We start the New Year pretty much where we started the new season with the Knicks, which means with this one great, big basketball question:
Can they be great?
As we approach the end of the first semester with them — and with a very nice marker game waiting for them in Detroit on Monday night when they face the Pistons for the first time this season — we have seen so much good from the Knicks, we really have. We have seen a much deeper and much younger team, we have seen the way they fit together and how — most nights — their most important guys complement each other around Jalen Brunson playing hero ball. And we’ve seen Mike Brown coaching in the big city as if he’s been on this stage for years.
We have also seen an Eastern Conference, with the notable exception of the Pistons, that has generally been less than we thought it would be, at least until the Cavaliers figure things out, if they actually can figure things out. And yet the conference has been interesting, too, with the Jayson Tatum-less Celtics hanging with the Knicks the way they have and sitting there at No. 3.
The Knicks, if they really are going to be great, absolutely need to be good enough to win the East. That means catch the Pistons eventually and pass them and not be caught by Jaylen Brown and the Celtics. They also need to prove, maybe as early as this month, that they can be more than the basketball version of the Yankees the way they were last season: A team that beats up on inferior opposition but then falls down against the big boys the way the Knicks ended up getting slapped by the Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals.
We can talk forever about how much changed when Tyrese Haliburton’s shot bounced toward the rafters before finally dropping through the basket at the end of Game 1. It doesn’t change the fact that the Pacers were a better team than the Knicks by then, the way they had been since Jan. 1, 2025. Not by a lot. Just enough. The Knicks weren’t good enough the way the Yankees never quite are.
Put it this way, all this time before we get anywhere near the postseason: We need to see across the next few if the Knicks can consistently beat serious teams. In that way, maybe we’ll get a sense of just how seriously we can take them, more seriously than we ever took the Yankees even when they were getting to 94 wins.
There is also still a world of time for the Knicks to look like more than what they are right now, a middle-of-the-pack defensive team, trying to work around the fact that their two best and most visible players — Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns — still don’t guard nearly enough at two of the most important positions on the floor. OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges and even Josh Hart, let’s face it, can only do so much to cover for them.
In the last two weeks alone, even as the Knicks had gotten themselves to a record of 23-10 through Wednesday night’s loss to the Spurs, they gave up 125 points in beating the Heat, 124 in beating the Cavs on Christmas Day, 125 in beating the Hawks last Saturday, 125 as they were doing the same to the Pelicans. Then they got rung up for 134 by the Spurs as they rang in the New Year, even after Victor Wembanyama left the game. By the way? By then, Wembanyama had scored 31 points in 24 minutes. This was on the same night when Julian Champagnie, a St. John’s kid, torched Brown’s team for 36 points, doing what he wanted and going where he wanted all game long.
The Knicks — who had just beaten the Spurs in Vegas to win the Adam Silver Cup — should have taken the game once Wembanyama sat down with a knee. But this time Brunson missed the kinds of shots he so often makes and the Knicks got clipped at the end of what would have been a serious win against a serious team for them, even with Wembanyama sitting out the last 10 minutes and change.
Here are some of the things Coach Brown had to say about all of that:
“They just outworked us in a lot of different ways,” Brown said. “[Spurs coach Mitch Johnson] kicked my ass, the rest of the team kicked our ass, we all got our ass kicked today so you got to give San Antonio a ton of credit.”
There was also this:
“I was a little disappointed in our guys because it was almost like we didn’t respect [Champagnie]. We didn’t pick him up in transition… We know he’s a hot player and that’s what he does, but he just kept getting look after look after look after look after look that were wide open. You give him a lot of credit because he knocked the shots down, but I was really, really disappointed in the way we defended him.”
Brown’s team didn’t do much defending on De’Aaron Fox, either, when Champagnie wasn’t making another 3-pointer. Just like that, down the stretch, what could have been a really nice statement win by the Knicks turned into one for a young Spurs team that doesn’t seem to be afraid of the Thunder or anybody else. So this time the Knicks didn’t steal a close one. Maybe there can be a better statement in Detroit on Monday night against the team that has been the best in the conference so far.
The Knicks are all we have right now. And have been so much fun to watch. And really, really good. But great? There’s shorthand for that, with so much of the long season still to be played:
TBD.
