How Jalen Brunson and the Knicks are building a contender in New York that’s meant to last

New York won the day that Leon Rose took over the Knicks. I don’t mean that in, like, a global sense; I mean it literally. On March 2, 2020, the orange-and-blue scored a 125-123 upset win over the Houston Rockets:

To watch those highlights is to step into an extremely specific time machine. (And, considering it’d drop you off about a week before the coronavirus became extremely real in the NBA and the U.S. at large, maybe one better avoided.) The only member of the visiting team still wearing Rockets red is Jeff Green, and he was on two different teams before returning to Houston last season. Maurice Harkless, Wayne Ellington, Frank Ntilikina and Elfrid Payton all played at least 19 minutes for New York; they’re all out of the league now. (Not starting center Taj Gibson, though! He’s still around.) The Knicks’ leading scorer in that win was RJ Barrett — the No. 3 pick in the 2019 NBA Draft, New York’s consolation prize for missing out on Zion Williamson and Ja Morant, and, at the time, seemingly its best shot at finding a star.

The cupboard wasn’t bare when Rose took the reins: Barrett had shown some two-way promise, center Mitchell Robinson was finishing his second season in New York, and power forward Julius Randle was wrapping up his first. But he didn’t have a ton to work with as he inherited a team with the NBA’s fifth-worst record, circling the drain of its seventh straight sub-.500 season, and on its sixth head coach in that dismal span.

Year after year, the hoped-for heroes — those who made it to Madison Square Garden, like Amar’e Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony and Phil Jackson, and those who never did, like LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving — had never actually saved the day in one fell swoop. Fast-forward four summers, though, and the Knicks are coming off their first 50-win season in a decade, with a playoff series victory in two straight postseasons — the first time they’ve done that since the springs of 1999 and 2000. They kept one of the most coveted wings on the free-agent market in OG Anunoby and added another in Mikal Bridges, building what profiles as one of…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/how-jalen-brunson-and-the-knicks-are-building-a-contender-in-new-york-thats-meant-to-last-191745579.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-07-16 19:17:45

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.