The Reason the Knicks are World Champions

 When the New York Knicks traded for Karl-Anthony Towns right before the 2024 training camp; the instant reaction was heavily cautious. Towns has been largely labeled as a player with a horrible contract and someone who couldn’t get out of his own way. “Can Towns swallow that ego come into this situation…  and just surrender that [ego] for the good of the team? He hasn’t done that yet for Minnesota.” Those words were uttered by me on my own podcast right after the trade was announced. I was warning Knicks fans that they would regret the day they traded for Karl-Anthony Towns. Boy was I wrong.

The trade for Towns felt like a true fork in the road moment in real time. It was a surprise to everyone given the state of both teams. The Knicks had gotten eliminated by the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Semifinals and were looking to move past the second-round playoff wall they had run into. Mitchell Robinson wasn’t going to be ready for the start of the 2024 season because of ankle surgery. The Knicks were in dire need of a center heading into a pressure packed season so they traded their second-best player in Julius Randle and sixth man Donte DiVincenzo for what Leon Rose and company thought would be the right solution to the Knicks championship drought.

In Minnesota they were trading their second-best player for some help around Anthony Edwards on a team that had made back-to-back Western Conference Finals and seemed on the brink of having a legit shot at a championship.

What the Knicks got in Towns’ first season in New York was KAT’s best statistical season of his career—but that only resulted in one more win in the regular season on the court than the 2023-24 Knicks. In the playoffs however the Knicks went up on the postseason. They made the Eastern Conference Finals. But they lost to the Indiana Pacers, again.

New York, instead of overreacting and changing the roster, perhaps moving on from Towns, and take another home run swing to help Jalen Brunson, they fired Tom Thibodeau. A controversial move that was deemed unfair because of how far Thibodeau dragged the Knicks out of the mud and into legitimacy. Enter Mike Brown.

The beginning of the Mike Brown tenure with the Knicks wasn’t rosy for Karl-Anthony Towns. KAT was on the injury report for the first few games with a quad issue and also an issue of not knowing how he fit into what Brown was trying to do with the philosophy of the team. It seemed like the 2025-26 was going to go like most of the seasons in Towns’ career. A roller-coaster of emotions and great but aggravating play from the 11-year center and a team that never realized its potential.

“I wanna make sure that the biggest goal and the main goal here is to win. It don’t matter who gets the credit or whatever.” Those were comments made by Towns to the “Inside the NBA” crew following a 108-106 win against the Houston Rockets in The Garden on February 21st. In that game KAT was the leading scorer for the Knicks with 25 points and grabbed a team high seven rebounds. He was +23 in 34 minutes. That win was on the heels of an embarrassing loss to the Detroit Pistons on the MSG court two days prior. At this moment in time the Knicks were starting to get questioned if they had what it takes to get to the next level to be able to be championship contenders. Towns got slammed both on “Inside the NBA” and in the New York media for not being more of an alpha dog when it looked like his team needed him to be. Something changed within Towns after that interview.

That Saturday night in February was game 53 of the season. Following that game Towns had 11 20-point double-doubles over the last 29 games. However, for the remainder of the Knicks 2025-26 regular season the questions about the Knicks weren’t answered. Towns looked like he was succeeding in this offense but couldn’t gel completely with the rest of the team. Then the playoffs happened…

The New York Knicks are now NBA Champions for the first time since 1973. When the documentary, championship DVD (if those are still made), or book gets written one of the main focuses of it will be the team meeting that saw Towns emerge as the focal point of the offense. That meeting was after Game 3 of the first round of the playoffs against the Atlanta Hawks. A game in which the Knicks lost on a fumbled last possession, 109-108, and fell behind Atlanta 2-1 in the series. What happened next was the offense being run through Towns, opening up an offensive attack that buoyed one of the most historic playoff stretches in the history of the NBA.

New York rattled off 13 straight wins. They won those games by the biggest margin in NBA history. Karl-Anthony Towns averaged 16 points, six assists, and 10 rebounds. But it goes beyond that. The Knicks collectively always made the right play on both ends of the floor. The right pass, the right cut, the correct defensive rotation or block out for a rebound. The Knicks did everything damn near perfectly. During the second-longest winning streak in postseason history this squad held their opponents under 100 points in eight of the 13 wins. It was basketball porn akin to the 2017 Golden State Warriors mixed with the 1996 Chicago Bulls. During the Warriors historic 15-game winning streak they held their opponents under 100 points in five of those games. Those ’96 Bulls held their opponent under 100 points in all but three games and under 85 points in eight of their 16 playoff wins.  

Whatever came out of that meeting was a team that sacrificed for the betterment of winning the game. It wasn’t until the NBA Finals that the sacrifice showcased itself.

“I don’t know what it was. I just felt a calm and a peace that I don’t know had to come from the woman above. I felt really confident about today. I felt good. I felt like a kid. It was just fun out here. This is something that as a kid you always dream about. You always hope to be a NBA player let alone be in the NBA Finals and all day it was just a weird. It felt like I was a kid getting ready to go play in my Saturday AAU and Sunday AAU games…Game 1 of the NBA Finals you’re told how the pressure is going to be… it felt like a certain presence was here.” Towns said this after Game 1 of the Finals in San Antonio to the “Inside in the NBA” crew, again, following going toe-to-toe with the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year and alien Victor Wembanyama.

What stands out about that quote for me is something that Bill Simmons wrote a 736-page book about. Towns was telling us he and the rest of the Knicks understood the secret of what makes a championship basketball while also telling an amazing story about his late mother spiritually guiding him along this journey. Following the Game 1 win in San Antonio this Knicks team felt like a team of destiny. Partially cosmically but also partially because they played ultimate team basketball. A big key to that was Towns whether it was being the best player on the floor, vocal leader, or co-captain to Jalen Brunson, Towns was a catalyst. He sacrificed that preserved ego. The only regret the Knicks would have right now is if they chose not to trade for Karl-Anthony Towns. Because without him, the Knicks would not be hoisting the Larry O’Brian Trophy.