Knicks making James Dolan look prescient; they're a win from NBA Finals
CLEVELAND — It is rare that Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan speaks about the Knicks, but he appeared on WFAN in January and set a high bar for the franchise, offering up a belief that “we want to get to the Finals, and we should win the Finals. This is sports and anything can happen. But getting to the Finals we absolutely got to do. Winning the Finals, we should win.”
With this pressure placed squarely on their shoulders, the Knicks were beaten by 31 points that night by the Detroit Pistons, an awkward misstep as they attempted to live up to the burden of their owner’s expectations.
Four months later, the Knicks took the court in Cleveland on Monday night with the opportunity to meet the moment, to live up to Dolan’s lofty standard.
On the verge of reaching the NBA Finals with a 3-0 lead over the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals and boasting 10 consecutive postseason wins, they were reminded Monday of the challenge and what it meant back then with the weight pushing down on them.
“We better get to the Finals or we’re going to get traded,” Josh Hart joked of the thoughts at that time before adding, “Not pressure, because I think that’s the goal that we all kind of have. Obviously, it hits a little bit different when the big dog says it. But that’s the goal that each and every one of us has. And we’re our own biggest critics, so this kind of adds a little bit more fuel to that internal fire of the hunger to get there.”
Maybe they didn’t need to hear it said it out loud because the baseline for success already had been set six months earlier. Just days after losing to Indiana in the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals, the Knicks fired coach Tom Thibodeau, the man who had led the team from years of dysfunction to contention.
If that wasn’t good enough, anything less certainly would be a failure for the team, which returned every key piece of the roster under new coach Mike Brown.
“I mean, we all had that aspiration regardless,” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “So we didn’t really need to hear that because we all wanted that moment. We all wanted to see that, especially after last year being in the Eastern Conference Finals and coming up short. We understand that we’ve got to take that next step. So what he’s talking about is also how we all felt. We wanted to go out there and we wanted to take that next step. Get past the Eastern Conference Finals.
“It was historical last year. The city went crazy and it was awesome to see the city so alive, but there’s new standards now. There’s new expectations and we’ve raised the expectations, so we knew what we came into this season to do and what we want to accomplish and we’ve just got to keep our head down and continue to focus on the goal at hand.”
The Knicks have managed to do that, and that night in Detroit seems far removed.
That loss was part of a 2-9 stretch that seemed to derail the hopes as much as any words from the top of the organization. But after overcoming obstacles throughout the season and adapting to the new coach and new systems, the Knicks have a list of accomplishments that already seems to have measured up to last season.
The Knicks’ 53 wins surpassed last season’s 51. They won the NBA Cup championship by beating the San Antonio Spurs, one of the two teams on the other side of the bracket trying to reach the NBA Finals. Since a minor bump in the form of back-to-back one-point losses in the opening round, they have dominated the opposition, winning the 10 straight games by an average of 22.5 points.
“The regular season is full of peaks and valleys and ebbs and flows,” Towns said. “That’s how a regular season goes. And you kind of expect a run like that to happen at a certain part of the season. it was just the most [inopportune] time, especially when things weren’t looking great, and New York fans, rightfully so, are not the most patient. So we understood that.
“Tough stretch for us, but it also helped us grow and be more unified and understand that if we continue to believe in each other, we continue to lean on each other, we can get out of any situation regardless of it’s a 2-9 run in the season or it’s a [22]-point deficit in Game 1. As long as we continue to believe in the goal and continue to lean on each other, we’ll be fine.”
While they constantly preach that a closeout game is the toughest game you’ll play, the Knicks beat Atlanta by 51 points in the first round, then destroyed Philadelphia by 30 to finish off a sweep in the conference semifinals. And as they spoke Monday morning, they continued to stress the desperation that they have played with through the postseason no matter how far ahead they were.
“I mean, just continuing to let everyone know the expectation, you know?” Towns said. “The desperation and the mentality that needs to be present for all 48 minutes. Like I’ve always said, this is the toughest game of the year. The one that ends someone’s season is the toughest game. So you’ve got to go in there understanding that it’s going to be two times harder than the game before, and before that, and everything, so you’ve got to meet the moment.”
Still, the Knicks have seemed to be the team playing with that desperation, maybe fueled by expectations and maybe by experience. Whatever it is, they have found themselves peaking at the most opportune time after the roller-coaster moments of the season, far from the failures of last season and from the cold night in January.
“I don’t want to consider us peaking at this moment,” Jalen Brunson said. “I still think we have a lot of work to do. Us as a team, I’ve said this all year, we just want to get better every single day. That includes the times that we’re in the playoffs because there’s still time to learn, still time to get better.
“That’s how I’ve always thought about it. I haven’t really had the time to really kind of wonder where we are as a team. All I focus on is how can we get better from the day before.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
