Indulge me for a moment, I’m about to get romantic about basketball. The best teams in the NBA typically operate on two parallel tracks. There’s the obvious, externally driven pursuit of a championship, which boils down to beating the team in front of you. And then there’s also the quieter, internally driven pursuit of a team finding its best self. Of figuring out exactly how it needs to play and who needs to occupy what roles before ultimately achieving a very rare sort of basketball harmony.

Not all champions get there. It’s possible to talent your way to the title. Not all contenders that get there become champions. The Pacers last season comes to mind as one of the all-time “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” teams in league history. When you get both, you achieve a sort of basketball Nirvana. Think of the 2014 San Antonio Spurs and their ball-movement hurricane or the 2011 Dallas Mavericks digging deep enough to out-tough the Miami Heat superteam. These teams aren’t just champions. They’re revered years after they’re gone, achieving a level of basketball immortality reserved for history’s most beloved teams.

We have a long way to go. Seven victories to be exact, four of which would need to come against a heavily favored Western Conference champion. But with each passing game, it’s starting to feel more and more like the New York Knicks can be that sort of team. That they have found themselves in the crucible of the playoffs and have emerged as 2026’s team of destiny.

The ball started rolling after Game 3 of New York’s first-round series against Atlanta. Karl-Anthony Towns spent the year expressing frustration with his role. Everything clicked into place in Game 4. Mike Brown started using him effectively as a point center, operating as a passing hub behind the arc, and the whole offense soared. With Towns playing the best defense of his career and the whole team locked in beside him, New York won its next seven games by 185 combined points. These are the 2014 Spurs-esque games, though admittedly against far lesser opponents. They are the ones that made you feel as though the Knicks were playing a different sport than their opponent.

That wasn’t Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks, coming off a nine-day break that was longer than the 2026 All-Star break, were flat for three and a half quarters. They trailed by 22 points with roughly seven minutes left on the clock. But the Knicks never took their foot off the gas. 

They knew not to, because one year ago, they were on the other side of a game very much like this one. They led the Pacers by 14 with 2:51 remaining in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals. We know how that game went. An avalanche of Aaron Nesmith 3s. A Lazy Knicks offense leading to turnovers and ugly misses. Missed free throws. Tyrese Haliburton’s miraculous, above-the-backboard bounce at the buzzer to send the game to overtime. One of the ugliest chokes in franchise history.

Though the series would last five more games, that game was the death of the old Knicks, the defeat that cost Tom Thibodeau his job. He built the culture that got them there, but couldn’t adapt enough to get them across the finish line. The adjustment he refused to make is the one that swung this game for the Knicks.

Josh Hart offered to come off the bench before Game 6 of New York’s second-round series against Boston a season ago. Thibodeau declined the offer despite mountains of on-off data suggesting he should make the change. New York lost Games 1 and 2 against Indiana largely because of the minutes their starters lost. He subbed Hart out in Game 3, but for backup center Mitchell Robinson. Despite having an all-time shooting center in Towns, Thibodeau refused to lean into five-out lineups that the numbers screamed would be unstoppable.

Cleveland didn’t guard Hart all night. He made just one of his five 3-point attempts. With 9:59 remaining in the fourth quarter, he was subbed out for the last time. With 7:52 remaining in the fourth quarter, Brown finally pulled the trigger on an adjustment fans had waited two years for: the four starters plus an elite shooter (in this case, Landry Shamet). From there, the Knicks outscored the Cavaliers 44-11.

The strategy was not only simple but familiar. For much of the last several years, the Knicks have too easily reverted to Jalen Brunson-ball, allowing him to monopolize the offense at everyone else’s expense. The rest of the team lost its rhythm. It seeped into their defense. Everyone seemed unhappy.

The Knicks dealt with none of that at the end of Game 1 Tuesday night. The team knew the assignment and eagerly executed: play your butts off on defense, space the floor on offense, and watch Brunson commit NBA-sanctioned atrocities on James Harden through one of the most relentless switch-hunting stretches in NBA history. Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson certainly helped by waiting until the lead had been cut to five to call a timeout and make an adjustment, but by that point, the building was rocking. The adrenaline was flowing. Destiny had officially kicked in.

At this point, Cleveland finally started forcing the ball out of Brunson’s hands. His teammates were ready. An Evan Mobley 3-pointer pushed Cleveland’s lead back up to eight, but topped it with two 3s of his own. And then, for the tie with 45 seconds left, Shamet got his Haliburton moment with one of the most favorable bounces in Madison Square Garden history.

If that doesn’t feel like destiny, this certainly will. Harden and Brunson traded two-point baskets. Cleveland had a chance to win it with the final possession. Sam Merrill, one of the NBA’s best shooters, fired away for the win. Listen closely to the audio on the shot. It came so close to going in that Mike Breen literally started saying the word “bang” before it rimmed out, evidently stunning the NBA’s most decorated broadcaster as much as it did the rest of us.

You can call the Knicks a team of mercenaries. Hey, champions who didn’t draft a single starter are indeed rare. You could call this game a fluke, or a laughable exploitation of a single mismatch that the opposing coach inexplicably refused to address. You could dismiss this entire New York run as the junior varsity championship while the big boys duke it out in the West.

But there’s something bigger happening here than a single win, or even a stretch of blowouts. It’s a group of players that has teetered on the edge of dysfunction for most of its two years together finding something, some form of cohesion and a sense of team, that it just didn’t have a year ago. Something that this organization has achieved so rarely across its 53-year championship drought.

This falls apart completely if a single player doesn’t buy in. If anyone suffers a defensive lapse because they’re sick of watching Brunson dribble, the Knicks lose. If Hart’s ego can’t stomach getting benched, the Knicks probably lose. If Bridges lets the “they traded five first-round picks for you” criticism weigh him down, the Knicks lose. If OG Anunoby can’t gut through his hamstring injury, the Knicks lose. If Towns doesn’t accept his new role and the fewer shots that have come with it, the Knicks lose. And if Brown hadn’t fostered an environment that not only maximized the whole, but got each of the individual parts to fully buy in on the biggest stage, the Knicks almost certainly lose.

I don’t know if the Knicks are going to win the championship. They’re going to be less talented than whoever wins the Western Conference, and talent very often wins championships. It doesn’t always. The Pacers were less talented than the Thunder and may have beaten them anyway had Haliburton’s Achilles tendon not torn. The Knicks have matched up well with the Spurs this season, beating them twice. As of this writing, San Antonio has a 1-0 lead in the Western Conference finals, and the Knicks would certainly stand to benefit from a long, physical series between the regular season’s two best teams. Ultimately, though, the championship is driven by external factors. The Knicks can’t control who they play or how good they are.

But internally, they’ve figured it out. They’ve found the best versions of themselves, the team they always needed to be to even give themselves a chance to win the championship. If you believe in destiny or the basketball gods or anything of the sort, you probably believe they’ll be rewarded for that. They certainly were in Game 1. How can you not be romantic about basketball?