How Nico Harrison helped Jalen Brunson and the Knicks win the championship

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The New York Knicks were able to get their franchise player in Jalen Brunson.

Then came the hard part: keeping him healthy. That task is where the story of the 2025-26 NBA champion Knicks really begins.

We can point to 2022 — the summer in which the Knicks swiped Brunson away from the Dallas Mavericks — as the genesis of their magical run to the Larry O’Brien trophy. But in order to win it all, they didn’t just need to get their guy, they had to make sure he stayed in one piece, peaking at the right time. The most unsolvable puzzle in the sport — injury prevention — is the area in which the Knicks proved most victorious.

Yes, this is what it looks like when the puzzle pieces fit perfectly together. The Knicks uncorked, statistically, the most dominant postseason ever, outscoring opponents by a whopping 283 points over 16 games — the largest playoff point differential in NBA history.

But the fact that some puzzle pieces were available in the first place, credit goes to one man: Nico Harrison. Not just because Harrison let Brunson go in free agency in 2022.

The former Dallas Mavericks head of basketball operations also made a critical mistake that helped New York end its 53-year title drought: He fired perhaps the best injury-prevention mastermind in the sport, Casey Smith, who landed with the Knicks in 2024.

In the wee hours after the Knicks won the championship on Saturday, Smith, the team’s VP of Sports Medicine grabbed his phone and typed out a public message on X, tagging not only Brunson but also Knicks senior athletic trainer Heather Mau and Knicks shooting coach Peter Patton.

“Shout out to my real ones,” Smith wrote. “They said we weren’t a good fit for their culture. Said we weren’t good enough in our roles. Peter Patton, Heather Mau, Jalen. We did and will continue to do the work.”

I’ll connect the dots for you. Smith and those three Knicks staffers were let go by Harrison’s regime in Dallas in recent years.

It’s hard to overstate Smith’s impact in New York. When he took over the Knicks’ medical team almost two years ago to the day, the Knicks were injured so often, the futility reached almost comical levels. And now, they were the healthiest team, the last one standing.

Before and after Casey Smith

In 2023-24, the Knicks ranked among the most injury-riddled teams in the NBA; they had also fallen prey to injury at the worst possible times. By the end of the season, against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference semifinals, Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson and Bojan Bogdanović were already unavailable. But it was OG Anunoby’s DNPs that hurt the team the most.

After Anunoby was acquired at the trade deadline, the Knicks surged to a 23-5 record with the former Raptors wing. In Game 2 against the Pacers, he was putting the final touches on a masterful career-best performance, scoring 28 points in just 28 minutes and helping the Knicks take a 2-0 lead. Then his left hamstring gave out and he missed the next four games. Anunoby started Game 7, but was mercifully taken out early with his hammy in such bad shape. If that wasn’t enough, Brunson broke his shooting hand in Game 7 and didn’t finish the game either.

That’s all a distant memory, thanks largely to the guiding hand of Smith. While Anunoby suffered a hamstring injury against Philadelphia in the second round this postseason, he returned after a two-game absence, ready to play some of the best basketball of his career.

In 2023-24, the season before Smith came aboard, the Knicks ranked 10th in salary lost due to injury, with almost $36 million worth of salary on the shelf, according to Spotrac.com tracking. In Smith’s first season running the show, that fell to 23rd in the NBA. This season, it dropped all the way to 29th.

When Dallas reporters last year brought up Smith, whom Dallas legend Dirk Nowitzki calls one of his best friends, Harrison scoffed.

"You bringing up Casey [Smith] is like almost, it's kind of a joke," Harrison said, according to ESPN. Smith was fired over Zoom while he was tending to his ill mother in Ohio.

Without Smith, Dallas ranked fourth-highest in salary lost due to injury last season and second-highest this season.

In Smith’s first year on the job in New York, his staff was recognized by the National Basketball Athletic Trainers Association (NBATA) as the Training Staff of the Year. For an encore, they won the championship.

Injuries driving league parity

As the Knicks celebrated their title on the Frost Bank Center court, the ABC broadcast showed a graphic that depicted the annual turnover at the top of the league.

The upshot: the NBA has crowned a different champion in each of the last eight seasons, culminating in the Knicks’ win on Saturday.

Observers will often point to the league’s focus on institutional parity, and the collective bargaining rules that flatten the playing field. But it’s also a story about the championship tax that has gnawed away at title-winning teams.

The Oklahoma City Thunder were the latest team to get snakebitten by injuries. OKC star Jalen Williams played only four of the team’s 15 games this postseason dealing with a nagging hamstring injury. The team’s second-leading scorer in the playoffs, Ajay Mitchell, didn’t play in the last four games of the Western Conference finals, nursing a leg injury suffered in Game 3 with the Thunder up 2-1.

If OKC didn’t lose those two key players to injury, the NBA Finals might have gone differently. Following their seven-game series in the West finals, the San Antonio Spurs wilted in clutch moments and lost in five close, hard-fought games. Maybe a fully healthy Thunder team finds answers the Spurs could not.

But that’s the point. The Knicks were healthy and the others were not.

Not the Thunder.

Not the Pacers, who after beating the Knicks for the East title last year, finished with the second-worst record in the NBA in the aftermath of Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles tear.

Not the Minnesota Timberwolves, who were without Donte DiVincenzo (Achilles tear) in the Western Conference semifinals and Anthony Edwards, who missed two games this postseason with an ankle injury and started the Spurs series coming off the bench.

The Knicks capitalized this postseason, running the gassed Spurs off the floor in the most demanding moments.

