There's no easy fix for a Knicks team in a tailspin
Head coach Mike Brown of the New York Knicks looks onb against the Dallas Mavericks at Madison Square Garden on Monday, Jan. 19, 2026 in New York City. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The blame is the easy part.
It’s the front office that decided to make changes to a team on the rise, through trades, shipping out of carefully-curated assets, firing the coach that got them to the brink of a title. It’s the coach, Mike Brown, who came and brought a new system to a roster that was built for the old game plan. And it’s the roster, the players who made it so far last season, who won the NBA Cup just a month ago, and suddenly have seemed as if they don’t want to be on the floor together.
That’s the easy part. Take your pick, make a target and start taking shots.
But the fix, that’s the hard part.
Walk around the locker room after Monday night’s embarrassing loss to an injury-riddled Dallas Mavericks squad at Madison Square Garden and it was, to a man, fingers pointing only at themselves.
“I think we all need to do some soul searching, some looking in the mirror and figuring out what we’re going to do individually, what we’re going to do as a team, what our identity is,” Josh Hart said. “Because right now, we’re playing embarrassing basketball.”
“We didn’t show up,” Jalen Brunson said. “Yeah, there’s been a lot of things to pinpoint. But as a team we know what we have to do. Either we do it, we care enough to do it, or we don’t.”
The saying goes that admitting you have a problem is the first step and the Knicks are more than willing to admit it now. But fixing it is a much more difficult task. Making a coaching change would be an admission that the move to dismiss Thibodeau was the wrong one. On a day when much of the New York media attended the introduction of John Harbaugh as the newest Giants coach it’s worth thinking, if you knew he’d lead them to four playoff appearances in the next four years, get to the second round twice and one step from the Bowl in Year 5, you’d think that all the hoopla today was well-deserved. Thibodeau did that and got fired for it.
And while a trade, shaking up a room that seems oddly ill-fitting of late, might be the easiest move, making a major trade would, like the coaching change, prove the front office wrong in the decisions made in the summer of 2024 when they went all-in for Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns.
But while the Knicks may listen in, it’s hard to imagine any potential deal not resulting in a step back in talent. Are the Knicks listening? Yes. Shopping Guerschon Yabusele and Pacome Dadiet? Yes. But looking to cast off Towns for fifty cents on the dollar? Not a chance.
So the Knicks could stand pat, look in the mirror and remember that this group went to the Eastern Conference finals last season and won the Cup just a month ago. So why can’t they do it now? Why is this group that ranked fifth in offensive rating and 14th in defensive rating last season now bottom five in both categories in January?
“I think every year is new,” Hart said after Tuesday’s practice. “And I think every year you have to start from ground zero and you have to continue to build. Obviously, last year was a different team altogether.
" It was the same people but it was a different team, different coach, different identity, those kinds of things. Now, we have a new system, we have to incorporate that. We have to incorporate personnel; we have to do those kinds of things. It’s never going to be just black and white. …
“We’re not bad. I think we’ve shown this year we’re not bad. Do I think this is just a little stretch? No, when you get to 10, 11, 12-plus games, it’s not a stretch. It means you're trending in the wrong direction. The thing that we have going for us right now is that it’s game 42 or 43. There’s a lot of room for growth. Like I said, it starts with everybody individually, how they can pick it up, how they can do that individually and help the team. We’re not a bad team by any means. But we’re falling into bad habits and we got to fix that.”
The answer is in the mirror. Maybe Brown, who has been flexible in prior stops, should just throw out the plans and put this roster in schemes they were in a year ago. Get Towns the ball and make him comfortable. Maybe the players should take accountability and if Thibodeau pushed them harder, they’re veterans and should push themselves.
Last season’s Knicks team was a culmination of five seasons of Thibodeau. As bad as it looks right now, as much panic is setting in, the Knicks need to remember who they were. The fix starts Wednesday night with a cold, hard look in the mirror.
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.
