The common sense and dollars and cents agree with ownership on the 2025-26 Knicks: This year is the year for the best team constructed in the franchise’s recent history.

It’s been at least 25 years — dating back to the Knicks’ failed 1999 NBA Finals run — since Madison Square Garden has housed as stacked, as complete, of a basketball team as the one tasked with an NBA Finals or bust mandate from above.

Because it’s hard to find a star with as many weapons at his disposal as Jalen Brunson, the all-world guard whose boom-or-bust task is striking the right balance between scoring and distributing.

The Knicks have given Brunson a six-time All-Star co-captain in Karl-Anthony Towns. They’ve given him his friends from Villanova, including one who cost five draft picks plus a $150 million extension. They’ve given him two of the most impactful two-way wings in the sport, a Defensive Player of the Year candidate off the bench, plus a second unit — with trade deadline acquisitions — stretching 10 to 11 real rotation players deep.

Leon Rose and his front office did that.

They identified a less rigid, more collaborative and modern head coach (albeit a backup option). They maximized limited roster-building resources. They drafted Mohamed Diawara, re-signed Landry Shamet, and swapped Guerschon Yabusele out for Jose Alvarado and Jeremy Sochan.

The Knicks have gotten tougher. They’ve gotten deeper. They’re more talented at all five positions than possibly any team in the Eastern Conference.

Which means they are out of excuses. This team has to win — and win big — or else the front office will return to the questions they had as the Knicks spiraled out of control, losing nine of an 11-game stretch before finally getting their act together ahead of the trade deadline.

Or, as James Dolan said in a Jan. 5 interview on WFAN: “I’d say we want to get to the Finals and we should win the Finals. This is sports, anything can happen. Getting to the Finals, we absolutely have to do. Winning the Finals, we should do.”

If the Knicks don’t. If they don’t at least make it to the Finals, you can bet they will return to the Giannis Antetokounmpo discourse. To the discourse that deems the roster as currently constructed unworthy of ownership’s championship mandate.

Yet it’ll be hard to break these Knicks up if they run the table in the East and make the Finals for the first time in more than a quarter century.

“Look how far we got with our group last year and look at who was playing and who wasn’t,” Dolan continued. “We’re going into the second half of the season, Josh [Hart] is still out and Landry [Shamet] is coming back. We got depth.

“We stay healthy, we’ll go into the playoffs in much better condition than last year.”

The Knicks have $201 million in guaranteed player salaries for the 2026-27 NBA season. The second apron is only expected to increase by 7% to $223 million, which will leave the Knicks just $22 million in space before encroaching over into restricted territory.

That $201 million payroll for 2026-27 does not include Jose Alvarado, who — as someone with career earnings of less than $12 million — can decline his $4.5 million player option for next season to sign a more lucrative deal elsewhere (or in New York). It doesn’t include Mitchell Robinson, who will be an unrestricted free agent seeking a pay raise, potentially north of $20 million annually alone. It doesn’t include Shamet, Jordan Clarkson or Jeremy Sochan, all in New York on one-year deals. Nor does it include Mohamed Diawara, Ariel Hukporti or Kevin McCullar Jr., each of whom will enter restricted free agency this summer.

The payroll for next season includes only Brunson, Towns, Bridges, Hart and OG Anunoby plus Miles McBride, who will be eligible for a contract extension, Pacome Dadiet and Tyler Kolek. The Knicks will need to go into the second apron to build a complete roster, let alone re-sign Robinson. They will be under even more pressure to trade a piece of their core in hopes of improving their roster elsewhere.

Or they can double down. They can bite the bullet associated with the second apron because the taste of victory could far outweigh the bitter tax bill at the end of a season.

This Knicks team has the goods. They’ve got stars on both ends of the floor, proper spacing, a deep bench and a coach prioritizing a free-flowing style of basketball.

It’s time to turn the goods into hardware. Into results. Into this franchise’s most successful season of the century. This team is constructed to run the wide-open Eastern Conference.

If it doesn’t, the second apron will force the front office to answer questions the roster couldn’t.

CHICAGO — For a few seconds in Monday’s road loss to the Brooklyn Nets, Matas Buzelis could barely breathe.

The second-year forward had launched himself on the typical aggressive trajectory that allows him to block more shots than any of his Chicago Bulls teammates. Buzelis knew what to expect once he made it into the air, where to place his hand to anticipate the redirection as the ball charted toward the rim.

What he didn’t expect was a new teammate sliding into his landing path. Buzelis was still suspended midair when Collin Sexton backpedaled underneath the forward, knocking his legs backward to send the younger player crashing to the floor, stomach-first. And for a second, Buzelis stayed flat on the court, wincing as he measured up how much pain he could take, how much of the game was left to endure the burden of anchoring the Bulls at both ends of the court.

Six minutes down. Three and a half quarters to go.

This is the new status quo for Buzelis. The 21-year-old kid is becoming increasingly familiar with the hardwood of arenas around the league. It’s not abnormal for a young player to get tossed around — but this is a bit different.

