The idea was simple: reunite four college teammates in the pros, and bring a title to the Garden. The reality was more complicated. This is the story of the Nova Knicks.

For a few months this summer, it seemed as if the New York Knicks had done something remarkable. By bringing together Villanova University teammates Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo, and Mikal Bridges in the professional ranks, the team was making a bet that, in the cutthroat NBA, friendship and chemistry could serve as the foundation for a squad with championship aspirations. “They grew up together and now they’re reunited. That shit does not happen in professional sports,” legendary Knicks fan Spike Lee told me, emphatically. “And so there’s a bond there that is unbreakable.”

Three months later, the bond was…well, broken. DiVincenzo, along with longtime Knicks star Julius Randle, was shipped off to the Minnesota Timberwolves in exchange for the sweet-shooting big man Karl-Anthony Towns. News of the move, coming days before the team opened training camp, seemed to take all parties by surprise. Towns professed to be shocked. DiVincenzo seemed dazed in his initial press conference in Minneapolis. Brunson, the Knicks’ all-business captain, refused to even acknowledge the move, since it wasn’t yet official. “Who’s Karl?” he asked the media, gimlet-eyed.

Overnight, the Nova Knicks became a trivia question—one of the coolest basketball teams to never exist, a theoretical vibes colossus that will see the floor together only in games of NBA 2K.

But for three surreal months—long enough for GQ to photograph and interview the four of them together, in blue and orange for one of the first (and last) times—the Nova Knicks represented a couple of overlapping dreams. For Knicks fans, they would be the crew to return a long-cursed team to the promised land, and in hard-working and plainly charming fashion. And for NBA fans more broadly, the Nova Knicks represented a sort of prelapsarian basketball ideal. Getting these four together was only made possible by a sort of basketball humility: a willingness to take less money so your team can afford to employ your friends; a conviction that crashing the offensive boards is just as valuable as hoisting an off-the-dribble-three; a belief that playing with your buddies is not just more fun but more likely to deliver you playoff glory. It’s the kind of attitude you only ever used to see in college basketball (and is probably gone from there too, a victim of the NIL era), and not quite ever in the NBA, where money trumps memory. And then it vanished, with Knicks management seemingly deciding that chemistry was of course nice, but perhaps not quite as valuable as employing one of the best floor-spacing big men in the sport.

The idea that the Nova Knicks would have ever had a chance to play together after college, all four explained to me this summer, was such a longshot as to make dreaming about it a waste of time. “It’s something that you don’t even really talk about, because you know it’s impossible. It’s not going to happen,” Josh Hart told me. “So I can’t even say, yeah, we joked about it, or we talked about it, because you don’t, you never…. You know the likelihood of that happening is slim to none.”

For a second there, the needle pointed right at “slim”—and then, in October, sank back down to “none.” In that gap sits the story of the greatest Knicks team that never was: the short but stirring tale of the Nova Knicks.

Like so many college friends, Brunson, Hart, Bridges, and DiVincenzo were resigned to going their separate ways after school. They’d be able to look back on some incredible times together, at least: All four were members of Villanova’s championship-winning 2016 basketball team, and Brunson, DiVincenzo, and Bridges won a second title in 2018. They’d grown close off the court too: They had lived in the Nova dorms, shared meals in the dining hall, partied together. But going pro, where fewer than 600 players touch the floor over the course of a typical season, as members of 30 different teams in 28 different cities, would mean going their separate ways.

After leaving college, they’d spend the next seven years fighting hard to establish their places in the league, keeping in touch where they could—by text, in pregame warm-ups when they happened to play one another, at weddings for the Nova basketball diaspora. Separately, they were becoming the sorts of players you’d much rather root for than against: Bridges blossomed into a long-limbed defensive menace for the Phoenix Suns, and then featured as the lead scorer for the Brooklyn Nets. Hart built a reputation as a gritty, do-everything wing. DiVincenzo won a ring with the Milwaukee Bucks, but an injury kept him off the court—so he rehabilitated his career during a one-year stint with the Golden State Warriors, where he learned from Stephen Curry. And Brunson carved out a role as a buckets-by-the-fistful scoring guard for the Dallas Mavericks. They’d bonded in college, Brunson told me, over two shared goals: “To win and make the NBA. And we did both of them.”