Once again, the healthiest team was the last one standing. Though Brunson left in Game 1 of the series with a knee injury, he returned and never missed a playoff game despite the Spurs’ bigs landing on or landing below Brunson’s feet throughout the series. Nonetheless, Brunson started and finished each of the 19 Knicks playoff games. And so did Karl-Anthony Towns, the Knicks’ other star player, who led both teams in plus-minus at plus-44.

It was the same story as the Thunder last year. OKC’s top seven players didn’t miss a single game due to injury in the postseason run, while Haliburton ruptured the biggest tendon in his body in the first quarter of Game 7 with the score knotted at 16-16. The Thunder took advantage of injury luck going their way, outscoring the Pacers by 12 the rest of the way.

Although every champ during this eight-year stretch is a different team, there’s a commonality that connects them all with the exception of the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks: perfect star health.

The Spurs entered the Finals with three games lost due to injury by their stars in the postseason (De’Aaron Fox two; Victor Wembanyama one), but the Knicks’ two stars didn’t suffer a single DNP in the run. Same goes for the Thunder last year, as well as the previous three champs before them.

Though Giannis Antetokounmpo missed two games in the Bucks’ 2021 title run, so did Chris Paul on the Phoenix Suns’ side, leveling out the All-Star outages.

In 2020, the Lakers ran the table with LeBron James and Anthony Davis DNP-less, while their opponent, the Miami Heat, saw Bam Adebayo miss Games 2 and 3 of the Finals with neck and shoulder injuries. Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant famously suffered season-ending injuries in the 2019 NBA Finals, paving the way for the Raptors to shock the world — with zero DNPs for Kawhi Leonard, Marc Gasol, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam (Most Improved Player that season) the entire postseason.

The Knicks made a bet that the star power of Brunson and Towns would be enough as long as they were surrounded by the right pieces. Anunoby, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges were added to that eventual championship core along with Landry Shamet and Jose Alvarado. Their talent and cohesion certainly helped drive the Knicks’ championship, but their availability may have been the most important factor. Those pieces stayed healthier this time around, notably by playing less.

Less is more

Tom Thibodeau enjoyed immense success as the head coach of the Knicks, pulling them out of mediocrity and into title contention. But if there was one knock on Thibodeau, it was that he ran his players into the ground with high minutes and little regard for bench production.

It got to the point that Bridges, who famously has never missed a game in his college or NBA career, asked Thibodeau to pull back on the minutes last season.

"Sometimes it's not fun on the body," Bridges told Stefan Bondy of the New York Post. "You'll want that as a coach, but also talked to him a little bit knowing that we've got a good enough team where our bench guys can come in and we don't need to play 48 (minutes), 47.”

In other words, less is more.

"We've got a lot of good guys on this team that can take away minutes,” Bridges said. “Which helps the defense, helps the offense, helps tired bodies being out there and giving up all these points. It helps just keeping fresh bodies out there."

To help keep bodies fresh, the team parted ways with Thibodeau and hired Mike Brown, who took a much different approach to the Knicks’ vaunted starting lineup. Last regular season, the starting lineup of Brunson, Hart, Bridges, Anunoby and Towns led the NBA with 940 minutes played, a whopping 226 minutes more than the next-most used five-man lineup. The Knicks played 19.6 minutes per game with that exact quintet on the floor, also a league-high, according to NBA.com/stats.

But this season, Brown’s coaching staff, with input from Smith’s training staff, went the other way with an eye to having enough left in the tank to play at the highest levels.

In training camp, Brown told reporters that he learned his lesson in Golden State with those veteran star players needing time to recover.

“The biggest thing is trying to make sure you watch everybody’s minutes instead of trying to chase games," Brown told the New York Post. "There might be some games where maybe you throw the towel in early. It’s important to win, but you also have to understand, ‘Hey, I want to keep this guy’s minutes here, this guy’s minutes here, this guy’s minutes here, instead of trying to extend everybody’s minutes. Because if the season is long, we don’t want anybody worn out by the end.”

As the NBA Finals showed, they certainly weren’t worn out by the end. The starting lineup’s minutes fell from 940 to 541 in the 2025-26 regular season. Likewise, the minutes per game for the starting five together plummeted from 19.6 to a more normal 12.6, relying more on reserves like Shamet, Miles McBride and Jordan Clarkson. At the deadline, the team also added another Brunson backup, Alvarado, to keep him ready for the postseason grind.

The availability of Captain Clutch

No one can argue with the results. The process was also deliberate and exacting. The team focused on player health knowing it wasn’t enough to have Brunson, the man they call Captain Clutch. They needed to keep him on the floor. And sure enough, he shined brightest in crunchtime when fatigue hits the hardest, earning him Finals MVP for his hometown Knicks.

“I'm not going to lie to you,” Brunson said after the game. “I'm hurting right now.”

But he powered through. When it comes to player health, the cliché “availability is the best ability” is a cliché for a reason. But thanks to Nico Harrison, the fact that Brunson and Smith’s staff were available at all is perhaps the Knicks’ superpower.

There’s one other feat to mention. With minutes managed throughout the season, Brunson erupted for 22 points in clutch situations in this series against San Antonio. On the Finals stage, that’s the most points scored in the final five minutes with the game within five points since 2011. It was done by a 33-year-old Dirk Nowitzki, who scored 26 clutch points for Dallas in its title run.

The team’s athletic trainer was none other than Casey Smith. To which Knicks fans can make a toast and join the chorus of Los Angeles Lakers fans by saying three words:

“Thank you, Nico.”

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