The New York Jets sit alone in the doldrums of New York sports misery.
For a while, the Jets’ misery had company in the form of the New York Knicks. James Dolan’s directionless organization was the hardwood iteration of Woody Johnson’s gridiron circus.
Those days are long gone. Since the turn of the decade, the Knicks have logged four playoff appearances and three playoff series victories. They are on their way to their first Eastern Conference Finals since 2000, a landmark achievement affirming their official return to NBA relevance (though the job is far from finished).
Meanwhile, the Jets are still desperately seeking their first playoff appearance since 2010. Over that time, the Knicks have had a three-year run of playoff contention, fallen into an excruciatingly long rebuild, and begun an entirely new half-decade era of success.
Since the Jets’ last playoff appearance, 10 of the other 11 major professional New York City sports teams have reached the “Final Four” of their respective sports, with the exception of the Brooklyn Nets (who were one game away from it in 2021).
- New York Yankees: 2012, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2024
- New York Rangers: 2012, 2014, 2015, 2022, 2024
- New York Red Bulls: 2014, 2015, 2018, 2024
- New York Liberty: 2015, 2023, 2024
- New York City FC: 2021, 2022
- New York Mets: 2015, 2024
- New York Islanders: 2020
- New Jersey Devils: 2012
- New York Knicks: 2025
- New York Giants: 2011
It is long overdue for the Jets to rejoin their New York comrades in the playoff limelight.
Not too long ago, many people would have labeled the Knicks as the furthest team from serious championship contention in New York sports. Today, the Jets are likely the most popular pick for that dubious distinction (perhaps in a close battle with the Nets).
Considering the starkness of the Knicks’ turnaround – and that they pulled it off in the same pressure-cooker of a media market – it is conceivable that they might be one of the best role models for the Jets to follow in all of sports. Is that the case?
Indeed, it is.
While it would be impossible for the Jets to completely mimic the Knicks’ path to success, they should seek to emulate some of the core elements that fueled the Knicks’ turnaround.
Shift the culture
1. Front office
For a long time, no NBA team dealt with more front-office dysfunction than the New York Knicks.
From Isiah Thomas digging the team into purgatory, to Phil Jackson’s outdated dreams of resurrecting the triangle offense, to Steve Mills’ atrocious draft picks, the Knicks spent the better part of two decades as the poster child for poor team-building in professional sports.
Then Leon Rose came along.
On March 2, 2020, while the team was deep into its seventh straight non-playoff season, Rose was hired as the Knicks’ new president. This was the first step in reshaping the image of the organization. In June, Rose appointed William Wesley as his executive vice president of basketball operations.
The Rose-Wesley tandem was an unorthodox one. Rose was a longtime agent for CAA (Creative Arts Agency), where he represented many NBA stars, the most notable being LeBron James from 2005-12. Wesley, a longtime confidant of Rose, spent 13 years as a consultant in the coaching division of CAA. Between the two men, there was zero coaching, scouting, or front office experience in the NBA.
What they offered, though, were three things: connections, respect, and an understanding of the NBA’s inner workings.
Rose and Wesley were plugged into the epicenter of the NBA world and had the admiration of the league’s most powerful figures. These are traits that wouldn’t carry as much weight in the less player-driven NFL, but they have proven valuable for the Knicks, who have used Rose and Wesley’s agency experience and connections to facilitate a plethora of crucial signings and trades to build the core of their team.
The Jets won’t be able to mimic these specific aspects of team-building. However, they can learn from the ways that Rose and Wesley molded the Knicks’ culture.
The Knicks were a laughingstock throughout the mid-to-late 2010s. Upon the hirings of Rose and Wesley, the Knicks immediately began to operate like a professional organization again. Their arrivals drew rave reviews across the association, and they quickly displayed why they are so respected around the league.
Rose and Wesley used their connections to hire respectable names across the scouting and coaching staffs, particularly at head coach, which we will get into next. They executed a savvy offseason in 2020, improving the roster without making any crippling investments. They maneuvered the draft board with smart trades to help build the team’s long-term capital while still adding multiple quality players.