By July, it appeared as if the Knicks had gotten the gang back together. In July 2022, they poached Brunson from Dallas, returning him to the leadership role he’d held in college. Midway through Brunson’s first season with the Knicks, they traded for Hart, and added DiVincenzo in free agency the following summer. Last year, the three Nova Knicks led the squad on a playoff run before falling to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference semifinals. This summer, they shipped a haul of assets to Brooklyn in exchange for Bridges—seemingly ensuring that the four would take the floor as part of the same team for the first time since 2017.

Plenty had changed since they were last teammates. Brunson willed himself into becoming a consensus top-10 NBA superstar, with the accolades to prove it: This summer he was named the Knicks’ first captain since the 2018–19 season, and signed a massive four-year, $156.5 million extension that nevertheless represents a team-friendly discount—if he’d waited until next summer to sign, he’d have been eligible for a quarter-billion-dollar contract. Bridges, once a skinny freshman who spent many an afternoon in college attending the Josh Hart School of Tough Love, became one of the league’s stoutest defenders. After a year in New York, DiVincenzo was known to a portion of the Knicks faithful as The Big Ragu, and to another, more online faction as White Donte. (One assumes he’ll find a new, more Twin Cities-appropriate nickname—The Big Hotdish?—in his new home.)

Much, though, is still as it was in suburban Philadelphia a decade ago. “We’re all the same,” Brunson told me. “Besides the fact that three out of four of us have kids now.” (Bridges is the lone holdout.) Hart is still seemingly addicted to Mike and Ikes. Bridges is still a little bashful. Brunson still gets ribbed for his coach’s-favorite status, and also the size of his head. (“JB, obviously, is very easy” to roast, Hart told me. “Obviously, the main thing is how big his head is and how little his ears are.”) They all expect, of themselves and of one another, the same commitments they made back in college: to effort, to teamwork, to the little winning habits that separate great teams from good ones.

The Knicks haven’t won a championship since 1973. And outside of a few exciting playoff runs, the team’s recent history has been defined by poor play on the court, and even poorer franchise management off it. But the Knicks receive inordinate attention even when they’re bad—and when they’re good, the city itself seems to catch fire. (National media attention—hello!—tends to follow.) A spark caught when Brunson came to town in 2022, and grew as his college teammates joined him there. And even with DiVincenzo (and Randle) off to Minnesota, it’s hard to deny the fervor around this Knicks squad.

“After my first season, in that playoffs, that’s when I think we were on the right track and I felt the love a lot,” Brunson said. “I obviously felt it throughout the season, but that’s when I witnessed and remembered a Knicks playoff game”—when the intensity goes to 11 and otherwise reasonable young men start screaming “BING BONG” out on the plaza in front of the Garden. “And so that’s when it started.”

The 2023–24 campaign—Brunson’s second with the Knicks, and his first with both Hart and DiVincenzo on board—went about as well as fans could have hoped. Brunson made his first All-Star and All-NBA teams, and the Knicks finished second in the Eastern Conference in the regular season. A rash of injuries to key players left the trio shouldering an unusually heavy burden in the playoffs. “It sucked,” Brunson said. “But no one complained. And we were one win away from the conference finals. And I mean, I can go on and on about how, like, we have a certain mindset when it comes to how we play. But I just think it was really important for us to realize what we can do.” Which was: win, especially when everyone else thinks you won’t.

Still, Brunson was wary of becoming complacent—of spending too much time relishing “what we were quote-unquote able to accomplish,” he said. “Because we didn’t really accomplish a lot. But we definitely…. We’re better than people thought.”

And so expectations heading into this season are sky-high.There have been plenty of iconic Knicks rosters, Spike Lee explained, but only a few like this. “That’s not disrespect to my brother Patrick, my brother Oakley, brother Starks…we love Sprewell too,” Spike said—all credit to Allan Houston, too, and to Charlie Ward, he later clarified in a voicemail—but this team has something special. “I think this is the most beloved team in the history of the Knicks, with the exception of the two world championship teams,” he said. Then Spike got to prognosticating. “Now they’re going to take it to another level and bring the Knicks to the championship,” he said.

A few months later, I checked back in with him after the trade. “It’s a cruel business,” he said. But the goal was the same, if not even clearer: “We’re going for it now. It’s all in. Do or die. The next two, three, four years? This is it. This is the window, and you gotta go for it.”

