TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — Time and again on Monday morning, during a season-opening press conference at the New York Knicks’ practice facility, head coach Mike Brown emphasized how important it will be for his team to uphold the standard that led the team to the 2026 NBA championship.
As the Knicks open training camp and begin the process of defending their NBA title, Brown repeatedly said the team cannot afford any slippage — in their energy and focus, in their commitment to sacrifice and connectedness, in their willingness to hold one another accountable.
“First and foremost, we have to be able to look in the mirror and make sure that we’re doing what we should be doing for everybody in the locker room — for ourselves and everybody else in that locker room,” Brown said. “If we do that, the Knicks faithful will be taken care of, as long as we take care of ourselves first.”
The biggest questions hanging over the Media Day session for a Knicks team seeking to defend a championship for the first time in 53 years, though, focused primarily on whether the team will take care of several of its core players, in the form of multi-year contract extensions.
Karl-Anthony Towns, the unicorn stretch-5 who played perhaps the best basketball of his life during New York’s run to a title, has one fully guaranteed season left on his contract, and holds a $61 million player option for the 2027-28 campaign. Josh Hart, whose boundless energy and hard-charging two-way work helped fuel the Knicks night after night, also has one fully guaranteed year left, plus a $22.4 million team option for 2027-28.
Karl-Anthony Towns addresses the media Monday in Tarrytown, New York.
(Caleb Bowlin via Getty Images)
Both are eligible for extensions of those contracts: up to four years and $272 million for Towns, and up to four years and $132 million for Hart. Both made clear Monday that they would very much like to secure those extensions, sooner rather than later.
“I mean, I’ve made it known,” Towns said. “You know, I wanna play here. Been a fan since I was young, and so I would like to get one done, of course. That’s obvious, you know? I would like to get it done so I can step on the court and feel [as] comfortable as possible.”
“You always want to get it done, kind of as soon as possible, obviously, because you don’t want that trickling into the season,” Hart said. “Because whenever there’s uncertainty, there’s gonna be a lot of questions, there’s gonna be a lot of rumors. At a human level, sometimes that can wear people down, and it can affect how you go out and handle business on a day-to-day basis, just some of that uncertainty.”
Despite those desires, though, both starters enter training camp and the title defense without having inked long-term deals. Reports circulated last week that Towns and the Knicks were far apart on the terms of a new contract. And from the sound of Hart’s comments on Monday, he’s not particularly close, either.
“Do I think it’s gonna get done [before the start of the season]? There hasn’t really been much movement or conversation with that, so I don’t think it will get done,” Hart said. “But I would love for it to get done. Once the season starts, I’ll probably have that mentality of, ‘I don’t really want to deal with this, I want to try and focus on playing the season.'”
All things being equal, you’d imagine the Knicks would prefer not to harsh the vibes of last year’s triumph by heading into a new season with two of their five starters — plus key reserve Miles McBride, who’s entering the final season of his bargain three-year, $13 million contract and is also eligible for a new deal — feeling ill at ease about their long-term standing within the organization. (McBride wasn’t one of the players the Knicks made available Monday. He recently told Kristian Winfield of the New York Daily News that he’s “a little disappointed” he doesn’t yet have a deal done, but that he intends to be professional and perform while he waits.)
“I’m sure there will probably be a little extra weight to the jersey,” Hart said. “You don’t know the certainty of your situation and obviously it affects home life. There are certain things that you might want to do, but you’re like, ‘I can’t, because I have no idea what the situation will be in two months, three months, four months, in a year, if I’m gonna be here or not.’ You don’t know. But hopefully, like I said, I’m a Knick. I’d love to be a Knick and I love the city.”
All else isn’t equal, though. The Knicks reportedly will not offer Towns or Hart the full boat, preferring instead to try to get both players to take something below their respective maximum salaries — as OG Anunoby and Jalen Brunson did in 2024, and as Mikal Bridges did in 2025 — to try to preserve as much financial flexibility as possible in the years ahead, especially with both Brunson and Anunoby eligible for extensions of their own next summer.
As much as Hart, Towns and McBride love the city — and as much as the city loves them for their contributions to last spring’s magical run — the Knicks now find themselves facing down the same financial pressures that have helped induce owners and front offices to splinter championship teams across the league in recent years.
“That’s why we haven’t had a repeat [champion] for the last eight years,” Hart said. “Because of that second apron and because of that [collective bargaining agreement].”
Four days after the Knicks finished off their five-game victory over the San Antonio Spurs, owner James L. Dolan went on New York radio station WFAN and made it clear that he did not intend to approve an offseason spending plan that would increase the team’s total salary commitments for the 2026-27 season past $222 million — about $21 million above the projected luxury tax line, a threshold called the “second apron.”
