Over the course of the 2025-26 regular season, the New York Knicks were not the Eastern Conference's best team. The group eventually came together to end a 53-year organizational championship drought, but the Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics won more games.
Regardless, the Knicks claimed the third seed – giving them home-court advantage against the Atlanta Hawks, Philadelphia 76ers, and Cleveland Cavaliers throughout the Eastern Conference playoffs. With the NBA flattening lottery odds to curb tanking, though, essentially every team out east decided to build a more competitive roster.
Reclaiming home-court advantage is crucial to any of New York's aspirations to defend their 2026 NBA Championship. The league's best conference is only getting better, and no title winner has successfully repeated in eight seasons. With a core of players in their athletic primes, the Knicks are uniquely positioned to break that trend. They'll need to control what they can control to capitalize on it.
Knicks will need home-court advantage to break NBA's no-repeat trend
The NBA used to have a championship formula, to some degree. Teams needed a top-10 player in charge, a top-25 player by his side, a deep supporting cast of shooting and defending specialists, and a creative head coach to go all the way. Teams like LeBron James and AD's Lakers, Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray's Nuggets, and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown's Celtics fit the bill perfectly.
In this new era of parity, though, teams are built out much more completely. While Jalen Brunson and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander indubitably led their Championship-winning squads, they had several stars in each of their supporting casts.
Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby both produced superstar-level performances throughout their NBA Finals run, and Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams were instrumental to OKC's run the year before.
The Eastern Conference gearing up for next season means things might not break so aggressively in the Knicks' favor. The one seed will likely not lose in seven games to the eventual conference runner-up, and the two seed will likely not have a star returning from injury midseason and surrender a 3-1 lead to a squad that went on to get immediately swept.
New York already had their work cut out for them. Their championship win converted them from the hunter to the hunted. And looking at the rosters across the conference makes clear that it's going to be even more of a battle to carve out home-court advantage for the postseason.
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