Alongside his actual roster moves, Rose has positively impacted the organization’s culture by doing his part to silence the drama around the team. Rose has become infamous for almost never speaking to the media. Akin to the mantra pushed by the Jets’ new head coach, Rose prefers to “work in silence.”
While this approach can frustrate media members, it is utterly perfect for what the Knicks needed when Rose arrived. They were a joke of a franchise. They generated more headlines for having franchise legends kicked out of the arena than for anything the active players did on the court.
Rose’s invisible approach with the media has helped establish a newfound basketball-first culture at Madison Square Garden. This trickles down throughout the organization, creating an environment where players can focus on the game and avoid being sucked into drama that does nothing to help their performance. In New York, this is essential.
It’s early, but the Jets’ new regime, led by general manager Darren Mougey, is conveying a similar approach. In their first major move as a duo, Mougey and head coach Aaron Glenn made the decision to send Aaron Rodgers packing, and his drama along with him. This was an immediate statement that the Jets’ new regime is prioritizing the establishment of a football-first mindset within the organization.
Mougey also emulates shades of Rose’s knack for keeping the media in the dark. While Mougey is forced to speak more than Rose, Mougey’s press conferences have been among some of the most boring and least insightful that I have ever watched from an NFL general manager. That’s intentional, though, and it’s perfect.
To boot, Mougey has the Jets running a tight ship. Going into the NFL draft, teams around the league were completely unaware of the Jets’ intentions. In fact, they successfully misled teams into believing they were favoring a different prospect than the one they preferred and ultimately chose.
Rose’s Knicks have kept the ship similarly tight. This past offseason, the Knicks executed multiple blockbuster trades that featured no build-up in the media.
Shifting the culture starts at the top. The Knicks nailed it with Rose, while the hire of Wesley as his right-hand man was also pivotal.
After appointing Wesley, the next step was to find the right coach to bring Rose’s vision to the court. In July, he found his man: Tom Thibodeau.
2. Head coach
To this day, questions remain about Thibodeau’s ability to raise a team’s ceiling. Over the next few weeks, he will have an opportunity to finally quell those doubts.
But Thibodeau’s ability to raise a team’s floor has never been questioned.
Thibodeau came up as an assistant in the late ’90s and early 2000s under Jeff Van Gundy, who consistently fielded elite defenses and tough-minded teams with the Knicks and Houston Rockets. He spent three more years as an assistant with the Boston Celtics, winning a championship ring and contributing to three more top-five defenses.
When he got his first shot as a head coach with the Chicago Bulls in 2010, Thibodeau took what he learned from his decades as an assistant and proved he could instill those traits in a team overnight. Taking over a franchise that had not won 50+ games or reached the conference finals since Michael Jordan was in town, Thibodeau led the Bulls (who went .500 the previous year) to 62 wins and an Eastern Conference Finals trip in his first season.
Derrick Rose’s injury in the following season capped the Bulls’ ceiling during Thibodeau’s tenure there, but the tenacious coach restored Chicago’s respectability, and he did it through a standard of physical play and dominant defense.
Chicago had the NBA’s best defensive rating from 2010-11 through 2014-15. Across five seasons under Thibodeau, the Bulls went 255-139 (.647), making five consecutive trips to the playoffs and earning four playoff series victories. That’s three more than Chicago had over the previous 12 seasons before Thibodeau’s arrival.
Thibodeau later led the Minnesota Timberwolves to the playoffs in 2017-18, ending a 13-season playoff drought. While that tenure ended poorly, Thibodeau again showed that his coaching style was ideal for walking in the door and establishing new standards in an organization where losing was the expectation.
The Knicks had tried and failed with multiple ambitious coaching options prior to Thibodeau. Phil Jackson pulled his longtime point guard, Derek Fisher, straight into the role one year after his retirement as a player. His next choice was former sharpshooter Jeff Hornacek, whose debut head coaching tenure in Phoenix started promisingly but quickly flamed out. Fisher and Hornacek were both colossal failures.
