The Knicks are playing good basketball again. So, how are they doing it?


More than anything else, James Dolan and Leon Rose hired Tom Thibodeau to try to make the Knicks feel like the Knicks again. After a couple of mostly aimless decades flitting from one would-be savior and monorail sales pitch to the next, New York’s braintrust hired the least slick man on the planet because it didn’t want a dream anymore; it wanted a defense.

Between 2010 and 2020, the Knicks employed seven different head coaches and five different heads of basketball operations, but produced just above-average defense. Enter Thibodeau, the hard-charging and ever-hoarse former defensive coordinator turned successful head coach of the Bulls (and somewhat less successful head coach of the Timberwolves), tapped by Knicks brass to restore the defensive commitment that defined the franchise throughout the title-contending Riley and Van Gundy eras, and that has only rarely been seen at Madison Square Garden this millennium.

The first season of the project , as the Knicks finished fourth in defensive efficiency and made the playoffs for the first time in seven years. It wobbled in Year 2, as expected offensive upgrades Kemba Walker and Evan Fournier proved disastrous on the defensive end and New York slid down to 12th in points allowed per possession en route to a 37-45 finish. Through the first month of his third season on the bench, with the Knicks again below .500 and sputtering around the bottom five in a slew of defensive categories, it seemed like the wheels had fallen off, and that the was about to find a frustratingly familiar finish.

A funny thing happened on the way to the start of , though: Thibodeau’s Knicks started getting stops and became one of the hottest teams in the NBA.

New York enters Tuesday’s matchup with the Warriors having won a league-best seven straight games and nine of 13 dating back to Nov. 21. The Knicks have in that span, according to Cleaning the Glass — second-best in the NBA behind the and West-leading Grizzlies.

Jalen Brunson and the New York Knicks are feeling pretty good about themselves. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

This recent run has propelled the Knicks to for the season, despite still hanging around the middle of the pack in 3-point makes, attempts and accuracy. The secret weapon for Thibs’ crew? Offensive rebounding. When you’re not an elite shooting team, it helps to get more bites at the apple. Centers Mitchell Robinson and Isaiah Hartenstein both ranking in the top five in ; only the Rockets have rebounded a higher share of their misses than the Knicks , and nobody’s averaging more than New York.

The more notable leap, though, has come on the defensive end. Early in the season, the Knicks often looked disorganized and lethargic, frequently scrambled by simple actions; when they made mistakes, they rarely seemed interested in trying to make up for them with hustle and extra effort. Through its first 17 games, New York ranked 25th or worse in , , , and how often it let opponents .

What a difference a month makes. Since Nov. 21, the Knicks rank third in , second in , seventh in , fourth in and eighth in . They’ve been better at preventing runouts, better at finishing possessions, better at the point of attack and cleaner off the ball — just, y’know, better.

So: What changed a month ago?

Well, for one thing, New York’s opponents hit one hell of a cold snap. After shooting against the Knicks through 17 games, they’ve made just 31% of their long balls over the past 13 — . As we noted in , studies have shown there’s regarding opponents hitting their 3-pointers; if they shoot 31.8% on lightly contested threes and 25.8% on uncontested threes, as New York’s opponents have in this stretch, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking data, that’s a pretty good place to start when you’re trying to figure out how a defense got better fast.

But while Thibodeau can’t control shooting luck, he can control playing time. About a month ago, he exerted that control, paring down to a nine-man rotation and finding a somewhat elegant solution to untangling New York’s crowded roster: He stopped playing his worst defensive players — or, at least, those who weren’t otherwise justifying minutes with their offensive play.

Fournier, whose value derived almost entirely from his ability to make jumpers but who’s shooting just 34.4% from the field, hasn’t played since Nov. 13. An injury-addled and steps-slow Derrick Rose (just 43% on 2-pointers) has been inactive for more games (eight) than he’s played non-garbage-time minutes (four games) in the last month.

Cam Reddish, the former lottery pick , had struggled to sustain his , shooting just 30.4% from 3-point range; he hasn’t started in a month and is now firmly out of the rotation. When fellow former lottery pick Obi Toppin suffered a six games ago, it cost the Knicks a player whose electric work in transition has made him a cause célèbre for many fans; it also removed from the equation a player whose failings as a rim protector and defender in space have kept Thibodeau from ever fully trusting him. (To get a sense of just how frequently Reddish and Toppin falling asleep off the ball or missing rotations led to open shots for opponents, check out this great recent look at New York’s defense by .)

Shuffling those players out of the rotation made room for some new ones. Miles McBride stepped into Rose’s backup point guard spot off the bench, and the former West Virginia and G League standout has offered an injection of physicality tracking back on the defensive glass, on-time rotations and on-ball tenacity:

Deuce’s shot hasn’t been falling — just 12-for-43 (27.9%) outside the restricted area — but the 22-year-old has more than made up for it with youthful exuberance and defensive disruption, averaging and per 36 minutes of floor time. The new-look reserve backcourt of McBride and Immanuel Quickley — eligible for an extension of his rookie contract after the season and, in a perhaps-related story, the subject of of late — has made life miserable on second-unit offenses: Opponents are scoring a microscopic with Quickley and McBride on the floor.

