The collective beats the collection

Half-time, Madison Square Garden, Game 4 of the NBA Finals. The New York Knicks are 29 points down. At home. In the biggest game of the last five decades for the franchise. The building is silent, and every pundit is already writing the "series tied 2-2" story.

If you follow the NBA, you know what happened next. The Knicks won the second half by 30, took the game 107-106 on a tip-in with 1.2 seconds left, and completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. They now lead the series 3-1, one win from their first title since 1973.

That idea should sound familiar. It's almost word for word what Jeroen Delmee told us about rebuilding the Dutch men into Olympic champions. And that's why I think this Knicks run is worth a long look from every field hockey coach, whatever level you work at.

Jalen Brunson is a star. He averaged 26 points a game this season and scored 36 in that Game 4. So no, the Knicks aren't a team of nobodies. But here's the distinction that matters: when their front office had the chance to chase a marquee superstar last summer, they didn't. They signed depth instead, Jordan Clarkson and Guerschon Yabusele, two bench players. Across the floor in these Finals stands Victor Wembanyama, the kind of singular talent every franchise dreams about. The Knicks' answer to him isn't a bigger name. It's more connected players. Sound familiar? Delmee again:

For a sense of how deliberately this group was put together, and how rare what Mike Brown is doing with it actually is, this breakdown is worth your time:

🎬 DflowHoops: Only two teams have done this. Mike Brown coached both

The principle here is selection. The Knicks could have traded three role players for one big name. Every pundit wanted them to. They chose instead to keep a group where the fourth and fifth best players are genuinely good, and where the eleventh man believes he belongs on the floor in a Finals game.

Delmee made the exact same call before Paris, and he made it more brutally than any NBA front office. He left the top scorer of the Dutch Hoofdklasse at home, as well as some renowned star players. His reasoning: "I think without them, I had a better and stronger team." A slightly less skilful presser who wins the ball 60 metres from your goal can be worth more than a more gifted finisher.

What I like about the Knicks version of this is that it shows the same principle holds over a full season, not just one tournament selection. They went 53-29 playing this way. It wasn't a romantic gamble. It was a plan.

For your team, the question is uncomfortable but simple: are you picking your eleven best players, or your best eleven? Write down the jobs your team needs done to win, pressing, transition, ball-winning, structure around the circle. Then let the roles drive the names. If two names change when you do that exercise, you've learned something.

Mike Brown took over the Knicks last summer and inherited a squad that the previous coach had run into the ground. Tom Thibodeau famously played his starters enormous minutes; Josh Hart averaged 37.6 a game. Brown cut that to 30.2. He gave Landry Shamet roughly 50% more court time than the season before. He kept ten players genuinely involved all season, even when it cost him cohesion early on, and even when the lineup experiments drew criticism.

Why? Because of something he learned as an assistant to Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr, two coaches with eight NBA titles between them:

Listen to him after the Game 4 comeback. It's all about the group:

🎬 SNY: Mike Brown on the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history

The payoff came in May. Shamet, a bench player, shot 11-for-12 from three in the Conference Finals, the first player ever with ten or more threes at 80% shooting in a Conference Finals series. Miles McBride delivered series after series. None of that happens if those two spent the winter as spectators.

Now bring it back to our sport. We have something basketball coaches would kill for: unlimited rolling substitutions. A field hockey match is already built for sixteen players, not eleven. Sammy Lander, football's first specialist substitution coach, made this point in his masterclass with us: substitutes aren't backups, they're finishers, players with a defined job who often decide the match. Yet how many of us still treat minutes 1-70 as belonging to a core group, with the bench getting whatever is left over?

Here's the catch: a bench only performs in money time if it has been trusted in normal time. That trust is built in March, not in the final. Or, in Brown's language: it's not about now, it's about the postseason.