It’s May 18, 2025. New York Knicks forward Precious Achiuwa rushes up to the scorers’ table to check in for Karl-Anthony Towns, who just committed his sixth personal foul with 4:37 remaining in the fourth quarter of Game 6 of an Eastern Conference semifinal series.
Achiuwa takes the floor and joins four New York starters who have been playing 35-40 minutes a night for more than a month. They don’t have nearly enough gas left in the tank.
The final buzzer sounds. Milwaukee Bucks 104, Knicks 92. New York fails to reach the Eastern Conference finals for a third straight season. Back to the drawing board it goes.
Of course, May 18, 2025, hasn’t happened yet. For now, these are simply words on a screen. But in just over seven months, this could be reality for the Knicks—or at least close to it.
New York has assembled one of the most daunting starting fives in the league this offseason, trading for Mikal Bridges and Towns, who will be playing alongside Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby and Josh Hart.
Bojan Bogdanovic went to the Brooklyn Nets as part of the Bridges deal, while acquiring Towns from the Minnesota Timberwolves cost the Knicks Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. New York also parted ways with four back-of-the-bench guys and three draft picks to land Towns.
So buckle up, Knicks fans. You’re in for a special, special regular season.
However, no champion earns that title by utilizing a five-man rotation for 48 minutes for a minimum of 16 playoff games. And that’s why New York is going to run into problems come postseason time.
An eight-or nine-man rotation is usually what it takes to get the job done, meaning Miles McBride, Mitchell Robinson, Cameron Payne and Achiuwa would be the guys most frequently called upon to deliver valuable minutes off the bench.
That group doesn’t really inspire confidence, does it?
A healthy Towns is a clear-cut upgrade over Randle, whose selfishness and poor decision-making often spoiled a lot of promising possessions for the Knicks. But this team is really going to feel the losses of Bogdanovic and DiVincenzo, especially when New York’s core players are gasping for air by mid-April.
Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau is known to play his starters until he can’t anymore, and while you do want your best players on the floor as much as possible, it becomes problematic when they end up either injured or too tired to make any serious noise in the playoffs.
It really becomes a double-edged sword: Rely on a shaky second unit throughout the regular season, risking a top-two seed in the East, or go all in for Games 1-82 and hope for the best when things start to really matter.
We’ve seen one of these scenarios play out before, as New York gave everything it had to secure the No. 2 seed in the East last season, only to fall to the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of a semifinal series.
In the 35 games that New York played from March 1-May 19 (regular and postseason), Thibodeau may have legitimately been trying to kill Hart, who appeared in all 35 of those contests while casually playing 40.8 minutes a night.
DiVincenzo was getting 37.4 minutes per game during that stretch, Brunson was averaging 36.0, and, even though he was hobbled by a hamstring injury, Anunoby was logging 34.8 per contest. Like Hart, DiVincenzo saw action in all 35 games, with Brunson getting into 34 and Anunoby playing in 18.
There’s a very real chance that the Knicks win upwards of 60 games this season with such a talented starting five. Problem is, banners don’t get hung for 60-win seasons. Even a 65- or 70-win campaign wouldn’t help fill up the rafters.
Heading into the marathon that is the NBA season, New York is only conditioned for the first 25 miles. That’s great and all, but it takes 26.2 to reach the finish line.
