Prologue

The 2025 Eastern Conference Finals ended in Indiana. The Knicks had just played into late May for the second straight year, and the front office decided that was no longer the point. Within a week Tom Thibodeau was fired, and Mike Brown got the job.

Nobody called it a rebuild, because it wasn't one. The roster stayed. The coach changed, the offense changed, and for two months the Knicks looked like a team relearning things it already knew how to do. The bet was that the discomfort would be temporary and the ceiling would not.