After Jackson’s exodus, Steve Mills appointed David Fizdale, who was best known for his long tenure as an assistant in Miami under Erik Spoelstra. Fizdale was coming off his first shot as an NBA head coach with the Memphis Grizzlies, which failed miserably, as he was canned just 19 games into his second season.
All of these attempts to find the next hotshot coach went up in flames. So Rose took it back to basics. Knowing the importance of reconstructing the standards and culture of the organization before they could think about building a championship-ready team, Rose went for the “boring,” “lower-ceiling” option in Thibodeau.
Thibs immediately turned the Knicks into the NBA’s third-ranked defense, leading them to their first playoff appearance in eight years. Thus, new standards were established, and the seeds were planted for New York to begin building toward legitimate contention.
The road has been rocky (featuring a wildly disappointing 2021-22 season), and nobody knows what the future holds. These next few weeks may just affirm that Thibodeau has done all he can for the Knicks, and that a new, more philosophically ambitious coach is required for them to take things to the next level.
But Thibodeau did what was needed to get this franchise out of the gutter.
The Jets need someone who can do the same thing. In Aaron Glenn, they may have found their man.
Glenn = Thibodeau?
Glenn offers many of the same traits that made Thibodeau the perfect floor-raiser to rescue the Knicks from the sewers. First and foremost, he offers the same type of personality that is at the core of Thibodeau’s success. Glenn is known as a tenacious, tough-minded coach, but one who can relate to players all the same.
This is a critical and underrated part of what makes Thibodeau such a consistent winner. Many misguided fans think of him as nothing more than a drill sergeant who shouts, pouts, and runs his players into the ground, but he is tremendous at relating to his players on a human level. Just look at his appearance on Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart’s “Roommates” podcast.
The players love this guy. Building that kinship earns Thibodeau the respect he needs to hold his players to high standards. If they didn’t love him, his act would wear thin – think of the many Bill Belichick minions who tried and failed with this approach in the NFL, like Brian Flores, Matt Patricia, and Joe Judge. Players have to like you before they will buy into a high-intensity coaching style.
At the same time, it is important to avoid going so far as to make the players love you. This was the Robert Saleh dillemma. Saleh was beloved among his players, but to a fault. His unwavering belief in players prevented him from establishing the accountability that was needed to change New York’s losing culture. Players who should have benched or demoted were allowed to continue playing the same roles. Saleh’s player-first culture caused the same mistakes to run rampant throughout his tenure.
A delicate balance is needed. Hold the players accountable, but don’t make them hate you. Develop a positive relationship with the players, but don’t forget that you’re their coach, not their friend.
Thibodeau nails it. Glenn is built to do the same.
In addition, Glenn’s background provides him with the experience he needs to succeed with this specific assignment. It is another parallel with Thibodeau.
As a player, Glenn witnessed Bill Parcells’ remarkable turnaround of the Jets in the late ’90s. Thibodeau learned under Van Gundy as he maintained the Knicks’ consistent title contention in the shadow of Pat Riley. Both men have witnessed what it takes to build a tough, physical, winning culture with the very same team they are tasked with leading.
3. Players
The last leg of the Knicks’ cultural shift comes down to the players themselves.
To win in New York, you need to have an even-keeled mentality. Those who yearn for the spotlight won’t make it here. Only the most “boring” of New York superstars have achieved championship-level success in the modern era.
The Yankees of the late ’90s and early 2000s embodied the mentality of their captain, Derek Jeter. Despite being the face of the winningest franchise in American professional sports, Jeter carried himself in a professional manner and never did anything to bring unwanted attention to the team. He is infamously boring as a personality.
Many of the team’s other core players, including Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada among others, embodied the same mentality. This team saved its flair for the field. Off of it, they were professional and workmanlike.