Achieving that goal, he’d told me over the summer, would unleash something remarkable in New York. “I keep telling people this: When the Knicks win this championship and it’s in the Garden, New York City’s going to be on fire,” he said. “They better call the National Guard, the Marines, the Army, even the motherfucking Air Force. And the NYPD and the FDNY. Let’s throw in the Transit Authority too!”

Tracy Morgan, another Garden regular, told Knicks owner James Dolan the same thing: “I told Dolan to his face, I said, ‘When we win the chip, we’re going to burn this fucking city down.’ This New York City, baby! This is where King Kong died! When we win the chip, I’mma ride on the float with them too.”

A bit later, while dissing the Brooklyn Nets—“I’m not excited about Brooklyn. Brooklyn is just Brooklyn. New York is New York! The whole thing!”—he started reciting lyrics. “I’m spreading the news, man! I’m leaving today,” he said. “I’m going to be a part of it! You know? New York!”

And then, as I stood in my living room in Los Angeles, Tracy Morgan started singing to me—or to himself, or to all of Manhattan, so loud and full-chested I held my phone a few inches from my ear:

If I can make it here, I’m gonna make it anywhere.

It’s up to you, New Yawk, Newwww Yaaaawwwwk.

He waited a beat, and then added an exclamation mark:

“A-number-one, baby!”

So much about Jalen Brunson’s life with the Knicks feels fated that it’s hard to imagine he ever played anywhere else. His dad, Rick, is one of the team’s assistant coaches, having served in the same role for head coach Tom Thibodeau at previous stops in Chicago (where Brunson played high school ball) and Minnesota. His sister, Erica, manages his off-court endeavors while his agent is Sam Rose—himself the son of Knicks team president Leon Rose, who in a previous life held the same job for Rick, whose journeyman career saw him play for eight different NBA teams, plus international squads like the Adelaide 36ers. “My dad was in Australia when I was born, and I think Leon saw me before my dad actually saw me,” Brunson said.

But Brunson spent the first four years of his career in Dallas, where he blossomed first as the backup to Luka Doncic and then as Doncic’s capable wingman. He was not the kind of young player teams typically allow to leave for free. And initially, he told me, he didn’t think he’d go anywhere at all. “I thought I would’ve been in Dallas for a long time,” he said. “And then things just happen and decisions are made and you go on.” Brunson became a free agent in the summer of 2022; the Knicks began clearing cap space around the draft to sign him, but what really grabbed his attention was when the team added his dad to the coaching staff. “Once my dad became an assistant coach, I was like, Oh, shit,” he said. He signed a four-year deal with the Knicks. (Brunson, who is particularly media savvy, is perhaps understating things here: A league investigation into his signing found that the Knicks violated tampering rules.)

And while Brunson had rampaged through the 2022 playoffs with the Mavs, especially while Doncic was out with an injury, it’s safe to say that nobody quite expected him to explode the way he did when he got to New York. From the moment the 2022–23 season tipped off, Brunson was everywhere: converting layups from awkward angles, spinning into difficult fadeaways that dropped more often than not, draining off-the-dribble threes from the top of the arc. This past season, in the playoffs, he blistered the league’s record books, becoming the first player since Michael Jordan to rack up four straight 40-plus-point postseason games.

Jay Wright, who coached all four players during his legendary career at Villanova, is as big a Jalen Brunson fan as you’ll find. But even he was shocked by the way Brunson has upshifted from merely excellent to practically undeniable. “When LeBron does it, I kind of get it. But I’m still surprised that in playoff games, when the defense is set to stop Jalen from scoring, he can still get 40,” Wright said. “Michael Jordan, LeBron, Kobe, they’re the guys that I think of doing that: No matter what your game plan is, he’s going to figure out a way to get 30. Maybe.” But Jalen keeps putting up 40. And 40, Wright said, “is crazy.”

It was enough to put Brunson in contention for the final spot on this past summer’s gold-medal-winning Team USA Olympics roster. And while Brunson broke his hand in the Knicks’ season finale in May, he reminded me that the injury didn’t actually change his fate. “So, let’s clarify, for sure,” he said. “The team was chosen before I broke my hand.” He was rooting for Team USA, he told me, and didn’t hold any grudges. “But I clearly want to be out there and playing for the United States.”

