‘It’s who he is’: How Mikal Bridges’ reappearing act has the Knicks surging toward the NBA Finals

CLEVELAND — Mikal Bridges nodded.

He’d just watched longtime teammate and friend Josh Hart break out of a shooting slump in a major way, knocking down five 3-pointers to fuel the New York Knicks’ sprint to a 2-0 lead in the 2026 Eastern Conference finals. And in his postgame press conference, Bridges fielded a question about what he’d seen in Hart’s ability to persist through the frustration of failing against a scheme designed to exploit his weakness until he found a way to succeed.

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“Yeah, just staying mentally tough, you know?” Bridges said. “That’s the biggest thing. And just keep trusting his game, trusting his work. We’re super confident in him, and we’re gonna keep finding him, and we know he’s gonna make some shots.

“But just for him, personally? Just mentally tough, you know. Staying with it.”

You wonder if, as Bridges answered, he found his mind drifting back to last month, when he himself seemed to be struggling with a crisis of confidence — one that threatened to dash the Knicks’ championship hopes against the rocks of cold, hard reality before they’d even really had a chance to set sail.

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And you wonder whether, as he thought about how Hart came out the other side on Thursday night — “He kept making shots toward the end, and we got to where we got to” — he took a moment to consider just how far he’s come since.

Bridges occupies a fascinating position on this Knicks team. He’s sort of like the pilot light in your furnace. When he’s operating as intended, nobody really says very much, because, y’know, how often do you make a point to comment about how it’s just the right temperature in the living room while you’re watching TV?

When the light’s out, though? Suddenly it’s cold and uncomfortable, and people start getting grouchy, and everybody begins loudly wondering why the hell they gave up unprotected first-round picks in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031, plus another 2025 first-rounder, a 2028 pick swap and a 2025 second-round pick for something that doesn’t even let them take a decent shower.

(OK: The metaphor got away from me a little bit.)

This, largely, has been Bridges’ lot in life since Leon Rose forked over a half-decade’s worth of draft capital to move him from Brooklyn to Manhattan. When he’s doing what fans think he’s supposed to do at a high level — gloving up opponents’ top perimeter playmakers, sprinting like a gazelle in transition, knocking down every corner 3, and doing it all without grinding the gears of an offensive system in which he is often, at best, the fourth option — nobody really bats an eye. (Mostly, they’re too busy looking at Jalen Brunson or Karl-Anthony Towns’ latest gaudy stat line.)

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But when he doesn’t — when he’s not quite as impactful at the point of attack as you’d like, when he’s misfiring from deep, when he’s barely even looking to run a pick-and-roll, and when the Knicks start slogging through what have become fairly rare spates of sluggish play — the weight of dealing all those picks to get Bridges and the subsequent $150 million extension to retain him, and the opportunity cost of not having the draft capital and financial flexibility to hunt for Insert Superstar Antidote to All Our Problems Here, starts to feel crushing.

You’d understand if, at times, it also feels crushing for Bridges, who had a pretty strong season on balance, even if it was rarely described that way. Yes, his counting stats were down — 14.4 points per game, his lowest since his final full season as a fourth option in Phoenix — and his free-throw attempt rate continued its plummet to career-low levels, as he seemed intent on avoiding contact around the basket.

That dip also came in the context of him playing fewer minutes than he had in five years. And averaging 8.5 fewer frontcourt touches per game than he did last season — and fewer than he had since 2021-22. And trying to figure out how to get in where he fit in offensively under a new head coach in Mike Brown, who had to figure out, first and foremost, how to get his All-Star fulcrums bought into what he was selling, on the same page, and firing on all cylinders.

“You come here and have Jalen and [Towns] and, offensively, might have to take a step back,” Hart told James L. Edwards III of The Athletic earlier this season. “Sometimes that’s difficult. Sometimes that’s tough. You go from getting 15-20 play calls to getting three or four play calls. Mentally, it can take time to adjust to that.”

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Bridges seemed to acknowledge as much after a January win over the Raptors that saw him break out of a weeks-long funk — one mirroring the Knicks’ broader post-NBA Cup swoon — by exploding for 30 points on 12-for-15 shooting.

“I think I just wasn’t playing how I was supposed to be playing,” Bridges said in a postgame interview. “I think I wasn’t coachable enough. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I felt too much entitlement. I just had to talk to myself about it and be coachable and be the best teammate I can be.”

But progress isn’t always linear. The next several months would see Bridges alternate peaks and valleys — a string of 20-point outings here, a quiet night with barely a half-dozen shot attempts there.

On the whole, though, Bridges still performed. Among players who made at least 60 appearances and averaged at least 25 minutes a night this season, Dunks and Threes’ estimated plus-minus metric graded Bridges out as a top-40 player in the league, providing roughly the same level of on-court impact as Rudy Gobert, Trey Murphy III, Desmond Bane, Cason Wallace and Julius Randle.

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Notably, Bridges’ contributions were evenly split: plus-0.9 points per 100 possessions added on offense, plus 0.9-per-100 on defense. In that group of players who logged 60-plus games and 25-plus minutes per night, only 20 other players in the NBA provided that kind of value on both ends of the floor — a list littered with All-NBA, All-Star and All-Defensive Team candidates.

That quiet effectiveness, though, got drowned out by a louder fact: Entering the 2026 postseason, Bridges had scored 20 points in a game just twice since the All-Star break — an offensive recession that hit rock bottom in Round 1 against Atlanta.

Bridges maintained his defensive effort, ping-ponging all around the court to stick with and limit Most Improved Player winner Nickeil Alexander-Walker. On the offensive end, though, a player who’d averaged 19.9 points per game in the two seasons prior to joining the Knicks had become little more than an apparition.

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Despite being guarded by CJ McCollum, Bridges seemed reluctant to enter the fray, rarely setting screens or calling for the ball to run pick-and-rolls that would draw the Hawks’ weakest link into the center of the Knicks’ actions. When the ball did find him, he looked tentative handling it and uncomfortable shooting it — resulting in a scoreless, four-turnover performance in Game 3 that led Brown to bench him down the stretch of Game 3, seemingly putting his spot in the starting lineup in jeopardy.

“It’s a tough one,” Bridges told reporters after his benching. “I got to take it on the chin and handle how I’m supposed to and be ready for the next one. It’s going to suck. It is what it is. I just got to be better to help my team out there.”

Brown stuck with him in the starting five, but curbed his minutes, leaning harder on Miles McBride, Jordan Clarkson and Jose Alvarado in Games 4 and 5. And then came Game 6 — the all-consuming, world-historic inferno of Game 6 — and Bridges emerged from the fire looking burned clean, reborn, like a brand new man.