How the Knicks Finally Built 'A Really Great Team'
It has been 50 years since the city of New York has seen an NBA championship trophy.
With the fifth-longest active NBA title drought, New York Knicks fans have sparsely had anything basketball-related to cheer about. Their team made a run to the NBA Finals in 1999 as the only eight seed to do so (until the Miami Heat joined them in that exclusive club last summer), then followed up the season after with a trip to the Conference Finals. Since then, the team has won only two playoff series, the most recent coming last season over the Cleveland Cavaliers.
While many favor the Heat, Boston Celtics, or Milwaukee Bucks to come out of the East this season, they leave out the Knicks. New York surprised a plethora of doubters in the playoffs after beating the Cavs in a dominant, five-game fashion before pushing the red-hot Heat to six.
Count FanSided's Nicholas Chiarito among the believers, however, as he claims the Knicks boast "one of their best rosters in decades."
The Knicks' success this season all starts with their depth in every position. The squad boasts a bench including the likes of Immanuel Quickley, newcomer Donte DiVincenzo, and Josh Hart, who's coming off a FIBA Basketball World Cup run with Team USA.
"With horrible management throughout the majority of the century, the Knicks have finally built themselves a really great team," Chiarito writes. All of these guys were primarily bench players last season and averaged a combined 39.5 points. This would have been enough for a top-five scoring bench last season."
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Other than a stellar second unit, the already-talented team still has room to grow: RJ Barrett has shown flashes of star potential, and he could go along well with the talents of Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle if he puts it all together. His work in the playoffs where he averaged 19.3 points, 4.5 rebounds and 2.8 assists made him Brunson's de facto right-hand man while Randle worked off a late ankle injury.
Finally, Brunson is destined to make yet another leap into his second season in New York. The primary point guard steadily improved his scoring average last season, drastically improving after the turn of the year with an impressive 28.7 points per game in the month of January. With an energized Brunson in tow, the Knicks wen 28-17 in the new calendar year and pulled away from the purgatory of the Play-In Tournament to secure the fifth seed on the Eastern Conference
The Knicks have all the pieces to make another deep playoff run this season, and with the correct circumstances, could find themselves in the NBA Finals.