When I asked if he thought he should have been on the roster, he was characteristically blunt. “Yeah, for sure,” he said. “The way I played last year, I thought I was deserving. I thought I could have fit in. I’ve played many roles throughout my career; I could play another. But obviously, it just wasn’t in the cards at that time. And so, you move on and you find ways to get better. You keep having goals, and that’s a goal of mine. I want to play next time.”

He is the exact right amount of beloved back home, where in two short seasons he’s become one of the most popular players in franchise history. “Yo! Say the name of my captain!” Tracy Morgan admonished me when I asked him about Brunson. “You don’t call him Jalen, you call him Cap.” That’s thanks, in part, to the way Brunson carries himself. He is reserved, with as dry a sense of humor as I’ve found in a professional athlete. When we met, he was wearing the Young New Yorker of Means uniform: a black Louis Vuitton crossbody, a “New York or Nowhere” hat, gray sweat shorts, and Nike Dunks. And what really cemented his New York idol status was his decision to sign that mondo contract extension this summer, rather than waiting until next year, when he could have signed a deal worth $113 million more. “One hundred thirteen on the table? That’s big. I love you, Jalen. I love you, Jalen!” Morgan said. “He did that for us! He didn’t have to do that. He did that for us. He wanted to see New York back on top again.”

Brunson is careful to point out that his deal is, technically, only a relative discount. “Everyone sees like, ‘Oh, taking 113 less,’ ” he reminded me. “Well, to be blunt, I took the most I could do this year.” Still, his decision makes it far more likely that the Knicks will be able to keep adding and retaining talent around him—like Bridges, who is due an extension of his own soon. “Obviously, it helps the team out, and I want this team to stay together for as long as we can, and try and do something special here,” he said.

Brunson’s blend of skill and humility, Hart explained, sets the tone for the rest of the team—he plays like a guy still earning his spot in the league, rather than one assured of permanent All-Star status. “It’s JB’s team,” Hart told me. “But personality-wise, work ethic, and all that, he acts like he’s just a random dude on a 10-day [contract].” Where the captain leads, they follow—with a few cracks about the size of Cap’s dome along the way.

To be clear: we are not talking about self-abnegating basketball monks. Bridges, they all agree, had the coolest house when he played in Phoenix. Hart collects wine and watches. Brunson’s got a growing portfolio of brand deals and sponsorships. But they aren’t exactly your typical designer-dripped NBA superstars, either and that’s not a coincidence. “At some point,” Brunson told me, “we’ve all been doubted.”

It’s a striking thing to hear from a guy fresh off his first All-Star appearance—and, of course, given the fact that Brunson has a high school state championship and two college natties to his name. But part of the joy of this Knicks team, and a significant reason the fan base feels so strongly about them, is the fact that, for all their winning, none of these guys were exactly expected to be this good.

“Each one of them always had an underdog mentality, for different reasons,” Jay Wright told me. They all starred for their high school teams, he explained, but were happy to serve as gritty role players on their extracurricular AAU squads. “So when they got to college, they knew how to play with other great players, but when it was their turn to be the go-to guy, they were also very comfortable in that role, which is really unique,” he said. “It was just so rare to have one guy like that, and we had four. And that’s why we won national championships. That’s why we won national championships—because of them.”

That’s how it felt to the players too. “Josh was before us, and he came from being sixth man to being an All-American,” Bridges told me. “And then I came to school next and I came from red-shirting to being an All-American. Jalen was probably the most prestigious coming in, because he was a McDonald’s All-American and he started, but he had to work for being a starter.”

To folks who follow the team, like longtime Knicks play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, they still carry plenty of the traits that helped them dominate in college. “They got a taste of winning it all in college, and clearly they became addicted to that feeling of winning it all, because that’s the way all four of them approach it,” Breen told me.

