Knicks Parade

The Knicks didn’t just build a championship team. They built deep partnerships

Jose Alvarado, left, and Karl-Anthony Towns celebrate the Knicks' title. Angelina Katsanis / Getty Images

This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and an expert on culture. He is also an NBA fan who grew up in Salt Lake City during the John Stockton-Karl Malone era of the Utah Jazz.

High-performing organizations often look inevitable in retrospect. This is equally true in sports and business.

When the confetti falls, hindsight bias sneaks in. Trades, draft picks and salary-cap maneuvers suddenly seem rational, even obvious. But my research and work with organizational leaders show there are some decisions that consistently pay off.

One asset that is key to organizational success is typically built long before anyone recognizes it: deep partnerships. Partnerships are relationships where each member of the relationship benefits from the other. Deep partnerships are relationships that continue to produce mutual benefits over time, even when the relationships come under stress. They create reservoirs of confidence, information and shared hope that can be drawn upon when opportunities appear or crises occur.

The New York Knicks’ championship run offers a powerful example.

Many of the key relationships that made the Knicks such a formidable team existed before many of the players arrived in New York.

Leon Rose, the Knicks’ president of basketball operations, spent nearly two decades as one of the NBA’s most influential agents. Long before he assembled a championship roster, he was building relationships across the league. His network became a strategic asset that few organizations could replicate.

Alongside Rose was William “World Wide Wes” Wesley, a legendary basketball connector whose influence was built through decades of relationships spanning players, coaches, executives, apparel companies, musicians and business leaders. Wesley’s value was never simply who he knew. It was the trust embedded within those relationships.

The Knicks’ MVP, Jalen Brunson, illustrates how these relationships compounded over time. His connection to the organization was not merely contractual.

His father, Rick Brunson, played for the Knicks and later developed close working relationships with former coach Tom Thibodeau and other members of the organization’s leadership. Rose had represented the Brunson family for years before either joined the Knicks.

When New York signed Jalen Brunson in 2022, it was not betting on a stranger. The Knicks were investing in someone they knew deeply.

Brunson was hardly the only example. The Knicks gradually assembled players whose relationships predated their arrival in New York. Brunson, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges won national championships together at Villanova. The front office was not simply acquiring talent. It was acquiring a dense network of players who already trusted one another, understood one another’s tendencies and had years of shared experience navigating pressure together.

These relationships might seem incidental to success, but as an organizational scholar, the evidence shows they are crucial.

Research on social capital has consistently shown that relationships create value. In business, the deep partnerships the Knicks acquired and continued to develop allow information to flow more seamlessly, facilitating faster coordination and a willingness to experiment.

Research also shows that when people build strong relationships, both members of the relationship tend to benefit. In sales, this often leads to longer and more successful partnerships. On teams, it can make it easier to resolve conflicts, collaborate effectively and find creative ways to tackle difficult problems.