After a tumultuous trade deadline, Buzelis is the primary option for the Bulls, the face of a team taking the first step toward redefining its identity. He’s also one of only three players available who was also on the roster a week ago. Young stars are supposed to get the spotlight treatment. But what Buzelis is receiving is something closer to a floodlight.

The Bulls know what they have in Buzelis. So does the NBA, which is why he was selected to participate in the Rising Stars event during All-Star weekend. He averages 15.2 points (third in his draft class) and 5.3 rebounds per game while tallying the 10th-most blocks (79) in the league.

For a player who averaged 13 points and 4.5 rebounds in his final 31 games as a rookie, this might seem like a small step forward. But the Bulls, for their part, are content with the progress Buzelis has made this season.

Coach Billy Donovan often appears to slip into the role of disciplinarian when handling Buzelis, regularly pulling the forward off the court for defensive mistakes and missed rebounds. Yet as the weeks wore on, Donovan began to readily praise the forward — for his work ethic, his playmaking, his improved timing and vision.

Even if the numbers seem reserved, Donovan feels Buzelis has made a “significant” leap in Year 2. The remainder of this season will be spent preserving that growth as the forward plunges into the dire straits of navigating a tank job as one of the few players whose future is tied to the rebuild at hand.

The Bulls made a difficult commitment at the deadline. For the next nine weeks, this team is going to lose as many games as possible. They will do so not because the players or coaches aren’t trying — in fact, it’s the opposite. The roster simply has been stripped and gutted of enough parts that the remaining players, while dedicated to attempted competitiveness, simply can’t keep up with the rest of the league.

This has been an effective tactic so far. The Bulls lost nine of their last 10 games before the All-Star break. In the process, they have marginally improved their odds of landing a top-four draft pick from 2.4% to 13.9% while dropping out of play-in tournament position by a full two games.

This approach isn’t particularly palatable to fans, but it is mostly accepted as a necessary mechanism for long-term roster improvement among the bottom rung of NBA teams. Still, one tricky aspect of tanking is ignored too often: How does a team throw away a season without also ruining a season of development for its existing young core.

Buzelis is being asked to do too much. He inherited too many responsibilities from Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu and Nikola Vučević. Buzelis already had his hands full just trying to live up to his potential as the best two-way player in the starting lineup. Now he’s trying to rally a locker room of strangers, initiate the offense as a primary playmaker and swallow up the mistakes and confusion of his teammates on defense.

Most of the time, he’s juggling these jobs with that signature grin, taking extra time in the locker room to check in with his new teammates, trading off jokes and questions during lulls in shootarounds and practices. But at times, the exhaustion — both physical and emotional — shows through. This is hard. And it’s not getting easier anytime soon.

The Bulls can’t afford to mess the next nine weeks up — because Buzelis is the future in Chicago. The front office believes Josh Giddey is a worthwhile investment. They see promise in 19-year-old rookie Noa Essengue, who played fewer than 10 minutes with the Bulls before suffering a season-ending injury. And the Bulls are genuinely interested in the potential of deadline acquisitions such as Jaden Ivey and Anfernee Simons.

But in Chicago, Buzelis is the fulcrum that every step hinges around. If he develops into a star, the Bulls have a decent plan on their hands. If his progress stalls out, this team is in trouble. And that’s how the forward ended up under a too-bright light at the end of this season, burdened with the unfortunate responsibility of being one of the few players the front office felt was worth investing in long term.

This weekend should serve as yet another reminder of how far this franchise has fallen from relevancy. Buzelis will be the only Bulls representative at the All-Star festivities in Los Angeles. The Bulls have not had a player selection to the All-Star team in three seasons.

The Bulls suffer from a talent vacuum. Role players and depth can go only so far. Even the front office has somewhat abandoned the mythos of “nine or 10 really good players” that once suggested this team could find success simply by rounding out an extensive and hardworking supporting cast. If this team is ever going to get serious again, it will begin with the definition and evolution of a true standout.

Is Buzelis the answer? It’s still too early to say definitively. But for now, he’s the closest thing the Bulls have to stardom.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson’s contemporaries from his sport’s heyday are all but gone.

Pictures in a frame. Names on a trophy. Plaques in the Hall of Fame.

All remain faces of the sport, most just sans helmet and fire suit.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick are on TV. Jeff Gordon is a big wig at Hendricks Motorsports. Tony Stewart pilots dragsters and returned from a decades-long absence Friday at Daytona International Speedway to race trucks.

While Denny Hamlin, 45, and Kyle Busch, 40, remain relevant, Johnson in many ways is the last of the Mohicans. He’s a final touch point to a bygone era in the aughts, when ratings soared, sponsors flocked to the sport and fans flooded race tracks — old and new, coast to coast.

But his 23rd appearance in Sunday’s Daytona 500 isn’t ceremonial. Winless since 2017, including his final three full-time seasons on the Cup Series, Johnson aims to match the late Bobby Allison as the only 50-year-old to win the Great American Race.

“I finished third last year,” he said, matter-of-factly.

Sweeping changes to the car and the rule book have done little to change restrictor-plate racing on superspeedways since he won his first of two Daytona 500s in 2006 — 20 years ago.

