Knicks' Tyler Kolek may get time in spotlight, being on center stage during NBA Cup
Tyler Kolek #13 of the New York Knicks controls the ball during the first half against Walter Clayton Jr. #13 of the Utah Jazz at Madison Square Garden on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025 in New York City. Credit: Jim McIsaac
TORONTO — The NBA Cup is a lot of things to a lot of people in the NBA. A way to entice players — and maybe more important, fans — to care about games in the cold of December, far removed from the hopeful start of the season and even further from the postseason.
And it’s a payday for players, most important to the ones near the end of the bench. But as much as it means to get a payout that is nearly as much as an annual salary for those players, it is also a stage.
There were no other games on the schedule but the Eastern Conference Cup quarterfinals Tuesday. The rest of the league is watching. It’s a stage and for players, the ones who aren’t in the commercials, it’s an opportunity.
Enter Tyler Kolek.
He’s not starting and frankly he entered Tuesday night’s game with no idea of how many minutes he’d get. But with Deuce McBride sidelined with a sprained ankle, Kolek, who played eight minutes Sunday in the Knicks' last game and never got off the bench in four others, might have a stage.
“Every game that you get into is a big opportunity,” Kolek said after the Knicks morning shootaround at ScotiaBank Arena. “Especially since it’s a Cup game. We’re trying to win. So I’m excited for the game no matter what.”
Not that he wouldn’t like the payout for winning the Cup. Last season, he took his quarterfinal money and bought his mother a car — and joked that it’s his dad’s turn this season.
Kolek has seen his opportunities rise in his sophomore season with Mike Brown in charge after getting some run under Tom Thibodeau as a rookie. He appeared in half of the regular-season games and then in the playoffs just got on the floor for six minutes of garbage time in the entire postseason run. This season, there have been times when he looks like the floor leader that Thibodeau was grooming him to be and others, like Sunday, when he and other players cleared the bench with 1:35 to play and then Brown had to go back to his starters with 19 seconds left in the game after a 12-point lead nearly disappeared against Orlando.
“I’m just trying to do all the little things coach has been emphasizing,” Kolek said. “Pushing the ball in transition. Being physical on defense. Getting into the ball. Stuff like that. I just think it’s attention to detail like I was saying. Guy my size, I've got to be exact on everything. I've got to be in the exact right position on defense. In the right spacing on offense. I can’t be a little bit off. There’s no margin for error there.”
Kolek was the one to bring up his size, but as he said he’s had to work to make up for being 6-foot-2 and 195 pounds in a league where scouts search for 6-foot-6 point guards. So he worked to get stronger in the summer, figuring out how to close the gaps that critics would cite.
And he spent less time working to exhaustion on the skills that got him to the NBA.
“You definitely change,” he said. “I was actually doing less on the floor. You can look back on my college career and all that and say I overworked to get to this point and that’s what I had to do. And now, I have to change that philosophy once you get here and work smarter. I was killing my body. I was never fresh. I was never feeling my best.
“So now coming into the summer I wanted to feel my best in order to go harder on the floor, go harder in the weight room. … Less is more sometimes.”
That is a hard turn for a player who worked his way into the league and who was tutored by Thibodeau — and spent mornings working with Rick Brunson last season. You may remember, “The Magic is in the Work,” the motto coined by Brunson and one that certainly helped make Jalen Brunson into the All-NBA pick he is after arriving as a second-round pick, too.
It’s hard to imagine those players agreeing to cut back, to accept that less is more.
“[In college, I’d] work out before practice,” he said. “Spot shots after. We get out of there around 4, 5 o’clock. Back in the gym, 8:30. Every single night. I didn’t miss a night. A lot of guys say that. But I really did not miss a night.
“I had this anxiety or fear of if I wasn’t in the gym, I wasn’t going to do good the next game. . . . All that kind of stuff, you kind of mature or grow out of that. I know the work I put in the past and I know the work I continue to put in. And that’s what’s going to hold weight in any game or practice or wherever I go for the next competition. It’s not what I did the night before, that’s not going to hold me. It’s what I did two years cumulative.”
And he hoped that it would pay off on a night like Tuesday, on a big stage.
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.
