The most revealing line about the New York Knicks right now didn’t come from a box score, a tactical breakdown, or even a postgame rant. It came from the reporting.
“In digging around on this, one theme has come up consistently over the past couple of weeks: This group is not tied together in the way that their early season success would suggest,” SNY’s Ian Begley wrote. “Players haven’t fully bought into their roles under head coach Mike Brown. Those reasons are cited often when you talk to people about the Knicks’ flaws.”
It’s a damning diagnosis because it reframes the slump as something deeper than a cold shooting stretch or a schematic adjustment period. The Knicks haven’t simply looked out of rhythm. They’ve looked like a team negotiating, in real time, who gets to be what, who sacrifices touches, who closes games, who defends first, who accepts being the connector instead of the finisher.
And the timing makes it louder. New York’s season had recently offered every reason to believe the foundation was solid: the Knicks were 18–7 a month earlier, climbed as high as 23–9, and were celebrating an NBA Cup title before the bottom fell out. Since that high-water mark, the tone has flipped to urgency. New York went 2–9 after reaching 23–9, dropped four straight, and began searching for an identity in a way that contenders usually don’t have to.
When a team’s identity goes missing, leaders try to manufacture it. After Monday night’s 114–97 home loss to a shorthanded Dallas team, Knicks captain Jalen Brunson called a players-only meeting. The message, per ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne: the answers had to come from inside the locker room, not from waiting on coaches to fix it for them.
That’s the connective tissue between Begley’s reporting and what you can see on the floor. Mike Brown didn’t inherit a rebuilding roster. He inherited expectations, an impatient city, and a group that already believed it was close. The Knicks hired Brown in July 2025 after moving on from Tom Thibodeau, betting that a new voice, and a different offensive approach, could raise their ceiling without flattening the edge that made them hard to play against.
But role clarity is the oxygen of Brown-ball. His best teams, from Cleveland to Sacramento to his years in Golden State, have typically required a shared agreement on what good possessions look like: pace, ball movement, smart shot selection, and the kind of defensive effort that makes the offense feel easy. When that agreement isn’t universal, the cracks show quickly. One player hesitates, another freelances, and suddenly the “system” looks like nothing at all.
Begley’s point, players not fully buying into their roles, lands precisely because it explains both ends. Offense becomes a tug-of-war between instinct and structure. Defense becomes the first place where discontent leaks, because defense requires the most trust: trust that help will be there, trust that rotations will be covered, trust that effort won’t be wasted. If you’re half a step late because you’re half a step unconvinced, the scoreboard punishes you.
There have been smaller moments that, fairly or unfairly, become symbols when things go bad. Brown’s recent postgame hug of Draymond Green, after a physical incident involving Karl-Anthony Towns, did not sit well with “a lot of folks” in New York’s locker room or organization, an example of how perception can become part of the problem in a skid. A contender can survive awkward optics when it’s winning. When it’s losing, everything becomes a referendum.
The uncomfortable truth is that buy-in issues rarely announce themselves with one dramatic explosion. They show up as a collection of tiny, repeatable failures: a missed box-out that looks like fatigue, a late closeout that looks like strategy, a possession where the ball sticks because the passer doesn’t believe the next guy will do the “right” thing. Over time, those possessions stop being random and start being a personality test.
Brunson’s meeting suggests the players understand the stakes. Brown’s first year in New York was always going to include adjustment, new terminology, new preferences, new hierarchies. But the Knicks don’t need a reinvention. They need alignment. Because if Begley’s reporting is right, the Knicks’ biggest opponent isn’t the East standings or the trade deadline. It’s the quiet doubt inside their own rotation: the difference between doing your job and believing in it.