“In the 25 years, I’ve been driving these types of tracks, the game’s changed, like 5%,” he said. “The elements of the draft are still the same.”

Johnson’s beard is more salt than pepper, and his piercing brown eyes are framed by lines. But his body remains lean and fit, and his engineering mind sharp as ever.

Fresh are the memories of Johnson’s 2006 Daytona 500 win, which ignited the greatest run of championship success in NASCAR history — featuring an unprecedented five consecutive Cup Series titles.

The iconic No. 48 car’s race team arrived to Florida’s Surf Coast in 2006 after coming up short of a season championship the previous two years. Kurt Busch nipped Johnson by eight points in 2004, followed by Stewart’s 52-point margin in 2005.

Those close calls spurred hard conversations after the ’05 disappointment.

“There was a lot of tension internally,” Johnson recalled.

Johnson, a 31-year-old rising star, and his strong-willed, 35-year-old crew chief Chad Knaus set aside enough differences to win 18 times from 2002-05. Yet, the duo had competing visions of the team’s direction.

Knaus involved himself in every aspect of the operation to prevent strategy and testing results from leaking. Johnson felt the team would be best served if Knaus delegated.

“Chad didn’t want his secrets getting out,” Johnson said. “We had this siloed world — our testing team and racing team. Chad was worn so thin. It was holding him back and holding us back.”

Knaus dismissed Johnson’s suggestions, causing friction.

Hall of Fame owner Rick Hendricks finally stepped in. Johnson and Knaus arrived to his office to find chocolate chip cookies, on a Mickey Mouse plate, and glasses of milk awaiting.

The message: Quit acting like children.

“The lesson was about empowering others and trusting others,” Johnson said.

A Daytona 500 win validated the restructuring. After a runner-up finish the next week in Fontana, California, and win in Las Vegas, Johnson’s historic run was underway.

“It was such a fortifying moment for us as a group,” he said. “That whole dynamic created what the 48 became.”

NASCAR had never witnessed anything like it. Johnson recorded 35 wins and 81 top-five finishes in 160 races to sit atop the final standings from 2006-10.

Along the way, Knaus found gray areas on the black asphalt, was penalized for rules infractions and even suspended.

“Chad’s brilliance, because the rule book was quite thin, he was truly a rule maker,” Johnson said. “He did break a rule or two along the way. But think of how many times people thought we were in hot water and caught and doing something wrong, and once they got in there and read the rules a little closer, ‘Well, damn, they got us again. So let’s write a new rule.’ And then that next Monday, a new rule would come out.

“That innovation was something I was able to exploit — and we made such a great team.”

The No. 48’s team’s genius emerged late in races.

“I lived it — not on the good side like he did,” said Joey Logano, a rookie in 2009. “He and Chad had things really well figured out to where they always were there. They always figured out how to finish great even when they had an off day. They didn’t have many.”

Now a car owner at Legacy Motor Club, Johnson recognizes he and Knaus would have far fewer advantages in today’s NASCAR.

Decision-makers pushed for uniform cars to spur competition, culminating with the Gen 7 model introduced in 2022. That season produced 19 distinct winners — the most since 2001.

“Back then things were different; the teams could build extremely fast race cars,” said Hamlin, who is coming off a six-win season. “The advantages your team could build into your car were just a lot bigger. You can’t build that much speed in your car like you could back then.”

Hamlin’s success with Joe Gibbs Racing shows the top teams rise. The 2025 season produced 15 distinct winners, one fewer than during Johnson’s 10-win 2007 campaign.

Vast resources and extensive research and development allowed the No. 48 team to test 22 times, “to get it right,” Johnson recalled.

Trial and error on race simulators doesn’t provide the feedback familiar to Johnson, who cut his teeth racing motorcycles and trucks in the Southern California desert.

Johnson will race trucks in the Las Vegas foothills March 4-8 during the storied Mint 400 off-road trucks race. His NASCAR schedule will be sparse as he focuses on his Legacy team’s success.

“For the company, I’m better out of the car than in the car,” he said.

Few have been better than when Johnson was in full flight. The 83-time winner redefined a sport’s standards.

Not everyone cheered his success.

Sponsors embraced Johnson, who was telegenic, polished and charming at a time the sport was reaching new fans. The appeal was lost on holdovers accustomed to drivers rough around the edges, with a Southern drawl, drinking a beer in Victory Lane.

In time, Johnson won over the masses. Appreciation grew for his accomplishments, presence and generosity with younger drivers, like 19-year-old Cup Series rookie Connor Zilisch.

“I always loved Jimmy. He was just one of a kind,” Zilisch said. “He always walks up and says hello. It makes younger me proud to have cheered for him, just because he’s such a good person — and he’s done a lot for the sport.”

Johnson appreciates the respect within the garage and the increasing fanfare during the twilight of a Hall of Fame career. Starting alongside Zilisch in Row 16 Sunday, Johnson’s No. 84 Toyota will have considerable support from the sold-out grandstands.

“It does seem to resonate more and is honored more, maybe now than then,” he said. “For the public to weigh in now, it’s kind of an evergreen gift.”

Johnson hopes to give onlookers a parting gift Sunday with an improbable Daytona 500 win.