Josh Hart, the Knicks champion the box score never quite explains

Josh Hart

Photo: Erik Drost / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 6, 1995 Silver Spring
Occupation	Basketball Player
Individual awards	NBA champion · NBA Cup champion · NCAA champion · Consensus first-team All-American · Big East Player of the Year · Julius Erving Award

Every defense in the NBA has, at some point, made the same bet against Josh Hart: leave him open on the perimeter and send the help somewhere else. For most of his career the wager looked safe. What it never priced in was everything he does with the space he is given, the offensive rebounds taken from taller men, the loose balls, the outlet passes thrown before the other team has turned around. New York has now won a championship with him doing all of that, and the question the Knicks are asking this autumn is the one that has followed him through four franchises: what a player is worth when the things that matter most are the things nobody counts.

Being overlooked started early. Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, he drew no interest from the private schools of the Washington area and started at his local public school, Wheaton, before transferring to Sidwell Friends, where his grades nearly ended the experiment. The school was ready to let him go until a group of students and parents petitioned for a second chance.

Hart was born on March 6, 1995, to Moses and Pat Hart, into a family that already had a sporting name in it: his grand-uncle was Elston Howard, the catcher who became the first Black player on the New York Yankees. When he committed to Villanova in November 2012, he described the job he expected to do with unusual precision. “I might not hit the winning three but I’m going to be the one that goes and gets a rebound when we need it and goes on the floor for a loose ball, anything to win,” he said. It reads now like a career plan.

At Villanova, under Jay Wright, he began as a reserve and in 2015 became the first bench player named most outstanding player of the Big East tournament. A year later he started for the team that won the 2016 national championship, alongside a guard named Jalen Brunson and a wing named Mikal Bridges. As a senior he was a consensus first-team All-American and Big East Player of the Year. Villanova retired his No. 3 in 2022.

The professional route was less tidy. Utah took him with the 30th pick in 2017 and traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers the same night. Two years later he became a line item in one of the decade’s biggest trades, sent with Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram and draft picks to New Orleans for Anthony Davis. In February 2022 the Pelicans moved him to Portland in the deal for CJ McCollum, and a month later he scored 44 against the Washington Wizards, still his career high. Portland traded him to the Knicks in February 2023, which put him back in a locker room with Brunson.

New York is where the role he described as a teenager turned into a statistical oddity. Under Tom Thibodeau he became the player the coach would not take off the floor. In March 2024 he played all 48 minutes of a win over Golden State, joining Walt Frazier and Jerry Lucas as the only Knicks to do it. In 2024-25 he started all 77 games he played, averaged 13.6 points, 9.6 rebounds and 5.9 assists, led the league in minutes at 37.6 per game and set the franchise record for triple-doubles in a season. In the 2025 playoffs he added a triple-double in the Game 6 rout of the defending champion Boston Celtics, the first playoff triple-double by a Knick since Frazier in 1972.

Those minutes are also where the case against the way he was used begins. Thibodeau’s heavy rotations were a long-running complaint around the team, and Hart was their most visible example. The shooting question never went away either: opponents kept daring him from three, and during the 2025 Eastern Conference finals against Indiana it was Hart himself who asked to come off the bench so the Knicks could start a bigger lineup. They lost the series in six games, Thibodeau was fired days later and Mike Brown replaced him. Asked at media day whether he would accept a reserve role under the new coach, Hart answered with deadpan sarcasm, “If I don’t start, I’ll probably ask for a trade,” before adding: “Whatever Mike wants to do, or doesn’t want to do, I’m cool with.” The deeper problem was physical. After surgery on his right ring finger in July 2025, he revealed in November that he was living with nerve damage and numbness in that finger, on his shooting hand.

The strange part is what came next. With a finger he could not fully feel, he shot 41.3 percent from three in 2025-26, the best mark of his NBA career, while starting 53 of his 66 games, and New York won the NBA Cup in December. In Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals against Cleveland he was benched down the stretch during a slump; in Game 2 he answered with 26 points, a playoff career high. On June 13, 2026, in San Antonio, he played 39 minutes of the clinching Game 5 of the Finals, scoring 13 points and grabbing a team-high 11 rebounds in a 94-90 win that gave the Knicks their first championship in 53 years. Hart, Brunson and Bridges became the first trio of players to win NCAA and NBA titles together.

Off the court much of his public profile has little to do with basketball. The Roommates Show, the podcast he has hosted with Brunson and Matt Hillman since 2024, opened its fourth season this month, and Mike and Ike named him its “Chief Candy Officer” in 2025, a nod to a pregame candy habit he has never hidden. He married Shannon Phillips, a registered nurse and his high-school sweetheart, in Miami in 2021; the couple have twin sons and live in Harrison, New York.

The championship did not settle his price. He opened the 2026-27 season with a ring and with braids shaped like the Larry O’Brien Trophy. On October 9 the Knicks announced they were tabling extension talks with him and Karl-Anthony Towns until later in the season; he is due $20.9 million this year, and the club holds an option of about $22.4 million for 2027-28. “There hasn’t really been much movement and conversation with that, so I don’t think it will get done,” he said at media day. “I would love to get it done.” The months ahead will show whether New York values him the way its title run suggested, or the way the box score always has.

Tags: sports, athletes, nba, Josh Hart, Jalen Brunson, new york knicks, basketball players, Mikal Bridges, Villanova Wildcats