The Giants won a pair of Super Bowls behind Eli Manning, the antithesis of moxie. Manning has shown off his goofy personality in his media career, but as a player, he was excruciatingly mundane, giving the media nothing to work with. Those Giants teams flew under the radar, and it helped them pull off two of the most surprising Super Bowl runs in history.
Jalen Brunson has the makings of the next Jeter or Eli.
Throughout all of his record-breaking success in New York, Brunson’s public-facing approach never wavers. He remains professional and unsatisfied. While the streets of Gotham are torn apart by the euphoria of a long-suffering fanbase that treats each playoff win like a release from Arkham, Brunson sees the Knicks’ semifinals victory as nothing more than another step in the journey.
When showered with praise by sideline reporters, he takes no credit, redirecting it all toward his coaches and teammates.
The next piece of off-court drama involving Brunson will be the first. On the court, he puts his body on the line in ways that other superstars can only dream of, drawing charges on the regular like he’s a G-Leaguer desperate for any last way to impress NBA scouts.
After the Knicks were bounced from the 2024 playoffs, Brunson signed a four-year contract extension that included a $113 million pay cut from the maximum total he could have earned if he waited one more year to sign an extension. It allowed the Knicks to build the core that has them hosting Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
He is “The Captain,” and embodies the word in every sense.
The cultural shift of the Knicks’ roster all started with the signing of Brunson in 2022, and it trickles down from him. But if you want to establish a cultural identity, it must be held consistent throughout all of your roster moves. The Knicks have maintained this same cultural goal throughout all of their core additions in the Leon Rose era.
Josh Hart, who won a championship alongside Brunson at Villanova, carries the same blue-collar mentality that they both learned under Jay Wright.
OG Anunoby, the master of one-word answers and deadpan reactions to poster dunks, could not be less interested in anything that happens outside of the white lines.
Mikal Bridges is a no-excuses grinder who spits in the face of load-management culture, never missing a game in his NBA career and leading the league in minutes three times.
Karl-Anthony Towns brings back the old-school offensive tenacity that ’90s NBA fans yearn for. While he is one of the greatest three-point shooting big men of all time, Towns doesn’t settle. His desire to bully smaller defenders is what makes him such an unguardable force. Additionally, once known as a brutal defender, Towns has worked his way to becoming a respectable player on that end, aided by four years of development under Thibodeau.
General managers and coaches can yap to the media about culture until the cows come home, but it does not mean anything until they back it up with their roster moves. The Knicks have done it. Every core player on this team fits not only from an on-court standpoint, but from a culture standpoint.
Glenn and Darren Mougey must work diligently to achieve the same goal.
4. Owner doing their part
James Dolan was once known as one of the most intrusive and embarrassing owners in sports.
But an 8-year-old Knicks fan has probably never heard the man’s name.
It has been quite a while since Dolan’s name was in the news for something that directly related to the Knicks’ on-court product. Since dumping Jackson in 2017, Dolan has handed the keys to the basketball people and gotten out of the way.
The Jets’ owner should try a similar approach. Woody Johnson became a Class A meddler over the past few years, generating headlines for all the wrong reasons. He needs to take a page out of Dolan’s book. Sign the checks and get out of the way.
Team-building strategies
We dove into some of the culture-based elements of the Knicks’ turnaround. What can the Jets learn from a team-building perspective?
Target undervalued free agents with superstar ceilings
The Knicks aren’t where they are without Jalen Brunson. Yet, in the eyes of everyone outside of New York, Brunson was never supposed to be this type of player.
Brunson signed a four-year, $104 million contract to become the Knicks’ franchise point guard in 2022. At the time, his salary ranked 50th in the NBA. He was paid to be a good starter, not the face of the franchise.
Yet, many fans still deemed this an overpay. It was considered a hefty salary for a player who was only averaging 11.9 points and 3.7 assists in his career, with career-bests of 16.3 and 4.8 in his most recent season.
New York was betting on Brunson’s upside. Across four seasons in Dallas, Brunson displayed star-level potential through his efficiency and performance in games where he was trusted to lead the offense. There were legitimate reasons to believe that Brunson’s production would explode once he was given the keys to a team.
