Knicks' Took Bizarre, Decades-Long Journey Back to Finals
By the time the Knicks ripped off 20 straight points in the first half Monday night, their return trip to the NBA finals was booked. It was just a matter of how much the Knicks would win by.
This year began with dreams of an NBA Finals appearance and, to a lesser extent, a mandate from owner Jim Dolan during a January appearance on WFAN, shortly before his team really began to get rolling.
Looking at how the Knicks are playing as cohesively as the championship teams of 1970 and 1973, you might never know their last appearance in the NBA finals was 27 years ago.
Unlike this year, the 1999 appearance was hardly expected, since they pulled off an unlikely trip as an eighth seed after enduring a mediocre 50-game season and rumors of a coaching change with Jeff Van Gundy.
What happened to the Knicks in between finals appearances?
To turn all Bill Walton-like, the best way is to sum up some of the events in Knicks history since losing Game 5 at home to the Spurs, is the lyric from the Grateful Dead's 1970 song "Truckin" when Jerry Garcia sings: Lately, it occurs to me, what a long, strange trip it's been."
The reality is that for the Knicks, it has been a bizarre journey between finals appearances, marked by massive underachievement, failed promises of glory, and flat-out dysfunction that could mirror the peak of the bizarreness of the 1980s Yankees.
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Including the current group led by Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, 259 players have played at least one game for the team since their previous NBA finals game, and the list includes the gamut of names, while the team missed out on drafting players such as Stephen Curry and DeMar DeRozan.
The surprise finals run occurred in the 12th of 14 straight springs when the Knicks made the playoffs. It was also a what-if for the Knicks since Patrick Ewing was not healthy enough to play after Game 2 of the conference finals.
Ewing returned for 1999-2000 and played 62 games before helping the Knicks back to the conference finals. After the Knicks lost Game 6, Ewing was traded in a complex deal that hindered the salary cap and netted little in return, while the Knicks hoped LaTrell Sprewell and Allan Houston could guide the next set of playoff runs.
The Knicks made one more playoff appearance after trading Ewing, but a five-game loss to the Raptors in the first round marked their last playoff win until getting a game in the first round of the 2012 postseason against the Heat. In between, the Knicks endured nine straight losing seasons.
In between playoff wins, the Knicks were a combined 357-529 under Jeff Van Gundy, Don Chaney, Lenny Wilkens, Herb Williams, Larry Brown, Isiah Thomas, Mike D'Antoni, and Mike Woodson.
The Knicks were trickling towards normalcy with the duo of Amar'e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony in three straight playoff appearances in 2011-2013, but what preceded those years was downright awful.
Thomas presided over things from Dec. 2003-April 2008, and his biggest move was adding Stephon Marbury in Jan. 2004. The move appeared to work at first when the Knicks made the 2004 playoffs, but gradually things deteriorated to the point where Marbury was being told to stay away by D'Antoni.
Along the way, the peak of the dysfunction was a pair of 23-59 finishes in 2005-06 and 2007-08. In 2005-06, Brown coached the only year of a five-year deal on a team that had 42 starting lineups and actually won six straight in Jan. 2006.
By the end of 2005-06, Brown and Marbury were feuding in the media, with their comments aggregated in the infancy of blogs. Marbury was feuding with Brown at a time when he was expected to share point guard duties with Steve Francis, a pairing Brown actually compared to Earl Monroe and Clyde Frazier in front of many media members, including me, when I was a reporter for SportsTicker.
Thomas was forced to run the team and coach after Brown was ousted in June 2006. He was also given the mandate of "significant progress" by Dolan, but after a year marked by a major off-court scandal and several ugly losses that led to nightly chants to fire him, Thomas was out and replaced by Donnie Walsh in April 2008.
The first years of Walsh were designed to clear salary cap space for a play at James. Despite the pitches from the cast of "The Sopranos", James went to Miami while the Knicks added Stoudemire and received three exciting years to put the team in the playoff mix, but not at the upper echelon.
It turned out those years were unsustainable, and things got worse when Phil Jackson was hired to run the team. Jackson insisted on using the "Triangle Offense" despite Anthony not being suited to it. There was little success: the Knicks were a combined 80-166, with random names such as Lou Amundson seeing time, and the homecoming of Joakim Noah was unsuccessful.
They missed out on Towns by not winning the 2015 draft lottery, and Kristaps Porzingis showed some promise. By Jan. 2019, Porzingis wanted out, and the Knicks made a trade to clear cap space for the hope of landing Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in free agency.
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Settling for Julius Randle actually helped
At the time, it was easy to view the Knicks as settling for Julius Randle in free agency in 2019 as Durant and Irving joined the Nets. The Knicks were a combined 38-110 in Randle's first two seasons, but shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic put things on hold, Leon Rose was hired to run the front office, and things began to improve.
One of Rose's first moves was bringing Tom Thibodeau in to coach the team, and a hot streak at the end of the 2020-21 season pushed the Knicks into the playoffs. After losing a five-game series to Atlanta and missing the playoffs in 2021-22, the real improvement began.
Jalen Brunson was signed in the summer of 2022 and, combined with Randle, gave the Knicks an effective offensive duo. It led to them winning a round for the first time since 2013, but title dreams ended with a six-game loss to the Miami Heat in the second round.
Along the way in 2022-2023, the Knicks obtained Josh Hart and, in Dec. 2023, turned R.J. Barrett and Immanuel Quickly into OG Anunoby. Once again, the Knicks fell short in the second round when injuries became too much to overcome, but the excitement was there.
Randle was limited to 46 games because of shoulder surgery and did not appear in the playoffs. Still, his tenure with the Knicks was productive enough to be used in the trade that landed Towns from Minnesota.
Towns was acquired after the Knicks sent five first-round picks to the Nets for Mikal Bridges. Importing Towns raised expectations, and the Knicks lived up to them by upsetting the Celtics in the second round.
After stunning the Celtics, a massive collapse in the opener against the Pacers set the tone for a disappointing six-game loss in the conference finals. It also motivated the Knicks to avoid that disappointment again, and it seems that, guided by that moment, they are on an NBA run equal to the 1998 Yankees' run, winning each game by a combined 262 points.
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This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 5:14 AM.