Knicks and Spurs: Could Today's NBA Teams Replicate Their Unique Roster-Building Success?

The NBA Finals only includes two teams, but their 28 eliminated counterparts still have to pay attention. The Finals don't just determine who will win a given season's championship, but showcase the strategies everyone else can theoretically attempt to replicate in pursuing future titles. There are usually lessons to be learned from the two NBA Finalists, things that other teams may not be able to emulate perfectly, but strategies that may be applicable in other ways.

On the surface, that just doesn't seem to be the case this year. The San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks are about as anomalous as NBA Finalists get.

It took a historic run of good luck to get the Spurs here. They won perhaps the most important lottery in NBA history to land Victor Wembanyama in 2023... and then grabbed the No. 4 and No. 2 picks in the next two drafts afterward. San Antonio's lottery luck is now literally impossible to replicate. The NBA reformed the lottery in May , and one of the changes was that teams could no longer pick in the top five of three consecutive drafts.

What New York did may not technically be impossible to replicate, but we're not far off, either. They are set to be just the third team since the merger to enter the Finals without a player that they drafted in their starting lineup. One of them was the 2020 Lakers , and "sign prime LeBron James " is not a realistic roster-building strategy for most teams. The other was the 1999 Knicks, who drafted Patrick Ewing only to lose him to injury during the playoffs.

These probably are not replicable blueprints. It's hard to imagine another version of the Knicks or Spurs coming up behind them. But that doesn't mean there aren't smaller lessons baked into their strategies that other teams can learn from. So let's look at the how the Knicks and Spurs were built and try to figure out if there's anything the rest of the league can take from their anomalous builds.

How the Knicks were built

If you're looking for one guiding principle in how the Knicks were built, it would be relationships. Leon Rose's first major decision as president of the Knicks was to hire Tom Thibodeau, whom he represented as an agent at CAA for years. Two years later, he hired Rick Brunson, his first ever client as an agent, to Thibodeau's staff as an assistant. A month after that, he signed Rick's son and his own godson, Jalen Brunson , to a four-year, $110 million contract.

You could credibly call this the sixth-best free-agent signing in NBA history. Only the three LeBron James team changes, plus Kevin Durant to Golden State and Shaquille O'Neal to Los Angeles, would definitively rank ahead of it at this moment. A championship could push it further up the list. Rose knew Brunson since childhood. He saw something in him that the rest of the league did not. He was rewarded with a franchise player at a bargain price.

After the 2022 offseason, every player the Knicks either traded a first-round pick to acquire or spent at least $50 million to sign had a notable personal relationship to one of those key stakeholders:

- Josh Hart was Brunson's roommate at Villanova, and Hart is represented by CAA. - OG Anunoby is represented by Sam Rose, Leon Rose's son. - Donte DiVincenzo was Brunson's teammate at Villanova. - Mikal Bridges was Brunson's teammate at Villanova. - Karl-Anthony Towns was represented by Rose at CAA.

The obvious parallel here would be the 2020 Lakers. Los Angeles aligned itself with Rich Paul and Klutch Sports, albeit unofficially, and won a championship with several high-profile Klutch clients on the team. The unofficial nature of that relationship was part of its undoing. Paul and the Lakers worked together productively, but their interests were not fully aligned. He was representing his clients, and in many cases, the Lakers prioritized them at the expense of better players. The decision to re-sign Talen Horton-Tucker over Alex Caruso is the most prominent, but iffy signings like the mid-level deals handed to Montrezl Harrell and Lonnie Walker fit the same bill. The Knicks were similarly able to leverage Rose's relationships, but with him running the team officially, the team's best interests were never compromised.

If anything, one of the defining features of this Knicks rise is that they've had no sacred cows besides Brunson. Case in point: they fired Thibodeau despite reaching the Eastern Conference Finals a year ago, a decision that now looks brilliant. A common mistake teams make is getting too attached to their best decisions. The Knicks don't do that. Immanuel Quickley was probably the best draft pick this front office made. The Knicks didn't hesitate to trade him for Anunoby. This regime's best free agent signing was DiVincenzo and he was traded after a year alongside Julius Randle , who may have been signed by the previous front office, but grew into an All-NBA player under this one.

The Randle and Quickley moves are instructive on two other fronts. The first is fit. Again, Brunson was the only true untouchable ever among this group. Randle predated him in New York. In 2023, he made the All-Star team over Brunson. It's easy to look back on this now and suggest it was easy, but Brunson didn't fully pull away from Randle as the best player on the team until 2024. Both need the ball. There was only room in New York for one of them. The Knicks chose correctly. Quickley thrived as Brunson's backup, but someone else would view him as a starter and pay him accordingly in restricted free agency. The Knicks knew he was too small to start alongside Brunson, so they cashed him out early for Anunoby.