With the Mavericks, Brunson shot 49.4% from the field, 37.3% from three, 54.4% from two, and 82.3% from the free-throw line. His effective field goal percentage was 54.8%, which is star-caliber stuff; for perspective, it’s slightly higher than Kyrie Irving’s career average (54.0%) and multiple ticks ahead of Damian Lillard (52.3%).
The catch was that Brunson did it in a small role. He started just 127 of his 277 games in Dallas, playing 24.7 minutes per game and attempting 9.3 field goals per game. It was a gamble for New York to pay him like a star before he proved that he could sustain his efficiency in a larger role.
However, Brunson already showed he could do it when given the opportunity. In the 2021-22 season, Brunson played 20 regular season and playoff games without Luka Doncic, the Mavericks’ ball-dominant superstar. In those games, Brunson averaged 22.2 points and 7.2 assists with an effective field goal percentage of 53.6%.
Lo and behold, Brunson has taken that same productivity and maintained it on a full-time basis with the Knicks. In New York, Brunson is averaging 26.4 points and 6.7 assists on 54.7% effective shooting – nearly identical to his 54.8% in Dallas. The only difference is that he takes more than twice as many shots per game: 19.3 as a Knick compared to 9.3 as a Mav.
This is rare. Efficiency is easier to attain when you shoot less. You get easier shots off the attention demanded by your teammates. When you’re the focal point, you’re supposed to be less efficient, because you are the center of attention.
However, Brunson was an unusually enticing bet to sustain his efficiency because he already proved he could do it when given the chance. Yes, it was a small sample, but it’s not as if he merely saw his scoring spike because he took more shots. He took more shots and was equally as efficient as he was in a complementary role. This suggested that Brunson was truly capable of exploding if given the chance to lead a team.
New York saw that and jumped on the opportunity to buy low. Well, it wasn’t seen as a “buy low” by many at the time, but relative to the superstar ceiling that he displayed beneath his seemingly unimpressive box score stats (analyzed by the casuals), it certainly was a buy-low.
This approach is applicable to any team sport. The Jets should look to copy it – in fact, they already did with their biggest signing of the 2025 offseason.
In some ways, New York’s Justin Fields signing is reminiscent of the Brunson signing. Both teams handed a surprisingly large contract to a player who they believe can be the face of the team, even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it yet.
There are some major differences, though. Brunson was very efficient as a backup, and the Knicks wanted to see if he could translate that to a larger role. Fields has already had multiple chances to lead a team, and he struggled in the role. What the Jets are hoping is that Fields, who has elite physical tools and an elite pedigree dating back to high school, can be a late bloomer who puts it all together when he finds the right situation.
These players are very different in terms of the backgrounds they carried to their new homes in New York, but the main idea is the same: buy low to bet on a superstar ceiling. Whether or not it works with Fields, the Jets should continue using this approach in free agency, and not just at quarterback.
Nailing these types of signings is critical from a value perspective. When you have a star player who outperforms his contract to an extreme degree, it is a cheat code. You are left with a plethora of surplus cap space to improve the rest of the team. If you have to pay market value for your superstars, it becomes difficult to build the team around them.
Prioritize player fits
Scheme fit is a critical aspect of team building, both in basketball and football. More important, though, is the fit between players.
The Knicks have done a nice job of building a team with players who complement one another.
Putting Karl-Anthony Towns alongside Jalen Brunson was a smart move to capitalize on both players’ skill sets. With Towns’ long-range shooting and Brunson’s dangerous downhill scoring off screens, they projected as a nightmarish duo to defend in pick-and-rolls, and that came to fruition.
OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges are perfect complementary players to place around superstar scorers. They both excel as corner three-point shooters and are high-percentage shooters inside the arc because of their abilities as cutters. These skills make them fantastic options to capitalize on the attention demanded by Brunson and Towns.
