Watch a single home game and you’ll see eras blend together more seamlessly than they do for any other team. may be leading the team on the floor, but Carmelo Anthony, Stephon Marbury, Patrick Ewing and countless alumni are in the stands supporting them from the sidelines. That connection is as meaningful to the former players as it is to the existing Knicks. “They make us all feel a part of it,” Ewing told . “Like we’re a part of them.”
No one but the players themselves can truly understand how meaningful that must feel. Every Knicks player since the 1970s felt the weight of the championship drought that has dogged the team since 1973. Their legacies are all, to an extent, defined by their failures to end it. They all got to do their part in support of this team, but when the dust settled in San Antonio on Saturday night, it was and ending the 53-year drought In earning it, he stands above almost every Knick in history. He did what they couldn’t.
Well, most of them, anyway. The greatest Knick of them all, Walt Frazier, contributes to that historical layering. Though he spent the postseason in the stands, he is the team’s iconic television analyst and is therefore the single greatest tether between Knicks eras. Even before the title, he raised Brunson to the level of icons past. “He’s got the tenacity of Willis Reed and he’s got my cool,” Frazier told .
Frazier has spent generations watching the legends who watched Brunson. Many of them tried to match his place in team history, to bring the Knicks the championship glory that he did. They all came up short. Now, for the first time since the end of his playing days, Frazier and Reed have a true peer in team history. Brunson is to the current Knicks what they were to the legendary teams of the 1970s. And that raises a question: 53 years after their last championship, could Brunson be considered the greatest Knick ever? .
Whether or not you think Brunson is already there, or if he can get there, depends on your definition of the term. Let’s break it down.
At least by accomplishment, no Knick has peaked as high as Willis Reed. He is the only player in franchise history to win MVP, doing so in 1970. Though Defensive Player of the Year did not yet exist at that point, he could be considered the unofficial winner as the First-Team All-Defense center.
The raw stats don’t jump off the page. You won’t see 21-point, 14-rebound MVP seasons in the modern league. But the few advanced metrics we do have from back then support the notion that Reed peaked higher than later Knicks. He generated .227 Win Shares per 48 minutes, for instance, more than either Brunson, Ewing, Anthony or Bernard King at any point in their careers.
Yet Reed didn’t even lead his team on that front. Frazier did with .236 Win Shares per 48 minutes. Brunson’s 2023-24 season cleared both in terms of PER at 23.4, but otherwise, we don’t have many effective ways to compare numbers across eras. All we have is the acclaim they earned in their respective eras. Brunson has never been a First-Team All-NBA Selection. Reed made it once. Frazier made it four times. As a regular-season player, at least, Brunson wasn’t held in quite the same regard. All three were playoff heroes, so it’s not as though one gets a considerable boost over the others on that front.
If there’s a differentiator here, it’s on defense. Brunson is the best scorer of the three, but is a weak link defensively based on his size in a more sophisticated league. Frazier was one of the greatest defensive guards of all time. Reed was a defensive star at his peak. They obviously have him beat in terms of longevity, both having played 10 years in New York and won two championships to Brunson’s four years and lone title.
If your barometer is simply “the best player who has ever worn a Knicks uniform,” for now, the answer is probably Frazier or Reed, and with Brunson in his prime now, he is unlikely to improve enough to pass them purely on talent. If you’re merely stacking accomplishments, their longevity gives them the advantage as well, though Brunson can close it. He might win another championship. He probably will wind up playing as long in New York as they did. He hasn’t yet, but those All-Star and All-NBA berths will pile up over time.
That second championship is the major legacy distinction here, but it’s also where the argument for Brunson starts to form. He probably isn’t a better player than Reed or Frazier, but if your measure of “greatest Knick” is something more ephemeral like “most meaningful player in Knicks history,” that’s where the weight of Brunson’s individual title starts to come into play.
If you’ve ever wondered how Bill Russell won 11 championships, the place to start is the league he played in. The he joined had eight teams. The one he left had 14. The more teams competing with you for a championship, the harder that championship is to win.
