NEW YORK CITY -- The New York Knickerbockers have been on a historic tear up, and as of writing they have won 13 consecutive games in the 2026 playoffs. Truly unprecedented in the league. The key to their success? Microsoft Copilot.
Copilot, formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot app, formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot, formerly Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, is the secret sauce currently powering the Knick's back office. For example, it was Copilot who determined that Rick Brunson's most likely child to succeed on the Knicks was Jalen (sorry Erica). They've successfully let go of all their junior data analysts, as Copilot produces equally bad statistical analysis as them. We plan on laying off our junior staff due to AI as well.
Key to their success is Copilots integration with Excel. They entered their player's raw data into Excel and asked Copilot a variety of questions, such as "Is KAT still the heaviest player on the team?" VLOOKUP wasn't required at all for Copilot to say "No, its Guerschon Yabusele." We're dubious of the results, but it is very possible that it could be correct.
While free will is an illusion in the NBA, we think that the Knicks' embrace of new technology to power their analytics stack is a great choice. Is this inspired by the Rams quarterback Matt Stafford's use of AI? Quite possibly.
The use of Google's use of Artificial Intelligence and LLMs has been controversial. Oddly not much has been mentioned about Microsoft's ethics in this technology wave, just the poor functionality. They plan to disprove that with the Knick's latest success.