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“Did I make mistakes? Of course I did,” he said. “Did I trust people that maybe I shouldn’t have trusted? You go into it as a new owner and if you’re dumb enough, you think you actually know what you’re doing. Believe me, you don’t. And all along, you have everybody whispering in your ear: Do this, do that. You have you guys, the press, telling us where we’re going wrong at every step. And, you can start to feel like a pinball. But …” He paused. “The thing is, is to learn. Right? That might be the thing I feel best about is, I felt, I feel, that now after 25 freaking years of doing this, I might actually have learned something.”
“My ideal operation, like a lot of my other businesses, it’s the same thing: Give me a plan, let’s put together a plan, let’s follow the plan, and I’ll support the plan,” he said. “It’s the same thing with the hockey team. And if you go off plan, come back to me and we’ll talk about it. Once Leon came, he told me in advance what he was going to do and I’d always ask, what can I do to help you? You plan it. I’ll fund it.” Many of Rose’s deals, he simply nodded. Others, he had to be convinced — “Mostly,” he said, “I was always somewhere in the middle.” But he always landed on the side of trusting a GM who’d earned it unconditionally. It has made all the difference for the Knicks. And for Dolan.
Including DiVincenzo in the trade crushed Rose, team sources said. Rose loved the way DiVincenzo, the fourth Villanova Knick, played and understood how losing him would affect personal relationships on the team. But Minnesota wouldn't do the trade without him, and Rose believed Towns would be a perfect complement for Brunson's skill set. Rose took no public questions on the trade, but he called DiVincenzo to inform the guard of the trade, according to sources on both sides of the transaction.
Rick Brunson was Knicks president Leon Rose's first client back in 1995. It was not exactly an auspicious beginning for either of them. Brunson's first agent had ghosted him after he wasn't drafted coming out of Temple University, and Rose was the only agent who still had an interest in representing him.
Remember LeBron James' "Decision" back in 2010? That was Rose, James' agent at the time, and Worldwide Wes. Carmelo Anthony's trade from the Denver Nuggets to the Knicks in 2011? Leon and Wes. Dolan had a good relationship with both men during Anthony's seven seasons in New York and admired the loyalty they seemed to have with clients. Dolan is a lot of things. Irascible. Unpredictable. Meddlesome. But he's also loyal. So when he went to replace Jackson in 2019, he kept coming back to the idea of Rose and Wesley -- two men he knew could handle the pressure cooker of New York and identify the type of players who could thrive in that environment, too. But maybe even more importantly, he trusted them to do it and largely allowed them to operate without interference. Those who know Dolan best say he'd simply learned from his past that ownership involvement isn't always productive. Others suggest his focus was split between the Knicks and building the Sphere in Las Vegas.
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This team Leon Rose built is the NBA's first to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy and NBA Cup double in the same season. It just beat the Spurs four times in five tries despite spotting a double-digit lead to San Antonio in the first quarter of all five games. And it joins only Toronto in 2018-19, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, as NBA champions with four starters acquired via trade. These Knicks and those Raptors are also the league's only two teams, per Elias, to open a Finals-clinching game with five players it didn't draft.
To many in New York, Rose is a bit of a mystery. He’s the New Jersey–bred ex-player agent who grinded his way to the top of the profession. He represented everyone from Allen Iverson to LeBron James, building CAA’s basketball division into a powerhouse. In 2020, Knicks owner James Dolan, seeking his version of Bob Myers, the former agent turned Warriors top executive who built Golden State into a dynasty, tapped Rose to run the Knicks. Reporters who have spent time around him say it’s easier to get him into a conversation about Bruce Springsteen than any team transaction.
He’s also effective. In his five full seasons, the Knicks have finished at least 10 games above .500 in four of them. They have reached 50 wins in each of the last three. Last season, New York finished two wins short of the Finals. This year, they are two wins away from a championship. “I think he has a great basketball mind,” said Jalen Brunson. “The way he’s been able to do this, especially here with all the scrutiny people do to him and everything, I just think the way he goes about his business is as good as anyone.”
It isn’t just the moves that Rose has made. It’s the ones he didn’t make. He didn’t overpay for Donovan Mitchell, when Utah made the New York native available in 2022. He didn’t make a ridiculous offer for Giannis Antetokounmpo last February, when the Bucks were discussing deals for the two-time MVP. "Leon and his staff,” said Knicks coach Mike Brown, “have done a freakin’ fantastic job.”
By that point, Rose had represented both Brunsons as an agent. When Leon left for the Knicks, son Sam Rose joined Jalen Brunson's representation team. In 2022, less than a month before Jalen Brunson was set to hit free agency, Leon Rose hired Rick Brunson as an assistant coach on Tom Thibodeau's staff. "I think Jalen had a loyalty to the Mavs because they'd drafted him, but the Knicks were his actual family," said a Mavericks source. "I don't think we fully grasped that."
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Tom Petrini: Mike Brown shouts out Popovich when asked about blocking out the noise: "The term is a bunker mentality, it's actually something that I learned from Pop back in the early 2000s when you get to this level, or you're playing in a bigger market, especially, there's going to be a lot of noise, and you're going to hit some adversity throughout the course of the season, and this is what I talked about when I said, you know, you hope you hit adversity, because you want to see how everybody reacts, not just the players. I want to see how Mr. Dolan was going to react. I want to see how Leon Rose is going to react, their group, and on top of the players, because you know one of them, all of them can get pissed at me and say, 'Screw this, we're done,' or you could try to keep fighting, stay even keeled, and try to figure it out, and that will only help you the further along you get in the playoffs. And right now, the amount of media and noise that's outside is something that the guys, most guys, haven't seen, and so trying to continue to ignore it, they're human, so they're going to hear some of it."
Upon taking the Knicks job this past July, Brown lobbied for team president Leon Rose to re-sign Shamet, then an unrestricted free agent after playing for New York on a one-year minimum deal. "I thought Landry could be impactful," Brown said before Game 2. "He signed late because his agent convinced him to do that. Hopefully it won't happen going forward." "I said, 'Hey, I want you here. I'm sorry about the way the circumstances are contractually. I have nothing to do [with] that. I believe you can help us on both ends of the floor.'"
What convinced you that Mike Brown was the right man for this job? James Dolan: Leon (Rose) convinced me (laugh). When we knew we were gonna make the change, we didn’t tell the players about making a change. We first had talked to all the players and I was there, and then sat down with Leon, and we talked about what it is we want in a coach. ’Cause we knew we had a good coach in Thibs. We weren’t just going for a change, right? There was something we wanted, and we laid it out, really on paper, what we were looking for in a coach. I would say the No. 1 quality was collaborative, that was a big piece … somebody who strategically could avail himself of all the minds around him and put it together, particularly at game time, between halves, that was a big thing. And we were looking for flexibility. So we laid out all these sort of characteristics that we were looking for, and then I set Leon loose. And he interviewed a lot of different guys, and he came back with Mike, and I’m like, “OK.” Leon did all the work. I just blessed it.
Ian Begley: Mike Brown on James Dolan: “He challenges Leon [Rose]. He challenges me. He challenges the players in the right way. You want that from your boss. You want to be challenged, you want to be pushed. There's a way to do it, there's a way not to do it. My short time around him, he's been fantastic in that area. In the same breath, too, he's adamant if you bring to him what you need, then there's backing with it, he's adamant about trying to give you the best things possible to go get the job done. I really appreciate my short time being around him, especially with the horizontal and more importantly the vertical alignment this organization has.”