The Knicks’ championship blueprint? A roster-building miracle that has New York ready to run it back

NEW YORK — That the New York Knicks, who just won the 2026 NBA championship, are not favored to win the 2027 NBA championship, is no great surprise.

For one thing, the NBA hasn’t seen a repeat champion since the 2017 and 2018 Golden State Warriors. A decade into Adam Silver’s “parity of opportunity” era, picking the field over the champs seems like a reasonable decision.

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For another, it’s hard to blame the oddsmakers for dispassionately favoring a larger 82-game sample over a smaller 19-game one (even if those 19 games constituted some of the best basketball any team has played in recent memory). Heading into the 2026 NBA playoffs, both win-loss record and most advanced metrics pegged the Knicks as something like the fourth- or fifth-best team in the NBA, behind the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics and arguably Detroit Pistons. Heading into the new season with the fourth-best odds of once again hoisting the Larry O’Brien championship trophy, behind OKC, San Antonio and Boston, is understandable, from a removed, quantitative view.

Beyond that … I mean, of course the Knicks aren’t considered the favorites to win next season. They weren’t considered the favorites to win this season. Not until roughly one minute after The Right Hand of God made first contact.

Championship runs don’t always work this way. Sometimes, the favorite heading into the season winds up atop of the mountain come mid-June, and everyone’s just sort of like, “Yep. That sounds about right.” (In the last decade alone, the 2016 Cavaliers, 2017 and 2018 Warriors, and 2024 Celtics all pulled that off.)

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A lot of them, however, do unfold like this. Something that first appeared to be little more than an optimistic trick of the light somehow instantiates into tangible, three-dimensional reality; the impossible suddenly shifts into inevitability.

So much had to go right for New York to end its 53-year NBA title drought and turn in one of the greatest postseasons in the history of the sport. That can make it difficult to extract grand takeaways from the Knicks’ road to the top. All paths to glory differ,…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/the-knicks-championship-blueprint-a-roster-building-miracle-that-has-new-york-ready-to-run-it-back-183926319.html

Author : Dan Devine

Publish date : 2026-06-16 18:39:00

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