, a new team. We gotta look forward. Every day, it’s a competition.'”

With that competitive expectation clearly communicated and established, and with so much talent staring at them up and down the Eastern Conference standings, the Knicks enter the new season with no illusions about being able to rest on their laurels.

“It can be human nature to relax a little bit […] anybody that works in the building, as a player, as a coach, as a fan, you can relax after having a lot of success,” Bridges told reporters during the preseason. “It’s difficult to do something great and continue to try to get better. That’s our goal.”

“There’s no relaxation whatsoever,” Brunson told reporters at Knicks practice on Monday. “None. I think every year, it’s a new year to kind of attack something. When people say we’re ‘defending the title,’ I mean, that’s one way to look at it. But it’s something we won, we’ve put it in our past, and now we’re just trying to attack another.”

That’s the mentality the Knicks appear to be bringing into the new campaign: looking to attack, rather than defend. And if a preseason-finale dress-rehearsal win over the Raptors — one in which Brunson led five Knicks in double-figures, Towns flirted with a triple-double, and New York had 35 assists on 43 made field goals — is any indication, Brown’s club might be ready to resume its pursuit.

“Everyone loves to compete, so as the season goes on, yeah, we’ll be hunted,” Anunoby said. “But we’re going to be hunting other teams, as well.”

The hunt begins Tuesday: for proper execution on offense and the right attention to detail on defense; for the willingness to be honest with and accountable to one another; for the relentless commitment to Brown’s standard; for a new beginning, a new challenge, a new journey.

“I would say most of us, if not all of us, have turned the page already,” Brunson said Monday. “I think tomorrow is just something we can reflect on and understand what we did. But for the most part, we’ve all turned the page.”

The banner rises. The rings get tucked away. The ball goes up, and everybody’s once again staring at a blank page. How are the Knicks going to fill it?

“At the end of the day,” Hart said, “we write our own history.”