Knicks' Leon Rose made all the right moves en route to an NBA championship

SAN ANTONIO — In the bowels of Frost Bank Center, while players roamed back and forth from celebrations to interviews to combinations of both, Knicks president Leon Rose, soaked with champagne, quietly made his way through the crowd toward the exit with his father, Zev, beside him.

Rose wasn’t doing interviews, but he did offer handshakes and thanks to everyone he crossed paths with. He was the one member of the organization who wasn’t wildly celebrating for the crowd and cameras.

Every step of the way on their championship journey, the Knicks insisted they were entering each game 0-0. But for Rose, when he took over as the team president six years ago, it wasn’t 0-0. It was 21-45, the record of the team he inherited. And that was a step up from the 17-65 squad a year earlier. There were highlights, but wins were hard to come by.

The Knicks had failed with business executives, struggled with basketball front office lifers and collapsed under the weight and ego of a Hall of Fame coach/PR stunt when Phil Jackson was brought in to run the team.

So there was understandable queasiness among the fan base when it was decided to put the franchise’s fortunes in the hands of Rose, a longtime and very successful agent but someone with no experience running a team (and frankly, his moves to bring his clients to New York often helped the players and CAA more than the Knicks).

If he was a man of few words, he still was all about relationships. He hired his longtime client, Tom Thibodeau, to coach the team and bring a hard-nosed base to the organization. There were critics when he signed Jalen Brunson as a free agent, joining him with his father, Rick, now an assistant coach who was Rose’s first client as a young agent.

But it was more than just friendship and family. It was the long relationships that allowed him to know that Jalen Brunson’s heart was bigger than his NBA Draft Combine measurements.

‘I think he has a great basketball mind,” Brunson said. “I also think he surrounds himself with good people. 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.

“For the time I’ve known him, basically my entire life, he’s always been that way. He’s always willing to help, always willing to have the best possible outcome. So that’s just who he is.”

He has moved in almost unseen ways, restructuring every aspect of the organization from the medical staff to the analytics and scouting departments. With Brock Aller overseeing the salary cap, Rose has managed to make minor moves to open the door to major change.

Nearly every move he made could have been questioned at the time of the deal, but it’s hard to point to a mistake he’s made.

Josh Hart, Brunson’s teammate at Villanova who’d shuttled through teams and coaches, was acquired as part of a four-team deal in which the Knicks gave up former lottery pick Cam Reddish. Hart’s hustle and versatility immediately fit beside the teammate with whom he’d combined for a national championship long before they held the Larry O’Brien Trophy.

RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley were dealt for OG Anunoby, and the Knicks suddenly began to resemble a contender. Then, two summers ago, Rose took the team that had reached the Eastern Conference semifinals two straight years and restructured it, sending five first-round picks to the Nets to obtain another one of Brunson’s college teammates, Mikal Bridges.

Finally, on the eve of last season’s training camp, he sent Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and draft picks to Minnesota for Karl-Anthony Towns.

That brought the Knicks to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in a quarter-century, but they ultimately fired Thibodeau, replacing him after a long search with Mike Brown. Critics voiced their issues with the hiring, but now there is little to debate.

“I’ve thought about it even before I got the job,” Brown said. “There are a couple of franchises that are pretty iconic just because of the history that they have, the location that they’re in, sometimes even the building that they’re in. New York is definitely one of the few that you could say that to in all three facets.

“Everybody goes through their ups and downs. I don’t really think much about the tough times that they had, because everybody has tough times, including individuals. You just want to try the best you can to be a part of whatever you can to bring joy to the city, to the organization.

“At the end of the day, the chips are going to fall how they fall. I feel blessed, fortunate, lucky to be a part of what is going on now.”

By Steve Popper

steve.popper@newsday.com@StevePopper

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.