The Knicks did right at the trade deadline — now a championship run is on them

Jose Alvarado called into practice Thursday at his old high school, Christ the King in Queens, and jokingly told his coach that he would soon return, as the newest member of the Knicks, to beat all current players and former doubters in games of one-on-one.

Joe Arbitello was laughing over the phone after the Knicks completed the trade-deadline deal with New Orleans to acquire the 27-year-old Alvarado. When the kid was an eighth-grader at Arbitello’s camp, the coach didn’t initially want him in his program. After two days of watching Alvarado outwork and outfox the competition, Arbitello had an entirely different take.

“I told my assistant who brought him to the camp, Nick Sanchez, ‘We need him to be a Royal,’” Arbitello recalled. “Jose couldn’t jump over a piece of paper and he wasn’t an imposing figure, but every single camp game or contest, he badly wanted to win. And when he didn’t win, it was like the world had ended.

“If I had to survive on a desert island, I’d want to be with Jose. He’s the toughest kid I’ve ever coached, no question. … One area where he’ll really help the Knicks is he’s going to bring an element of toughness and accountability.”

And no, you can never have enough of those two things in a win-or-else season in New York.

Knicks president Leon Rose did the right thing before Thursday’s 3 p.m. ET deadline by making his bench better without messing with the core talent. The Brooklyn-born Alvarado is the living definition of moxie, which makes him a New York City point guard out of central casting.

His leadership, energy and ability to handle the ball and steal it from the opponent will make him a crowd favorite at the Garden and will ease the loss of Miles McBride, who will be out for a while after Friday’s surgery for a sports hernia, as first reported by The Athletic’s Fred Katz and James Edwards III.

It’s the kind of second-tier deal the Knicks needed to make, a deal to improve their defense and depth, as opposed to a franchise-changing play for Giannis Antetokounmpo, who stayed put in Milwaukee.

The Knicks’ players had earned the right to see this season through, and not merely because they’ve won eight consecutive games to carry a 33-18 record heading into Friday night’s road clash with the Pistons, their most likely antagonists in the Eastern Conference finals. This is only the current group’s second season together.

Rose and owner James Dolan fired Tom Thibodeau for not leading this group (Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, Mitchell Robinson) to the NBA Finals in Year 1. They hired Mike Brown to finish the job in Year 2, and they needed to give him the time and space to do that … while adding a complementary piece in Alvarado.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine when the Eastern Conference will be this winnable again. The team that eliminated the Knicks from the postseason the last two years, Indiana, is 25 games under .500 without Tyrese Haliburton. The current top seed in the East, Detroit, lost to the Knicks in last year’s first round and hasn’t won a playoff series since 2008.

The Celtics have done a great job without Jayson Tatum, but they also lost to the Knicks in last year’s tournament. The Raptors haven’t won a playoff series since 2020, the Magic haven’t advanced past the second round since 2010, and the Sixers haven’t advanced past the second round since 2001.

The Cavaliers? They just got better with the acquisition of James Harden, hands down, but they haven’t reached the third round since 2018. Their coach, Kenny Atkinson, questioned their own legitimacy as a major Eastern Conference factor before their season-opening loss at Madison Square Garden.

“The Knicks have gotten to the conference finals, they’ve done it,” Atkinson said. “Everybody’s saying we’re contenders. To me, ‘contenders’ is when you go to the conference finals or you’re in the finals. We’ve got to get out of the second round first before we start talking about all these expectations. … We have a lot to prove.”

Of course, the same will be said of the Knicks until they are holding their first NBA Finals trophy since 1973. Harden has averaged 26.4 points against the Knicks, his third-best career mark against an opponent, so Cleveland will be a tougher matchup going forward. Ditto for Boston, where Nikola Vučević has scored more career points against New York (872) than every league opponent except one (Miami).

But the Knicks are still better than the Cavs and Celtics, and they dodged a major Eastern Conference problem when Antetokounmpo didn’t end up with the Heat. New York can now battle Miami in the Summer of Giannis if it so chooses.

Meanwhile, Antetokounmpo is 31 and out with a calf strain, probably until March. The Knicks didn’t have the assets to land him, but even if they did, would Rose have risked breaking up his roster in the hope that Antetokounmpo would get healthy and, on the fly, figure out what on-court chemistry issues with Brunson might exist before the playoffs start in April?

Probably not. It was always more likely that the Knicks would continue banking on Towns and Bridges, whom Rose acquired from Brooklyn before last season for the price of five first-round picks, as the final components of a title-worthy team. Towns and Bridges made the Knicks complete, at least in the eyes of one Hall of Famer.

“They’re missing nothing,” Paul Pierce said on a recent edition of the No Fouls Given podcast. “They got everything to win and come out of the East now.”

The Knicks are playing better defense of late, though the idea of Brunson and Towns holding up on that end of the floor through four postseason rounds isn’t a comfortable one. This is where Alvarado can pitch in. He has the competitive will and savvy and hands to be a disruptive force on defense, where he occasionally sneaks up from behind a ballhandler and picks his pocket Globetrotter style.

“I told him that nonsense would never work in college or the NBA, and I guess I’m the idiot now,” Arbitello said. “If you told me when Jose was a sophomore or junior at Christ the King that he would be an NBA player, I would’ve bet against it. But he keeps defying the odds. These days, I think anything is possible with him.”

Including a meaningful role on a championship run with his hometown team. The Knicks have a clear path to their first NBA Finals appearance since 1999. Now it’s on them to take it.