Knicks head coach Mike Brown doesn’t get enough credit for the role he played in last season’s championship run, according to assistant coach Rick Brunson.

On the Locked on Knicks Squad Show (YouTube link), Brunson said Brown met with all five starters individually at the end of the regular season, when the team was struggling, and asked them to air out their complaints. Then he brought them all together and told the group what they’d said about each other so they could work through it themselves.

“Obviously it was all basketball, like, ‘I can do this or you do this too much or you don’t do this enough,’” Brunson said (Twitter video link via New York Basketball). “And they actually talked to each other and understood each other.

“And I swear that was the moment where we took off. I really believe that. Like right at the end of the season, the last couple games and then right into the playoffs. Even us even us being down 2-1 [in the first round against Atlanta], we still felt like we were the better team, but obviously you have to go out there and prove it.

“And then when we went on that 13-game [postseason] winning streak, I would say Mike don’t get enough credit. Mike was tremendous.”

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During a Q&A session at Binghamton University, Miles McBride discussed his journey to the NBA, his playing style, winning a title in June, and his relationship with his daughter and what lessons he hopes to teach her, per Samuel Weisberger of Pipe Dream, BU’s student-run newspaper. “I always felt as soon as [a] basketball touched my hands, I was gonna somehow make it to the NBA,” McBride said. “And I feel like you have to be not delusional in a sense, but you have to have this different self-belief to achieve great things. And I always had this positive mindset that I could do it if I just put the work in. So honestly, from the day I started playing basketball, I had a belief that I could make it to the NBA.” The 26-year-old guard recently said he was “a little disappointed” by how his extension talks with the Knicks have gone.
How can the Knicks avoid the “complacency” that sometimes comes with winning a championship? Stefan Bondy of The New York Post explores that question, writing that the team will be looking to turn the page on 2025/26 with training camp starting this week. “Is it cliché if I say it’s 0-0 again?” Karl-Anthony Towns said Thursday on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “That’s kind of the same thing we said every playoff game, and when we won and kept winning it was great. But this season is about us going out there and starting again at 0-0. Bringing that same hungry team, that team that’s hungry to prove everyone wrong. The underdogs.”
In two other stories for The New York Post, Bondy lists some training camp storylines to monitor, including the battle for the 14th standard roster spot, and breaks down every player on the camp roster.