Is it possible for a team from New York to be underrated?I would have thought this impossible, given the sheer gravitational pull of virtually anything New York-adjacent in the media landscape, but this year’s Knicks have me wondering. Somehow, the Knicks are four wins from the title after having just about zero hype all season. Even during this run to the NBA Finals, while much energy has been expended talking about the excitement in the city and amongst the team’s myriad celebrity fans, remarkably little focus has shifted to the actual basketball players.Look, we’ve learned more about Fat Joe in the last six weeks than we have about Josh Hart. Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns are All-Stars but still lag on the national attention meter, especially for New York athletes. The Knicks’ third-best player, OG Anunoby, is in the midst of an awesome playoff run and yet still effectively remains OG Anonymous once he leaves Madison Square Garden.These entire finals, in fact, are a tell on that phenomenon: It’s basically being marketed as Victor Wembanyama vs. The New York Knicks.This is a tremendous compliment to the way the Knicks have been built. There was no savior lottery pick like Patrick Ewing in 1985, no mildly-overrated-but-very-famous trade target to replicate Camelo Anthony. Instead, it’s been a sustained build of smart trades, good (OK, awesome) free-agent signings, and forward-thinking cap strategy. After three decades of chasing every shiny object, not to mention a few dull ones (paging Mr. Bargnani), the Knicks under Leon Rose have been a model of strategic patience mixed with timely impatience. Take that Masai Ujiri!*(*If you know, you know.)Over half a decade, New York snuck up on everyone as a contender. And out of the blue in a two-year span, where few perceived them as a true threat to win the title, the Shamet-Chalamet Era Knicks have won 22 playoff games and five playoff series. They’re arguably one Aaron Nesmith heater and Tyrese Haliburton miracle bounce away from consecutive NBA Finals trips.There’s a reason for that, of course: We equate champions with great players. Not good players, great ones. Historically, teams without one of the two or three very best players in the league have come close several times, but have had an extremely difficult time climbing the mountain at the end. New York’s team is the “get a bunch of good players” model more than one of heliocentric superstardom.The “bunch-of-good-players” roster build has come achingly close many times (Indiana last year, Sacramento in 2002, Portland in 2000, and so on), but the only true successes since 1980 are Detroit in 2004, San Antonio in 2014 and, one could argue, Boston in 2024. (Even that San Antonio squad had two awesomely great players, in terms of their career, but neither was That Dude in 2014: Kawhi Leonard was near the beginning of his journey, and Tim Duncan was near the end.)Every other champion since 1980 can be described by one player, more or less, from the Michael Jordan Bulls to the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Thunder. Yes, this is unfair and reductive, but it reflects the reality that a single dominant performer has been the necessary ingredient for championships much more often than not.The Spurs, unquestionably, have that ingredient in Wembanyama. The Knicks, unquestionably, do not. Brunson and Towns are very good, but literally nobody thinks they’re at the Wemby/SGA/Nikola Jokić/Luka Dončić level.The Spurs also won nine more games than the Knicks this season, had a better scoring margin, and are a jaw-dropping 39-5 in the last 44 games in which Wembanyama has played more than 20 minutes. San Antonio outlasted a team with the eighth-best scoring margin of all time to get here, even with injuries to De’Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper, two key backcourt players.Top to bottom, San Antonio has an awesome roster poised to challenge for titles for the next decade. The Knicks, meanwhile, are a No. 3 seed with 53 wins, one that barely nosed over my historical hurdle (a top-three seed and at least 52 wins) for quasi-legit championship contention.On paper, then, you might conclude this is a repeat of the Spurs-Knicks Finals in 1999 that San Antonio won in five games to kick-start the Tim Duncan dynasty.And yet …As I wrote a week ago as they were finishing off a sweep of Cleveland in the Eastern Conference finals, the Knicks have seemingly touched God over the last 11 games, not only sporting the best scoring margin in NBA history for an 11-outing stretch — playoffs or regular season — but actually bookending it with the two best 10-game stretches.Even allowing for the opposition, and for twice losing in the first round to Atlanta before blasting off, New York’s playoff run has been impressive. As NBA.com’s John Schuhmann noted, the Knicks’ offense and defense have beaten their opponents’ averages by a greater margin than San Antonio’s did in the first three rounds.