In that respect, there’s a pretty straightforward argument for Brunson’s single title holding as much weight as the two Reed and Frazier won. Their first came in a 14-team NBA and their second came in a 17-team NBA. Brunson’s Knicks were one of 30 teams, so they beat 29 competitors. Reed and Frazier beat 13 teams in 1970 and 16 teams in 1973. Add those numbers up and you get… 29. It’s funny how these things line up.
And then there’s the weight of the specific championships won within the broader context of the franchise. The first Reed-Frazier championship came 24 years after the birth of the franchise. A 24-year drought is meaningful, but it’s not half as long as the one that followed. It’s not nearly as meaningful, either. Frazier and Reed didn’t have to shoulder the burden that came with all of the losing that followed them.
That’s the real argument here. The championships Reed and Frazier won were, well, normal championships. Perfectly meaningful. Certainly historically resonant, particularly the 1970 championship that ended with the “here comes Willis” game in which Reed played 27 Game 7 minutes despite dealing with a serious leg injury that could have kept him sidelined entirely. But ultimately not especially out of the ordinary in the context of championship history. The Knicks were a 60-win team with the MVP and two other All-Stars on their side. They profiled as a champion.
The 2026 Knicks didn’t. They are the first champion since the 2004 to win it all without a single player who has ever made First-Team All-NBA. They are just the ninth No. 3 seed ever to win it all. They didn’t draft a single starter. The 2020 are the only other champion since the inception of the draft who can say the same, and it doesn’t mean nearly as much considering they signed arguably the greatest player in NBA history as a free agent two years before. Brunson is not . He didn’t just lead one of the most anomalous champions in NBA history. He’s almost entirely responsible for its existence.
If you’re looking for the single differentiator in Brunson’s direction, it’s this. Reed and Frazier were standard Knicks draft picks. They had no say in becoming Knicks or in who joined them in New York. They grew into icons, but they functioned within the team like almost any other great player.
It’s a bit sacrilegious given the chemistry and ball movement those Knicks were known for, but if you replace any single player on that team with a similar talent, the Knicks may have still won those titles. Swap Frazier out for Jerry West or Reed out for a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Knicks would still have been a great, probably championship-caliber team.
But Brunson chose to be a Knick. He did so at a time when a number of more prominent stars, most notably LeBron James and , had passed up the opportunity to wear blue and orange. That choice has intangible value. He willingly took up the challenge that so many more famous players declined and made it his mission to bring the Knicks a trophy that only Frazier and Reed had. It may not make Brunson a better player than either of them, but it underscores everything that followed. He made the 2026 New York Knicks. He could not simply be replaced by another similarly gifted point guard. The Knicks were built entirely in his image.
They traded for all of his college buddies for crying out loud. He started the Nova Knicks. Do the Knicks target or without Brunson in place? Remember, the Knicks needed to trade for . The only Knick starter whose place on the team was not in some way influenced by Brunson’s presence was … with whom he shares an agent, Sam Rose.
And then there’s the discount. Brunson extended for $156 million over four years in the summer of 2024 when waiting just one more year could have netted him a projected $269 million over five. He did so in part to help give the Knicks the flexibility they needed to build this roster. At a bare minimum, it kept them below the second apron for the 2025-26 season, which allowed them to acquire at the trade deadline. Alvarado became an essential figure in New York’s title run. Bigger picture, the Knicks might not have felt comfortable taking on Towns’ supermax contract if they were also paying Brunson fair market value. His financial sacrifice is what allowed the Knicks to build a championship team.
That alone kills the “replace him with an analogous player” experiment. The Knicks famously tried to trade for in the summer they landed Brunson. He didn’t take a discount when he extended in Cleveland in 2024 and there’s no indication he plans to do so if he extends again this offseason. Most stars don’t. Brunson is, again, an anomaly.
That, more than anything else, is his argument as the greatest Knick of all time. He likely isn’t the best player ever to wear the uniform. But he probably meant more to the championship he won than Reed or Frazier did to theirs, and the championship he won, considering both the size of the league he won it in and the generational agony that preceded it, is probably the most meaningful banner the Knicks will ever hang. That is, unless they go another 53 years before some new Knick wins it all and makes a run at all three of them.