Plenty of front offices would have paid them first and figured the rest out later. That's the other lesson from Randle and Quickley: the Knicks are extremely particular about contracts. They almost always extract meaningful concessions from their players. Brunson made one of the most team-friendly contractual decisions in recent NBA history when he left over $100 million on the table by extending in New York a year early, but he was hardly the only value contract this front office has signed.

The Knicks frequently convince players to take contracts that descend in annual salary (Brunson did so on his first contract, and Mitchell Robinson is on such a contract now). They often attach team options to the end of contracts (Josh Hart has one at the end of his current deal, Evan Fournier's contract had one). They signed Deuce McBride to an enormously cheap long-term extension right after they traded Quickley because they knew his role was about to grow. They convinced Bridges to time his extension, which came in just below his max, in such a way that he would be eligible to be traded in February, just in case Giannis Antetokounmpo became available.

Ironically, this Knicks front office even created problems for itself by signing a contract that was too team-friendly. When they signed Isaiah Hartenstein to a two-year, $16 million deal in 2022, his cap figure was so low that he was basically impossible to retain with Early Bird Rights. Had they given him a longer deal, which teams typically avoid and players typically prefer, they could have kept him with full Bird Rights a year later. They negotiated too hard and got punished because the player they signed was better than they realized.

Once you start to put all of these moves in sequence, you get a sense of what the broader vision here really was. The first priority was the acquisition of a superstar. They saw one in Brunson before the rest of the league did, and were so adamant about his future that they never buckled in trade negotiations for Donovan Mitchell later that offseason. The Bridges trade was an overpay in a vacuum, but he undeniably made more sense next to Brunson as a big, defensive wing than Mitchell did as a duplicative perimeter scorer.

The years that followed the Brunson acquisition were about positioning the Knicks to acquire players, like Bridges, who made sense next to him. Every contract was signed with future trade value in mind. The picks and youth they'd spent years accumulating were cashed out for their wing trio, and once that wing trio was in place, they felt they could defensively support another vulnerable scorer, hence, the Towns acquisition. That bet paid off. The Knicks currently have the best playoff offensive rating in NBA history. As shaky as things looked at times, the Knicks had an information advantage over the rest of the league when it came to most of their notable acquisitions. They trusted the people they built around because they knew them, and the result was a culture that ultimately proved strong enough to overcome last year's defeat and the early struggles of this postseason to become an absolute juggernaut.

How the Spurs were built

The Spurs were the best organization in the NBA for basically Tim Duncan's entire career. They are once again one of the best organizations in the entire NBA today. But this run started with the period in between. From the mid-2010s through the early 2020s, the Spurs simply were not an elite organization. You could argue, despite their many intangible strengths, that they were actually a weak franchise. Their long-term strategy was simply antiquated and aimless.

When exactly their relationship with Kawhi Leonard fractured, we can't say. It might've been how his injury was managed in 2018. It might've been their decision to force him to wait a year for his rookie max contract despite winning Finals MVP in 2014 so they could sign LaMarcus Aldridge in 2015. But the Spurs had spent almost two decades built around the lowest-maintenance star in NBA history in Duncan. When faced with a more typical star in Leonard, something went wrong. Notably, a similar story played out with Aldridge, who initially asked to be traded in 2017. Something about the old Spurs way just wasn't working anymore.

They should have known it was over the moment Leonard asked to be traded. That was the time to trade him for picks, deal Aldridge elsewhere and fully rebuild. The Spurs wouldn't do it. They tried to remain respectable by trading for DeMar DeRozan . They extended their playoff streak one more year before falling below .500 for the next three. They whiffed on a number of picks they'd almost always nailed. Luka Šamanić at No. 19. Josh Primo at No. 12. Jeremy Sochan at No. 9.

By the 2022 trade deadline, they started seeing the writing on the wall. You can't give the Spurs credit for their lottery luck, but you can certainly give them credit for recognizing the need to tank. They dealt Derrick White , admittedly for well below what we now know he was worth, to Boston. A few months later, they traded Dejounte Murray at the peak of his value, right after his first All-Star selection. They got a haul back from Atlanta in the process. At the 2023 deadline, they dealt Jakob Poeltl for what would become the No. 8 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft .

Again, San Antonio's lottery luck speaks for itself, but how the Spurs chose to manage their build up to the Wembanyama acquisition and in its aftermath is part of why they're in such an advantageous position on top of that luck. Trading away all of those veterans gave them a draft pick foundation to rival Oklahoma City's, which puts them in a position to navigate the consequences of the current collective bargaining agreement more carefully than any other team.

Since landing Wembanyama, the Spurs have essentially only operated from a position of strength. They acquired De'Aaron Fox in part because Fox forced his way to them, allowing them to get him at an asset discount rather than paying full freight for a star trade like so many of their competitors have. They were paid an unprotected first-round swap to take on Harrison Barnes , who became a meaningful player for them, just because they were diligent about maintaining their cap space when the Kings and Bulls needed a facilitator in their DeMar DeRoz

_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/how-knicks-spurs-were-built-nba-finals/)._