Teamwork is not only a practical good but a moral virtue. While supreme individual gifts seem to come, unbidden, from nature, teamwork draws on attributes available to all of us: self-sacrifice, perseverance, grit.
When Jalen Brunson, the undersize hero of the New York Knicks, was asked how he had led the team to a championship, he swallowed a giant lump in his throat before being able to say, “My confidence comes from my work ethic.” Neither you nor I can consistently nail a 25-foot jumper, but we can dedicate ourselves selflessly to the mastery of a worthy task. We can subordinate our ego to the group in the name of a greater good. Most of us don’t; the Knicks did.
It earned them a ticker-tape parade in New York City’s Canyon of Heroes on Thursday.
It’s hard to fathom the sheer improbability of the Knicks’ run through the playoffs, in which they won 16 games and lost only three, setting records along the way for the largest average margin of victory in the playoffs and the biggest comeback in a finals game. The N.B.A. is a superstars’ league. Until now, every championship team save two going back to 2009 had a league Most Valuable Player award winner on its roster. The two exceptions were still led by superstars-without-the-laurels (the Toronto Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard and the Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum). The gods beat the demigods.
Then there are the Knicks. The team lacks not only an M.V.P. but a member of the all-N.B.A. first team, an accolade given to the league’s top five best players. In the regular season the Knicks went 53-29, tied for sixth-best in the league. They finished third in the Eastern Conference. The teams they obliterated along the way to the championship were simply not as good as they were, yet they lost only one game against the higher-ranked San Antonio Spurs, a younger, more talented team led by Victor Wembanyama, a player of such singular dimensions and gifts that he seems to have stepped out of a Marvel comic.
The series, in retrospect, took on the form of an allegory — team versus superstar, underdog versus top dog, band of brothers versus young guns. Three of New York’s starting five had played together in college, at Villanova, before reuniting in New York. Throughout the playoffs, the starters and the bench played as if they were a single human organism.
That harmonious flow produced a transcendent moment in the final game of the first playoff round, against Atlanta, when the team scored 83 points in the first half, and gave up 36. They were also capable of canine ferocity. In the fourth game of the finals, they gave up 76 points in the first half and then only 30 — a number from high-school ball — in the second, coming back from a 29-point deficit to win. Both the means of victory and the author of victory kept changing: Brunson won the finals M.V.P., but earlier in the series the probable candidate was the forward OG Anunoby, and before him, the center Karl-Anthony Towns.What was constant was the alchemy of the team.
Here I must mention a name that has been lost in the euphoria — Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks’ coach for five seasons until he was unceremoniously dumped last year. Thibs is a pudgy basketball lifer from the boondocks of Salem State College who bounced from team to team. He preached defense, self-discipline and relentlessness; the hallmark of his Knicks was never giving up, even when they should have. Thibs’s DNA is in this team. He was the Knicks’ Moses, who could not deliver them to the Promised Land. Coach Mike Brown has proved to be their Joshua. Brown somehow coaxed out of this team a level of play they had never attained in their years under Thibs.
So — improbability, allegory, wonder. But municipal vindication as well. I can tell you, as a fan of over six decades, that New York teams rarely elicit the sense of moral glory that has accompanied the Knicks. Only occasionally, and as if by accident, as with the Knicks of the early 1970s, is the team greater than the sum of its parts. Usually it’s less. This reflects a congenital defect, not in New Yorkers, or at least not only in New Yorkers, but in the megalomaniacs who own some of their teams. As they are superstars in their own minds, so they blindly pursue the superstars of the hardwood and the diamond.
The Yankees of the 1980s kept trading away their gifted young players for over-the-hill sluggers, and losing — until the owner George Steinbrenner was briefly banned from baseball in the early 1990s and his highly capable general manager kept their core together, and fans could rejoice in victory just a few years later. At one point, the Knicks, under their owner, James Dolan, became so dysfunctional that few N.B.A. greats would agree to join the team. Finally Dolan had to defer to the team president, Leon Rose, who assembled this special squad.
These cartoon villains make New York look bad. People all over America think we New Yorkers must be like those villains. We’re not — or at least in our own minds we’re not. We think we’re like Jalen and OG and Towns and Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges. And Thibs — guys who will fight for every loose ball and wrestle away every rebound. Players who, as Brunson said, will put in the work all summer.
Sports is all too often a mirror of everything brutal and vulgar about America. But every once in a great while, it makes us feel better about ourselves. If the Knicks can slay the mythical giant with a heroic brand of basketball, then perhaps — despite all appearances to the contrary — virtue is not dead.
James Traub is an author and journalist. He writes the newsletter A Democracy, if You Can Keep It.
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