The power of expectations is that sometimes good just isn’t good enough. Perception vs. reality is a battle as old as time, and it carries a burden, fair or not.
The 2024-25 New York Knicks are victims of expectations. They’re victims of circumstance.
Another 50-plus-win regular season — which New York put a bow on by beating its cross-bridge rival Brooklyn Nets on Sunday — wasn’t supposed to be something to brush off, especially when you consider the story behind it.
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For the majority of the last 20 years, the Knicks were laughed at. Dismissed. Unserious. Four years ago, though, shortly after team president Leon Rose and head coach Tom Thibodeau took over, the franchise once again became relevant. Four winning seasons. Two trips to the second round of the NBA playoffs. Jalen Brunson’s development into a star. The Knicks brought excitement back to the Mecca.
The previous seasons culminated in all-time excitement at the start of this campaign, which many considered the most anticipated in recent history. New York basketball was back.
However, things change once the honeymoon ends. Last offseason, the Knicks traded seven first-round picks to add Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns, leaving everyone to assume the franchise was ready for the next step. Those moves brought expectations, and pessimism soon followed.
This team was supposed to be among the league’s elite, with a starting five that rivaled any squad in the NBA on paper. Instead, the Knicks went 0-10 against the league’s top three teams (the Celtics, Cavaliers and Thunder). And even when you remove those teams from the equation, the Knicks were still an underwhelming 15-13 against teams with a winning record. They were 9-20 against the league’s top-10 defenses. A month-long injury to Brunson in early March derailed things a bit, but, ultimately, the Knicks were healthier this season than they were a year ago.
Now, No. 3 seed New York goes into the postseason having lost three of its last four games, with the three defeats coming against the Cavaliers, Celtics and Pistons. All season, the Knicks made their objective clear: We want to play our best basketball by the end. The Knicks didn’t do that, and now they have to sort things out behind closed doors with a first-round matchup against Detroit — a feisty, hungry squad, similar to what New York used to be — a week away.
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“We’ve got to find what makes this team successful and work on that,” Josh Hart said after the Knicks blew a 23-point lead to the Cavaliers on Friday. “Playoff basketball is a different level. The intensity picks up. The physicality picks up. We’ve got to make sure we spend this week preparing physically but, more importantly, mentally.”
The Knicks have a week to fix things. But what?
“Everything that you guys see and we see,” Brunson said. “We have to fix that.”
Brunson’s answer was vague, surely for a reason. No need to put words in his mouth, but what I and many have seen this season is a talented group that lacks some of the intangibles that made previous versions special. This team scored with the best of them, but the defense was inconsistent. Some of that was due to personnel, and some of that was due to poor communication. The Knicks also didn’t always punch back when a team punched them first. They too often played to the level of their opponent, whether bad or good.
You don’t go 0-10 against the league’s best and finish barely better than last season’s squad without everyone deserving some blame — from the top down. The front office’s moves clearly didn’t make the team significantly better, despite having dished out significant assets in the process. The coaching staff didn’t consistently get the most out of the players. The players, at times, didn’t execute or rise to the occasion.
People always talk about the “It” factor. No one ever knows what that actually means, but they know it’s missing when they see it. As a collective, “It” was absent in New York during the regular season.
“This has to be changed quickly,” Thibodeau said when talking about his team’s play going into the postseason.
It shouldn’t get lost that the Knicks are, in fact, a good basketball team. Bad teams don’t just stumble into 51-win seasons. Brunson and Towns had All-NBA seasons. Hart is the ultimate glue guy. OG Anunoby was one of the best players in the NBA to close the regular season. Bridges is a good player. Thibodeau did get the best version out of some of his guys. The talent is there, but the gap between New York and the NBA’s best teams was significantly wider than the gap between New York and the No. 6 seed in the East. That’s where expectations come back into play.
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How good are the Knicks? That’s the question everyone has. Maybe we already know the answer. Maybe it will take the sport’s most intense period for New York to raise its play to a high level consistently. However, the fact that no one knows, even though the regular season is over, says a lot about the season the Knicks just had.
New York has the playoffs to answer all of these questions. It has the playoffs to change the narrative. It has the playoffs to fill some of that emptiness. If things go poorly at this stage, it’s very likely that changes will take place in the offseason.
This is what the Knicks and their fans have been waiting for. The playoffs. It’s to see what’s real and what’s not.
(Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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