Steve Popper: Knicks try to avoid all the noise and keep doing things the right way
Knicks' Jalen Brunson handles the ball against the Cavaliers during the first quarter in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals at Rocket Arena on May 25, 2026 in Cleveland, Ohio. Credit: Getty Images/Gregory Shamus
GREENBURGH
As the Knicks began their postseason run, a new message was placed on the wall just outside the locker room.
“10 weeks of sacrifice.”
It’s hard to argue that the team hasn’t lived up to that motto, but the Knicks might not have imagined that much of that time would be spent working out on their own, waiting for an opponent. On Thursday morning, they took to the court for the first practice since Monday’s completion of another sweep, their 11th straight playoff win, and with no NBA Finals opponent determined yet, they mostly kept the focus on themselves.
It’s worked out just fine to this point, with the Knicks running off a historic stretch — not just the wins, but the dominating fashion in which they have won the games. They have outscored the Hawks, 76ers and Cavaliers by 262 points in the 11 victories, an average of 23.8 points per game. Overall, they have outscored their opponents by 271 points — by far the largest margin of victory in a 14-game span entering the NBA Finals in league history — and their only two losses have been by a point each.
So while Oklahoma City and San Antonio continued to beat each other up in the Western Conference Finals — the Spurs forced a Game 7 on Saturday with a 118-91 victory over the Thunder on Thursday night — the Knicks refined themselves in mind and body. It’s hard to imagine, but the biggest challenge might be the mental part.
It’s nearly impossible for the Knicks to ignore what’s going on outside of their locker room. It was easy at the start of the playoffs to post that credo about sacrifice, but that was before they became the toast of the NBA, setting records, celebrating one series win after another with celebrities hugging them, and stepping onto stages carrying a trophy as Eastern Conference champions for the first time in 27 years. Now they will try to win their first title in 53 years.
From Jalen Brunson to Jeremy Sochan, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has put on the orange and blue this season will ever have to pay for a drink in New York again. Billboards already are springing up celebrating them. Now it’s up to them to avert their gaze and approach every day with the same focus and underdog hunger as they did at the start of the postseason.
“I think it’s different for everybody,” Brunson said. “I’ve been off social media. I may post one thing and then just go back to deleting it. You just gotta block out the noise. You’ve got to do whatever you can to make sure you’re locked in. Everyone is different. Every individual has their way of blocking out things. It’s important to not hear some of the things. When there’s negative things being said about you, it’s important to ignore them. When there’s positive things about you, it’s easy to read them and feel good. You can’t do one and not the other. So just block it out as best as you can.”
“I think just worry about just what we have to do to be better,” Mikal Bridges said. “You know, I think not getting too much on the media and all that stuff. You know, a lot of questions, a lot of talk about how great we are, how great we’ve been. It doesn’t matter. We just got to worry about being ourselves and stay locked in.”
It’s not easy when you’re loading that trophy on the plane home from Cleveland with you. The oddsmakers already have installed them as an underdog against either San Antonio or Oklahoma City, and maybe that’s the sort of bulletin board material that the Knicks can cling to when the world is celebrating — deservedly — their accomplishments.
It’s a delicate balance for the Knicks, enjoying the breather and maybe a little bit of the acclaim while keeping that single-minded sacrifice for the entire 10 weeks.
Mike Brown has been to the NBA Finals with three different organizations as an assistant coach with San Antonio and Golden State and as a head coach with Cleveland. OG Anunoby was with the champion Toronto Raptors squad in 2019 but didn’t play in the postseason because he was recovering from an emergency appendectomy. Bridges was with the Suns when they lost in the NBA Finals two years later. And that is the scope of the experience of handling this for the entire team.
“Yeah, the biggest thing is you have to enjoy it because this doesn’t happen,” Brown said. “Some guys never make it here, you know. And this is what most people play for, is to have a chance to, at the end of the year, say you won your last game, so you can walk around in the summertime with your chest out and all that other stuff amongst your peers.
“Having said that, you know, there are a lot more distractions that you got to navigate, so you have to be — I was talking to Allan Houston, he used the right word when I was talking to him about it, but you have to be real intentional about what you’re doing because you’re going to get pulled in so many different directions.
“And everybody’s human, and it’s natural to get pulled here, get pulled a little here, get pulled a little there, and think that you’re OK. But at the end of the day, after doing the media and practicing and getting pulled three or four different directions — because you’re going to have your family around you, you’re going to have friends around you, you’re going to have people wanting tickets, you’re going to have people wanting to go on this show and that show.
“At the end of the day, you may not realize it, but it can be fatiguing for you to do all of that stuff while trying to focus on some of the biggest games in your life. So again, going off of what word Allan Houston used, trying to be intentional about everything that we do during this time while keeping an edge is going to be huge.”
The Knicks have made it this far by doing it the right way. Two more weeks.
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