Furthermore, Anunoby and Bridges are fantastic defenders with the length to guard multiple positions, allowing them to fit seamlessly in any lineup on the defensive end. This lets the Knicks mix up their coverages in creative ways. Brunson and Towns can be exploited on defense, but the Knicks can mitigate that by putting Bridges on a primary ball handler or Anunoby on a big, moving Brunson and Towns away from the action.
You can’t just throw a bunch of talented players together and expect it to work. The Phoenix Suns’ core of Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, and Bradley Beal sounds fun, but they don’t complement each other well enough to facilitate team success. Phoenix is one of many teams that tried and failed to cram together a flashy Big Three, only to fail because they overlooked the congruency of those players.
In some ways, the Jets fell victim to this in the Aaron Rodgers era. They landed the superstar quarterback and tried their best to surround him with as many pieces as possible. It all looked wonderful on paper, but the result was a 5-12 record. Whether it was Rodgers’ poor chemistry with Garrett Wilson and Mike Williams or Haason Reddick’s fit in the Jets’ defense (and cap sheet), the whole was less than the sum of the parts.
Going forward, the Jets’ new regime must prioritize player-to-player synergy when building the roster. It’s not about maximizing the cumulative talent on the roster. It’s also not about forcing a bunch of guys who seem like scheme fits; Phil Jackson ruined the Knicks by trying too hard to build a team full of guys who could run his triangle offense.
Rather, the goal is to build a unit of players who can feed off of one another’s strengths and weaknesses to produce the best collective output.
Believe in developing your own players if you see the vision
The Knicks’ backup center spot was a debacle throughout the 2024-25 season. Multiple players failed to adequately fill the role, and it cost the Knicks some games. Going into the trade deadline, New York’s lack of depth, particularly in the frontcourt, was considered the main roadblock holding them back from championship contention.
New York could have went out and traded more assets (of which they have few remaining) for a backup center at the trade deadline. Instead, they bet on their in-house solution: Mitchell Robinson.
Robinson had ankle surgery in the offseason and would be out for an unknown duration to begin the 2024-25 season. Considering Robinson’s long-standing history with nagging injuries, it was difficult to know when, or if, he’d be back. If he did come back, he would have little time to ramp up for the playoffs, and it would be hard to trust that he could even stay on the court for long until getting injured again.
Despite all of this, the Knicks felt that betting on Robinson was a better choice than making a move at the deadline. They moved forward without adding any new players, and Robinson eventually returned on February 28. He would play 17 games before the playoffs.
In the postseason, Robinson has established himself as the X-factor that New York missed in the regular season. Playing 18.5 minutes per game off the bench, Robinson is averaging 6.8 rebounds per game and playing lockdown defense. The Knicks have a net rating of 11.9 with Robinson on the floor and -4.9 with him off; his 16.8 on-off differential is the largest on the team.
Robinson’s emergence displays the value of believing in your own players. The Knicks had every opportunity to adhere to fans’ panic and make an aggressive move to satiate them. Instead, they remained patient and invested in their player.
The disparity in confidence makes sense. Knicks fans couldn’t see Robinson rehabbing each day. They did not know when he’d be back or whether they could trust him when he did. Perhaps the Knicks did not know those things, either, at least not definitively. But they could see the human – and his mindset. And that was enough to inspire faith.
New York believed Robinson could change the team’s fortunes at a time when it would have been preposterous for an outsider to suggest that. So they stuck to their guns, trusting their medical staff, their coaches, and most importantly, Robinson himself. The Knicks wouldn’t trust Robinson the way that they did if they didn’t see it in his heart that he was determined to come back strong and make an impact.
This, though, is the culture that Leon Rose has built. It’s a family. Trust flows from each branch of the organization to the next, from the owner, to the front office, to the coaching staff, and to the players. Belief is embedded in the fabric of Seventh Avenue as deeply as the orange and blue shades that rambunctiously adorn the latest Sidetalk video.
It’s up to Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey to build the same dynamic in Florham Park.
