Knicks’ comeback Game 1 win over Cavaliers may just prove they’re a team of destiny
Humor me for a moment, I’m about to get romantic about basketball. The best teams in the NBA typically operate on two parallel tracks. There’s the obvious, external quest for a championship, which boils down to beating the team in front of you. And then there is also the quieter, internal quest of a team finding the best in itself. It’s about figuring out exactly how he should play and who should occupy what roles before ultimately achieving a kind of harmony that’s very rare in basketball.
Not all champions succeed. It is possible to earn your way to the title through skill. Not every contender who achieves this becomes champion. Last season, the Pacers come to mind as one of the all-time “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” teams in league history. When you get both, you reach a kind of basketball Nirvana. Think of the 2014 San Antonio Spurs and their hurricane of ball movement or the 2011 Dallas Mavericks digging deep enough to outplay the Miami Heat superteam. These teams are not just champions. They are revered years after their passing, achieving a level of basketball immortality reserved for the most beloved teams in history.
We have a long way to go. Seven wins to be exact, four of which came against a heavily favored Western Conference champion. But with each passing game, it starts to feel more and more like the New York Knicks can be that kind of team. That they found themselves in the crucible of the playoffs and became the 2026 team of destiny.
The ball started rolling after Game 3 of New York’s first round against Atlanta. Karl-Anthony Towns has spent the year expressing frustration with his role. Everything came together in Game 4. Mike Brown began using him effectively as a scoring center, functioning as a passing hub behind the arc, and the entire offense soared. With Towns playing the best defense of his career and the entire team behind him, New York won its next seven games by a combined 185 points. These are the Spurs games from 2014, although, admittedly, against much lesser opponents. They were the ones who gave you the impression that the Knicks played a different sport than their opponent.
This wasn’t the first game of the Eastern Conference Finals. The Knicks, after a nine-day break longer than the 2026 All-Star break, remained steady for three and a half quarters. They trailed by 22 points with about seven minutes remaining on the clock. But the Knicks never gave up.
They knew that wasn’t the case, because a year ago they were on the other side of a game very similar to this one. They led the Pacers by 14 with 2:51 left in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of last year’s Eastern Conference finals. We know how this match went. An avalanche from Aaron Nesmith 3s. A Lazy Knicks offense leading to turnovers and nasty misses. Missed free throws. Tyrese Haliburton’s miraculous rebound over the backboard at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. One of the ugliest chokes in franchise history.
Although the series would last five more games, this game marked the death of the old Knicks, the defeat that cost Tom Thibodeau his job. He built the culture that got them there, but couldn’t adapt enough to get them over the finish line. The adjustment he refused to make was the one that turned this game around for the Knicks.
Josh Hart offered to come off the bench before Game 6 of New York’s second-round series against Boston a season ago. Thibodeau declined the offer despite mountains of intermittent data suggesting he should make the switch. New York lost Games 1 and 2 to Indiana largely because of minutes lost by its starters. He replaced Hart in the third game, but for backup center Mitchell Robinson. Even though he had an all-time shooting center in Towns, Thibodeau refused to rely on five-out lineups whose numbers screamed they would be unstoppable.
Cleveland didn’t guard Hart all night. He made just one of his five 3-point attempts. With 9:59 left in the fourth quarter, he was substituted for the final time. With 7:52 left in the fourth quarter, Brown finally pulled the trigger on an adjustment fans had been waiting for two years: all four starters plus a sharpshooter (in this case, Landry Shamet). From there, the Knicks outscored the Cavaliers 44-11.
The strategy was not only simple but familiar. For much of the last few years, the Knicks have too easily turned to Jalen Brunson-ball, allowing him to monopolize the offense at the expense of everyone else. The rest of the team lost their rhythm. It seeped into their defense. Everyone seemed unhappy.
The Knicks didn’t settle anything at the end of Game 1 Tuesday night. The team knew the mission and executed it eagerly: play hard on defense, space the floor on offense and watch Brunson commit NBA-sanctioned atrocities on James Harden during one of the most relentless switch-hunting periods in NBA history. Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson certainly helped by waiting until the lead was down to five to call a timeout and make an adjustment, but at that point the building was shaking. The adrenaline was flowing. Destiny had officially intervened.
At this point, Cleveland finally began to force the ball out of Brunson’s hands. His teammates were ready. A 3-point basket by Evan Mobley pushed Cleveland’s lead back to eight, but topped it off with two 3s of his own. And then, for the tie with 45 seconds remaining, Shamet got his Haliburton moment with one of the most favorable rebounds in Madison Square Garden history.
If that doesn’t sound like destiny, it sure will. Harden and Brunson exchanged two-point baskets. Cleveland had a chance to win it with the final possession. Sam Merrill, one of the best shooters in the NBA, shot for the victory. Listen carefully to the audio of the shot. It came so close to going in that Mike Breen literally started saying the word “bang” before it was over, obviously surprising the NBA’s most decorated broadcaster as much as the rest of us.
You can call the Knicks a team of mercenaries. Hey, champions who haven’t drafted a single starter are rare indeed. We could call this game of chance or a laughable exploitation of a single mismatch that the opposing coach inexplicably refused to resolve. You could think of this whole run in New York as a junior college championship while the big guys compete out West.
But there’s something bigger going on here than just a victory, or even a series of blowouts. This is a group of players that has bordered on dysfunction for most of their two years together, finding something, some form of cohesion and sense of team, that they simply didn’t have a year ago. Something this organization has achieved so rarely in its 53-year championship drought.
This completely falls apart if just one player doesn’t buy in. If someone suffers a defensive breakdown because they are tired of watching Brunson dribble, the Knicks lose. If Hart’s ego can’t handle being benched, the Knicks will likely lose. If Bridges lets himself be weighed down by the “they traded five first-round picks for you” criticism, the Knicks lose. If OG Anunoby can’t shake off his hamstring injury, the Knicks lose. If Towns doesn’t accept his new role and the fewer shots that come with it, the Knicks lose. And if Brown hadn’t fostered an environment that not only maximized the whole, but allowed each of the individual parts to fully gel on the bigger stage, the Knicks would almost certainly lose.
I don’t know if the Knicks will win the championship. They will be less talented than whoever wins the Western Conference, and talent very often wins championships. This is not always the case. The Pacers were less talented than the Thunder and might have beaten them anyway if Haliburton’s Achilles tendon hadn’t been torn. The Knicks have fared well with the Spurs this season, beating them twice. As of this writing, San Antonio leads 1-0 in the Western Conference Finals, and the Knicks would certainly benefit from a long, physical series between the top two teams in the regular season. But ultimately the championship depends on external factors. The Knicks can’t control who they play or how good they are.
But internally, they understood it. They found the best versions of themselves, the team they always needed to give themselves a chance at the championship. If you believe in destiny or basketball gods or something, you probably think they’ll be rewarded for this. They were certainly present in the first game. How can you not be romantic about basketball?
