The Knicks Are in the Finals Because Karl-Anthony Towns Spoke Up at Work

Every leader is chasing the same thing: getting the best out of the team they already have. Not more headcount, not a sharper strategy deck, but more from the people already in the room. And almost everyone is coming up short.

With only 31% of U.S. employees engaged at work, a ten-year low, in a period of enormous growth and transformation, most leaders are aware of the problem but aren't treating the fix as critical to their success. They should be. Because the gap between an engaged team and a disengaged one isn't incremental. It's the difference between good and future-altering. Which brings me to a story about ... the New York Knicks.

The Knicks are in the NBA Finals because Karl-Anthony Towns spoke up at work. Granted, he makes $60 million a year, so maybe it wasn't the biggest risk — but stay with me, because the lesson at the heart of this has nothing to do with basketball.

I'm a die-hard Knicks fan, with perpetual heartbreak since 1985, so this is a big deal :)

All season, the Knicks played one way. Give the ball to Jalen Brunson, one of the most gifted offensive players alive, and let him go to work one-on-one while everyone else watched. It got them far. It also left their other stars — genuine stars in their own right — standing around, taking rushed shots whenever Jalen finally gave it up. Coach Mike Brown leaned into it. He once joked to the press, "I'm Linus, and Jalen is my blanket."

One player carried a quiet discontent all season: KAT. He never said it publicly, but while everyone praised the "sacrifice," he knew he was being underused.

Then, down 2-1 in the very first round of the playoffs — on the brink of an embarrassing early exit, with all of New York in full panic — KAT went to his coach and said his piece. Not "I need to shoot more." The opposite: run the offense through me, and I can be a facilitator — I can get everyone else involved in a way we aren't with Jalen dominating the ball. He and Jalen are friends; this wasn't a shot at his captain. It was a critique of the system.

"And it was received," he said.

What happened next was, by the numbers, the best stretch of basketball ever played — not just in Knicks history, but in the history of the sport.

The Knicks won the next three to bury Atlanta, then steamrolled Philadelphia and Cleveland with 4-0 sweeps. Through their first 14 playoff games, they've outscored opponents by 271 points — an average margin of better than 19 a game.

In a league where playoff games are typically decided by a basket or two, that is the most dominant run any team has ever carried into the Finals. A very good season became a record-setting one — and if it ends in a title, it won't just be remembered. It'll change how teams think about what "enough" looks like.

Here's the part most versions of this story skip. The old way wasn't broken. Brunson-with-the-ball was good, very good — it carried this same team to a game away from the Finals last year. They might well have made it through playing exactly that way. So this isn't really a story about a season being saved. What the conversation unlocked wasn't escape. It was about raising their ceiling as a team. By a lot.

This version of the Knicks is a fundamentally more dangerous team — which is why the talk around the league has flipped. A month ago, whoever came out of the East was a formality for the Western champion who was a lock to win it all. Now it's: hold on — this might be close. A lot more even than we thought. Maybe, dare we say it, the Knicks win the whole thing.

What changed, in a word, was engagement.

More touches, more guys involved, more energy on both ends of the floor. Set aside that these are some of the highest-paid employees on the planet — that only sharpens the point. At whatever level your team is playing, the margin between winning and losing, and your success as a leader, comes down to exactly that. Are they truly engaged?

It's easy to credit KAT for speaking up, and he deserves it. The less powerful person in the room named an uncomfortable truth everyone else had quietly accepted. It's the whole reason I built the Accountability Dial: most of us would rather carry a quiet discontent for an entire season than risk one direct conversation.

But there's another hero in this story, KAT's 'boss', the Knicks head coach Mike Brown.

Mike Brown had every incentive to get defensive — to explain why the system was mostly working, to remind KAT who runs the team, and to close off dialogue by saying that it was way too late in the season with too much at risk to make such a fundamental change. Instead he took it in, and was willing to accept that the way he'd been operating wasn't giving the team its best chance.

And notice what made that possible. The conditions for that kind of culture don't get created in that last conversation. They're built in the hundred quiet moments before it. All season, Brown had been the kind of leader who made it landable — collaborative with his staff and his players, on record that if they saw something he didn't, they could speak up.

By the time KAT walked in, the room was already built.

That's More Yoda, Less Superhero in real life. Most leaders believe their job is to have the answer. The best ones understand their real job is to stay open enough that the answer can reach them — especially when it comes from someone who reports to them, and especially when it stings. Not clutching the security blanket. Being willing to put it down.

And here's the rarest part. Staying open when what you're doing is failing is just survival instinct. Staying open when what you're doing is mostly working — almost nobody does that. It's the only reason this team now has a championship ceiling instead of an early exit.

So the question I'd leave you with: How do we create the conditions for that kind of conversation — on our teams, with our spouses and partners, with our kids? Not the values we aspire to, but the ones we embody in the three seconds after someone tells us something we don't want to hear.

Tomorrow night, the Knicks tip off Game 1 of the Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. They're the underdog, but nobody's calling it a formality anymore. All because of one conversation, between two people willing to take the risk, and a coach who spent a year making it safe to have.

What's the one conversation that your team is waiting to have with you?

Creating a culture where people can hand you hard truths isn't accidental. It requires a deliberate framework — and that's exactly what we built Ren to help you create.