Dolan called the prospect of spending into the second apron something “that you’d have to be, you know, suicidal to do,” since it not only imposes a higher tax rate on high-spending teams, but also strips away team-building and roster-management tools like access to salary-cap exceptions, the ability to aggregate players’ salaries in trades, the option of sending cash to another team to grease the skids on a swap, and the freedom to acquire players in sign-and-trade deals, among other restrictions. Combine the financial penalties with the removal of roster-building tools, and the second apron becomes a very big, very scary boogeyman for teams intent on spending big to retain a championship-caliber roster. (A cynic might say it also becomes a very handy excuse/explanation for ownership groups looking to justify some amount of belt-tightening.)
Dolan’s radio-appearance edict reportedly “blindsided” the Knicks front office, which wanted to go over the second apron after patiently and meticulously building a championship roster. Instead, New York spent its summer maneuvering to stay below that $222 million line — and, in the process, lost backup center Mitchell Robinson, who signed a three-year, $47.4 million deal with the Boston Celtics.
Watching Robinson, a critical reserve and the franchise’s longest-tenured player, leave to join a rival for a deal that the Knicks restricted themselves from being able to offer or match, stung New York’s starters.
“That hurt,” Towns said.
“Yeah, definitely tough,” superstar guard Jalen Brunson said. “That’s my guy.”
“I was heartbroken with that one, dawg,” Hart said.
If the Knicks were committed to staying below the second apron, there was no way they were going to be able to afford Robinson. Even so, Towns said, his departure came as an unwelcome shock.
“I was very surprised,” Towns said. “I was very surprised that Mitch wasn’t gonna be back here with us. I think all of us were. It was a surprise to everybody. I thought something would get done there.”
It didn’t, so now Robinson plays in Boston, replaced by Andre Drummond, who will make about $12.5 million dollars less, helping the Knicks stay under the second apron this season. It’s unclear whether Dolan’s mandate to duck it will extend into the years ahead, too.
“If you asked me to give you three facts or two facts about the second aprons, I can’t do it,” Brown said. “I have no interest in that. I’m not trying to punt, but it is what it is. I don’t follow that. [Team president] Leon [Rose] trusts me with the stuff on the court. And I trust him with that type of stuff. So whatever his thought is, or his focus is, I’m all on board with it.”
In the absence of clarity on that organizational focus, though, it’s natural for players without long-term security to start wondering about where they fit in. That seems like the kind of thing that could prove very distracting to a team trying to do something as difficult as repeating as an NBA champion. Brown said he invites his players to speak on the issues they might be dealing with rather than trying to brush them under the rug.
“You know, we try to talk about everything — we don’t want to leave any elephants in the room,” Brown said. “But you know, that’s something that Leon and his group, they’ve been really good at, and some would argue be the best in the NBA at. And so I have a lot of faith in them and, you know, the players and the agents — whoever’s involved, I’m not involved in it — that they’ll figure it out. And our group has done a fantastic job of understanding that, you know, we can only control what we can control.”
With the East still running through Madison Square Garden, even after a number of conference rivals reloaded this offseason, Brown wants Towns, Hart, McBride and all the rest of his players to be able to put business aside and focus on the task at hand on the floor. Brunson expressed confidence they’d be able to do so.
“Yeah, I feel like guys should be able to do that,” Brunson said. “I think we’re all professionals in that way.”
At that point, though, the captain paused.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “See how we approach this. But I have the utmost faith in these guys — well, KAT, I don’t know about Josh, we’ll see how he acts. But we’ll see.”
Brunson’s jokes aside, Hart — a veteran of nine NBA seasons and four separate trades — has been around long enough and seen enough to know that if things don’t get done early, you can find yourself staring at the calendar, counting down the days and minutes until the trade deadline.
“We know that at the end of the day, it’s a business,” Hart said. “You have situations like that and you never know what’s going to happen. But for me, as long as I wear this jersey, I’m gonna play as hard as I can for my guys and this city, and hopefully we can figure that out. But we know it’s a business, and we know if some of these things aren’t figured out by February, it might be a different conversation.”
The glass-half-full take: Towns, Hart and McBride are all locked in for this season on a Knicks team that returns nine of its top-10 minutes-getters from the title squad, and should once again be excellent. The conversations on long-term deals can continue, too. SNY’s Ian Begley reports that the Knicks have communicated they definitely want Towns and Hart around for the long haul; depending on the price points at which they can make that happen, perhaps there will be a pathway to bringing McBride back, too (though the math appears to be tight).
“I would hope that that stuff gets done,” Hart said. “At the end of the day, we’re humans, and I think what sometimes gets lost is that we are people — that we all have lives and things that we have to deal with and fix. I wish I could sit there and say it wouldn’t have any weight or any bearing, but you never know. Some people can handle it great and some people can really struggle with it and that can kill their performance. I hope it gets done, but we’ll see.”
And being forced into wait-and-see mode isn’t fun — even while one of the things you’re waiting for is your championship ring.
“I think in this situation, there is no comfortability to be had,” Towns said. “So that’s probably the best answer to that.”
Read the full article here