The guys endeared themselves to New York in inimitable fashion. The fans quickly came to appreciate Hart for his unreal hustle: In one five-game stretch in the playoffs last year, he averaged 48.2 minutes per game—a striking achievement in a league where regulation games last 48 minutes. And they loved the “NY” he braided into his hair for big matchups. But he really became a true New Yorker of Distinction last season in the playoffs, in Game 2 of the Pacers series when the Garden serenaded TNT broadcaster (and longtime Knicks supervillain) Reggie Miller with chants of “Fuck you, Reggie.” “I don’t know if you heard,” a mic picked up Hart saying to Miller as he walked to the broadcasting table. “But I think they’re saying ‘Fuck you.’” That Hart didn’t even know he was on a hot mic—that he would have said it to fuck with Reggie just because—made it all the sweeter.

As far as he’s concerned, there’s no other way to be. “Everything’s expensive in New York. Rent’s expensive in New York,” Hart told me. (Fact check: true.) “People fight, they dig, they scratch, they claw to make a living. And a lot of those people getting Knicks tickets, they put money away to get Knicks tickets. So how can I show them love? How can I make sure they know that I appreciate them? And I do that through how I play, but also just the ‘New York’ in my hair—I embrace this city how they embrace me, and show love to them how they show love to me.” Speaking of love: Earlier this year, Hart and Brunson sold approximately 4,000 tickets (starting at $65 a pop) to a live taping in Central Park of the Roommates Show, the podcast they host together. The line to get in stretched a quarter mile.

DiVincenzo, his own red hair carefully lined up, grew up in Delaware, but is a dead ringer for a New Yorker of a certain type, Spike Lee explained. “I don’t know his biography, but he grew up around brothers,” he told me, guffawing. “Hey, check his DNA! That’s my brother! Mookie had some brothers in Do the Right Thing, too, Italian Americans.” Though DiVincenzo spent only a year in New York, the team sent him off with a glowing note of thanks over social media: “Over the last year,” team president Leon Rose wrote, “Donte not only captivated the city with one of the most iconic shots in Knicks history, but also immediately bought into the culture we were building here and was an example on and off the court from the moment he arrived as a Knick.”

Bridges, the new guy on the team, might not even need to move: He could keep his Tribeca loft, where he lived when playing in Brooklyn last season (while getting roasted in the group chat as the Knicks won all four games against the Nets), or he could move closer to the team’s practice facility—and many of his teammates—in the suburbs. That he’s here at all is something of a coup. Bridges knew he might be traded, but certainly not to the Knicks, no matter how badly the team’s fans wished for it. “It just didn’t make sense, because those two teams don’t make trades,” he said. Now that he’s here, he told me, playing with his college teammates will be the easy part. He’s focused on building trust with the other Knicks—the ones he didn’t take Stats 101 with.

There are, of course, skeptics, mostly without 212 area codes. Retired NBA journeyman point guard Brandon Jennings called the Knicks out on a podcast this summer. “Ain’t nobody scared of that shit,” he said. “This ain’t college.”

Josh Hart was uninterested in Jennings’s line of criticism. “If you never won anything in your life, you can’t talk about winning,” he told me. “For guys who’ve only been losers to talk about how to win is foolish to me.”

The only thing left to do is win. It’s no longer cute that a few guys who went to college together are playing on the same team as pros; it’s no longer a pleasant enough surprise when the Knicks make the playoffs. And now, with serial All-Star (and perennial butt of NBA Twitter jokes) Towns joining the squad at the expense of fan favorites DiVincenzo and Randle, expectations have been cranked even higher. This year, they’ll be expected to make a deep playoff run. The Sixers added Paul George over the summer, and the path to the Finals still runs through Boston. And thanks to stories like this one, the Knicks will have a target on their backs every night along the way. “Guys are going to come at them more than they ever have,” Wright predicted.

Hart put it to me like this. “Obviously, this is the first time probably in a while where there’s real expectations for the Knicks,” he said. “And for us, we can’t listen to it. We just got to make sure we focus on ourselves, making sure we jell and making sure we sacrifice, making sure we put the work in to be successful for the team, for ourselves, for the city. Any 82-game year is going to be peaks and valleys, but we’re going to have that blue-collar New York chip to us every time we go out there.”

Some easy truths: Championships aren’t won in the offseason. The NBA isn’t college ball. Madison Square Garden isn’t the on-campus arena at Villanova.

But as Knicks legend Carmelo Anthony liked to say while corralling rebounds: Fuck outta here! The Knicks are back. Let the chips fall where they may.

“Boston,” Spike Lee said, “better look the fuck out.”