This Knicks bench is not like the old.
The Knicks have finally won a championship — the Emirates NBA Cup championship — and while it’s not the real thing, while no banner will rise to the rafters at Madison Square Garden, it serves as early validation of everything New York’s front office set out to do last summer.
This was an offseason designed to raise the franchise’s ceiling into true title-contending territory. One of its most important swings came not at the top of the roster, but behind it.
Beyond replacing Tom Thibodeau with Mike Brown, Leon Rose and his staff targeted a long-standing weakness: depth. Not depth for depth’s sake, but playable, trustworthy depth capable of surviving — and swinging — high-leverage minutes behind one of the most stacked starting fives in basketball.
That’s what made the Knicks’ NBA Cup run so compelling. And it’s why a date with the Indiana Pacers immediately after their December title feels like a necessary return to reality. It was this very Pacers team that forced the Knicks’ hand — the catalyst for the changes now paying dividends through the first third of the season.
Indiana rode an 11-man rotation all the way to Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. Indiana eliminated the Knicks in back-to-back playoff runs, first in the second round, then in last year’s Eastern Conference Finals. Those losses reshaped the Knicks’ identity. New York didn’t just need more bodies — it needed a coach willing to trust them, deploy them, and empower them when it mattered.
And it needed a coach willing to modernize the Knicks’ philosophies on both ends of the floor. Brown addressed New York’s dire need for speed. The Pacers ran the Knicks off the floor in both series. Now, New York is running teams out of Madison Square Garden.
Back-to-back playoff losses to the Pacers indirectly built these Knicks. They’ve since adopted what Indiana did best. They’ve upped the physicality. They sprint off stops. They fire threes in volume. And when the offense stalls, they have two All-Stars capable of rescuing any possession.
The Knicks didn’t just study the Pacers’ blueprint. They improved it. The difference is top-end talent. The starting five was never the issue in New York. The support system around it, and the willingness to use it, is what’s changed everything at MSG.
In truth, the Knicks had little business winning the NBA Cup. They did it without two of their best perimeter defenders: Miles McBride, sidelined with an ankle injury, and Landry Shamet, expected to miss at least a month with a shoulder sprain. That left New York thin on the wing and in the backcourt — at least by old standards.
Thin, now, is relative.
Tyler Kolek has emerged as a legitimate NBA point guard. He’s improved defensively year over year and stepped directly into McBride’s role when the moment demanded it. In Tuesday’s championship game, Kolek delivered the best performance of his young career: 14 points, five rebounds, five assists, and relentless poise in 20 pressure-packed minutes.
Jordan Clarkson did exactly what he was brought in to do: score, fast. His 15 points in 27 minutes stabilized the Knicks’ second unit, and he’s defended with more bite than his reputation as a pure scorer ever suggested.
And Brown’s decision to bring Mitchell Robinson off the bench — replacing him in the starting lineup with Josh Hart — has reshaped the rotation entirely. The Knicks are 10-1 since the switch, even if the final regular season schedule won’t include the Cup victory. Robinson has become a devastating change of pace, hauling in 10 offensive rebounds in just 18 minutes against the Spurs in the NBA Cup Final. He continues to lead all qualifying players in offensive rebounds per 36 minutes (9.3).
Now, the shoe is on the other foot. Legend has it, it ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun. The Pacers are the team devastated by injury with Tyrese Haliburton out nursing an Achilles injury. And the Knicks are the team in position to wear the Pacers into the ground on Thursday, to give them a taste of the very medicine that helped New York clear the longstanding hurdles on its road to compete for the real NBA title.
