How Nico Harrison helped Jalen Brunson and the Knicks win the championship

The New York Knicks were able to get their franchise player in Jalen Brunson.

Then came the hard part: keeping him healthy. That task is where the story of the 2025-26 NBA champion Knicks really begins.

Advertisement

We can point to 2022 — the summer in which the Knicks swiped Brunson away from the Dallas Mavericks — as the genesis of their magical run to the Larry O’Brien trophy. But in order to win it all, they didn’t just need to get their guy, they had to make sure he stayed in one piece, peaking at the right time. The most unsolvable puzzle in the sport — injury prevention — is the area in which the Knicks proved most victorious.

Yes, this is what it looks like when the puzzle pieces fit perfectly together. The Knicks uncorked, statistically, the most dominant postseason ever, outscoring opponents by a whopping 283 points over 16 games — the largest playoff point differential in NBA history.

But the fact that some puzzle pieces were available in the first place, credit goes to one man: Nico Harrison. Not just because Harrison let Brunson go in free agency in 2022.

The former Dallas Mavericks head of basketball operations also made a critical mistake that helped New York end its 53-year title drought: He fired perhaps the best injury-prevention mastermind in the sport, Casey Smith, who landed with the Knicks in 2024.

Advertisement

In the wee hours after the Knicks won the championship on Saturday, Smith, the team’s VP of Sports Medicine grabbed his phone and typed out a public message on X, tagging not only Brunson but also Knicks senior athletic trainer Heather Mau and Knicks shooting coach Peter Patton.

“Shout out to my real ones,” Smith wrote. “They said we weren’t a good fit for their culture. Said we weren’t good enough in our roles. Peter Patton, Heather Mau, Jalen. We did and will continue to do the work.”

I’ll connect the dots for you. Smith and those three Knicks staffers were let go by Harrison’s regime in Dallas in recent years.

It’s hard to overstate Smith’s impact in New York. When he took over the Knicks’ medical team almost two years ago to the day, the Knicks…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/how-nico-harrison-helped-jalen-brunson-and-the-knicks-win-the-championship-183200468.html

Author : Tom Haberstroh

Publish date : 2026-06-14 18:32:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.