As McBride has brought a defensive boost to the reserve corps, Quentin Grimes has given one to the starting five. When Grimes was on the shelf for most of the first month of the season with a — a month that also saw Donovan Mitchell opposing defenses as the Cavaliers to the East’s upper echelon — it seemed ludicrous that Knicks brass might have ever . Maybe you still think that; after all, Mitchell’s averaging nearly 30 a game and making a bid for an All-NBA berth, while Grimes remains a role player who’s taken all of eight shots a game .

Watching Grimes since his return last month, though, it’s been clear why the Knicks — and perhaps Thibodeau in particular — prize him so highly. The second-year man out of Houston is a central-casting modern point-of-attack defender — an elite on-ball stopper with the size (6-foot-5 with a 6-8 wingspan, 205 pounds), quickness and smarts to body up opposing guards, stay connected around screens to avoid giving them daylight, mirror their footwork through every fake and feint, direct drivers into waiting help and force shooters to take tough looks with a hand in their faces.

Locking down the likes of Mitchell, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, DeMar DeRozan, and Tyrese Haliburton is an awfully tough job. Grimes makes it look … well, not easy, but possible, in a way that not many other perimeter defenders can manage:

According to ’s game charting, no defender in the NBA has faced a more difficult matchup every night on average than Grimes. Even so, opponents are shooting just 38.3% when he’s the closest defender, according to Second Spectrum — the fifth-lowest mark among players to guard at least 150 shots. That ability to blanket top-flight scoring threats is incredibly valuable, both in and of itself — pegs Grimes as the third-highest impact defender in the entire league thus far this season — and because of the knock-on effect it has across the Knicks’ rotation.

Before Thibs shuffled the deck, Knicks defenders were getting “blown by” 11.7 times per 100 drives, according to Second Spectrum — ninth-most in the NBA. Since slotting Grimes and McBride into the mix, that’s down to 9.9 blow-bys-per-100 — sixth-fewest. When you can stall dribble penetration up top, your bigs don’t have to step up to stop the ball as much, limiting the danger of them picking up cheap fouls, allowing them to stay in better defensive rebounding position and reducing the pressure on your wings to help out down low. In a related story, Robinson’s committing two per-36 over the and leading the league in , while Julius Randle and RJ Barrett have picked up their work on the defensive glass — all key factors in the Knicks’ newfound ability to hold opponents to one shot.

Another benefit: Sliding Grimes into the starting lineup to guard No. 1 options means Barrett doesn’t have to.

Last season, Barrett combined high-usage offense with defending opponents’ top perimeter scoring threats ; that workload, though, hampered his offensive efficiency, an issue dating back to his rookie season that persisted at the start of the 2022-23 campaign. Now, though, Barrett can check, for example, , or , or , or .

That downshift in defensive responsibility, combined with the addition of Grimes as another above-average shooter to help decongest the Knicks’ half-court offense, seems to have given Barrett’s game an overall jolt. , he was averaging 17.9 points per game on dismal ; over , he’s up to 21.3 a night on . That’s still below , but it’s a significant improvement. Which, in turn, has helped open things up more for Randle, who is getting to the foul line and firing 3-pointers than he was , and who has seen his production spike accordingly: 25.2 points, 9.8 rebounds, 4.2 assists per game on .

Randle’s defensive work still leaves a lot to be desired at times, especially off the ball. His effort and on that end has ticked up of late, though, thanks partly to Thibodeau changing what he’s asking of the power forward — during this recent run, Randle’s switching ball screens twice as often as he was earlier in the season, according to Second Spectrum, rather than just hanging back in drop coverage — and the prompted by the arrival of Jalen Brunson has (with, um, ) continued to pay dividends. On the whole, Randle’s been as he was two seasons ago — the breakout campaign that saw him make his first All-Star and All-NBA teams and earn Most Improved Player honors.

With Randle and Brunson (averaging a shade under 22 points and six assists on 46/45/90 shooting splits ) playing at or close to All-Star levels, Barrett warming up, and Robinson and Grimes contributing efficiently in their defense-first roles, a Knicks team that last season suddenly boasts . With Quickley, McBride and backup center Hartenstein hounding opposing second units, the Knicks have had one of the best bench mobs in the business , too. Add it up, and you’ve got a team that — depending on — appears to have north of a 75% shot of returning to the postseason, and even a pretty decent shot at staying out of the play-in tournament.

Questions remain: whether the Knicks would be better served now rather than suffer the downside of a dip in his production; whether packaging their surplus parts could get them another wing shooter who can defend; whether merely being a middle-of-the-pack team in the East is really , in the grand scheme. For the moment, though, the Knicks are developing young talent, establishing a baseline of competence and competitiveness, and winning actual basketball games, all while still holding and some moveable contracts that can be packaged together if and when another mega-move becomes available. Maybe the Knicks aren’t truly on the ascent; their vibes, though, certainly appear to be, thanks to the kind of hard-nosed defense that even the hardest-hearted New Yorker can’t help but love.





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