Yes, you read the headline right. The Knicks might not be the most efficient team by the on-court numbers, but from a payroll-to-wins perspective, they’re tops in the NBA.

It’s a bonkers new NBA world out there. Which would have shocked you more, 184 plague-years ago, on Dec. 22, 2020, as the season got underway: James Harden being traded for Kelly Olynyk and stuff? Or the New York Knicks being the most efficient team in basketball? Don’t actually answer that, it’s an aneurism waiting to happen. The point is — both options are pass-the-Valium ridiculous. Except that they both sort of happened.

In the naked engine room of the NBA, there are two things: dollars and wins. The only restriction the league has is how much money a team can spend, and the only ends a team has is to win basketball games. The win column is an expression of useful work performed by the machine of a franchise relative to its dollar energy inputs. This is the definition of efficiency: the extremes of which have been beautifully demonstrated by the Knicks, this season, and in the solemn poo-poo-platter spending parade of the 20 preceding seasons.

Here’s a happy fact: The Knicks have the second-lowest payroll — $95,986,008 — in the league this year, ahead of only the Oklahoma City Tanks. The salary cap is at $109 million, and only four teams — the other two being the Sacramento Kings (just under $106m) and Charlotte Hornets (just over $106m) — are under the cap. 

Here’s another happy fact: The Knicks have the 13th-best net rating in the NBA, almost two-thirds of the way through the season. Here’s a fancy chart for you to print off and frame and put on your wall and worship to prove it.

At this point it’s worth asking: how is that non-Knicks fan in your life coping with the fact that the LOL-Knicks are the most efficient team in the NBA? How many swimming pools of confused tears have they wept? What’s the most creative way you’ve made them aware of this fact? Flash mob? Barbershop quartet ambush? Hiding behind their bins and shouting it at them, as they open the door in the morning, stepping out to begrudgingly face a world that makes no sense?

The Knicks of the last 20 years have been an albatross of payroll inefficiency, which is why this year comes to residents of the NBA universe as such a reality-shattering revelation. Yesterday’s Knicks could be counted on to roam around Central Park with one shoe on, swigging unlabeled moonshine, sleeping on a mirthful and mocking bed of New York Post back pages. Burning stacks of green paper for warmth. Generally reeking of fermented excess. Spending their doddering double-visioned days readying themselves for the evenings staring contest with that NBA-night-skies chosen star — unaffected, unreachable, uninterested — trillions of miles away.

Not any more.

This is a big-screen worthy story arc of a big-time efficiency renaissance. Rags to riches. Parkbench to penthouse. Julius fucking Randle to Julius FUCKING Randle! But it’s more than just one — admittedly All-NBA level — player. The roster is flooded with guys vastly outperforming the cost of their contracts, beyond Randle’s bargain $18.9 million deal. 

Mitchell Robinson: $1.6 million to act as the root system of an elite defense. Immanuel Quickley: $2.1 million to walk into the league as an offensive narcotic. Taj Gibson: $3.2 million to administer sage avuncular wisdom, and elbow fools in the paint. Reggie Bullock: $4.2 million for two-way 3-and-D production to set your watch to. Nerlens Noel: $5 million to block everything and drop everything. Elfrid Payton: $5.7 million to cause maximum little-blue-bird havoc. Alec Burks: $6 million to grease the temperamental offensive wheels. Derrick Rose: $7.6 million for old times’ sake. And RJ Barrett: $8.2 million to serenade us with The Great Sophomore Blossoming.

These are nine of the Knicks’ top 10 minutes per game players — and none of them make more than $10 million this season. Only RJ makes more than the league’s average salary of $7.8 million.

These are the ingredients. Nothing particularly fancy. The average contents of an average NBA fridge. The chef, though, Tom Thibadeau, has a bit of a thing for making the mundane taste gourmet. Back in 2010, in his first year coaching the Chicago Bulls, he turned a young roster with the 26th-most expensive payroll in the NBA into a league-best 62-win behemoth. It’s one of the three most efficient individual team seasons — from a dollars to wins perspective — since 1990. The other two are the 2014 Atlanta Hawks (second in wins, 26th in salary) and the 2004 Phoenix Suns (first in wins, 27th in salary).

The five least efficient individual team seasons since 1990 — you’ll be shocked to hear and may well wince at the memory of — all feature the doddering Knicks of old. In 2005: 29th in wins, first in salary. In 2006: 21st in wins, first in salary. In 2001: 23rd in wins, first in salary. In 2007: 25th in wins, second in salary. And in 2004: 23rd in wins, first in salary.

It’s one of many remarkable facets of this surprise Knick season: a general shock-and-awe competence, made all the more hopeful and all the more real for the sense of poignant separation from the scars of past failures it evokes. These Knicks look to have shed a culture of relentless catastrophe for a culture of relative caution. Nowhere is this more evident than the raw bottom lines of a well-kept cap sheet and a well-stocked win column.

The New York Knicks are the most efficient team in the NBA, something that would have been just as surreal 15 years ago as it was 15 weeks ago, and that — however shocking, however bonkers, however unfathomable — feels like something worth shouting about.