Before Leon Rose built the Knicks, he was a gym rat at Cherry Hill East, and coached hoops at his local JCC

Seth Friedman was watching the NBA Finals on Saturday night in Graduate Hospital when he heard a familiar refrain.

It came from Leon Rose, the mild-mannered architect of the New York Knicks. His team had just won its first title since 1973.

Rose, 65, was asked how he felt knowing he’d built a roster that had ended a 53-year-drought. The Knicks president shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and pivoted to his players.

He praised their brotherhood, their grit, their empathy. He talked about their care for one another, and their selflessness, and how it allowed them to reach new heights.

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Friedman, sitting on his couch next to his wife, began to tear up.

“It sounded like he was talking to us,” he said, “back when we were 13 or 14 years old.”

The setting was vastly different. Instead of holding two-a-days for high schoolers, Rose was standing on a platform in San Antonio, Texas, with a sparkling trophy beside him.

But the message was nearly identical. Friedman listened to it himself when he played for Rose in the mid-2000s at his local Jewish community center.

“He literally preached that same mentality,” Friedman said. “That family mentality.”

For decades, the future Knicks president was a mainstay in his Cherry Hill basketball community. He played under head coach John Valore at Cherry Hill East from 1975 to 1979 and joined Valore’s staff in the early 1980s while studying at Temple’s law school.

He moved on to work as an assistant coach through the late 1980s at Rutgers-Camden, a short commute from his day job at the Camden County prosecutor’s office.

He’d leave collegiate coaching in 1988, but Rose would always find time for the sport, even as he ascended the ranks of the NBA. In the 1990s, while he transitioned to sports management, Rose often could be found playing pickup hoops at the Katz JCC in Cherry Hill.

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By the mid 2000s, he’d assembled a Rolodex of star-studded clients, including Allen Iverson and LeBron James. But that didn’t keep him away from the gym. For the better part of a decade, Rose served as a volunteer coach at the Katz JCC, preparing teams to compete in the Maccabi Games.

The Knicks executive has achieved a lot since then. But those who know him best say he is the same understated guy who’d wear baggy sweatshirts and run his team through tap drills and sprints.

“He was Coach Leon,” Friedman said. “He was one of us. Even now, you see him down the Shore, and you’d never know that he’s the person that he is.”

Valore met Rose in 1975 when he was coaching junior varsity at Cherry Hill East. The freshman was undersized compared to his teammates, but he played above his stature.

If there was a loose ball, the point guard would dive for it. If there was a charge, he would take it. Valore admired his toughness. So when he got the varsity job in 1976-77, he decided to bring Rose with him.

The sophomore made the most of his opportunity. Cherry Hill East was a relatively new program at the time and largely was viewed as a “doormat,” in Valore’s words. Rose helped change that, building an unselfish culture from the ground up.

He wasn’t a vocal leader, but he showed interpersonal skills that would serve him later on. The future NBA executive was direct and honest. He could have difficult conversations with teammates if he needed to about roles and behavior on and off the court.

Rose also set a standard through his style of play. Cherry Hill East was up against stiff competition in South Jersey from teams like Camden and Haddon Heights, which boasted players who were 6-foot-2, 6-3.

The point guard was unafraid to battle them.

“He was a player that had to compete harder and tougher than the person he competed against,” Valore said, “because he was 5-7, 5-8, 5-9. That shows you the toughness he had within him.”

Cherry Hill East’s culture quickly translated into wins. When Rose arrived, the varsity team finished just above .500. By the time he graduated, it was one of the best teams in its conference.

But above all, Valore was most impressed by his pupil’s character. During a practice in 1979, the coach called his co-captain over. Valore’s wife, Joyce, had just given birth to their first child, J.C.

The coach wanted Rose to be the boy’s godfather.

“[Leon] was 17 years old,” he said, “and I saw everything I wanted to see. He was an exceptional person with relating to other people. He was something special.

“He went back to his dad and explained the situation, and his dad gave the thumbs-up. And the rest is history.”

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After a few years studying at Dickinson College, where he played basketball, Rose rejoined his high school team as an assistant coach in 1983. The 22-year-old was just as impactful on the bench as he’d been as a point guard.

Over Rose’s three seasons with Cherry Hill East, the program produced four Division I players. One of those four, Nick Katsikis, ended up contributing to Seton Hall’s run to the 1989 NCAA championship game.

Valore can see similarities in what Rose accomplished with the Knicks. When the agent was hired by James Dolan in 2020, the team was en route to its seventh straight losing season; “a doormat,” just like Cherry Hill East.

Then Rose came along, and everything changed.

“He was a gym rat,” Valore said. “He just loved the game.”

Ed Vernick moved from Philadelphia to South Jersey in the early 1980s, the same time Rose was coaching with Valore.

Unsurprisingly, the men became friends at the gym. Vernick was about to go on a trip to Ocean City and wanted a good place to work out. Rose overheard him talking, ripped off a piece of paper, and scribbled down an address.

Vernick had no idea who the young lawyer was, but he took him up on his suggestion. A few days later, while he was running on a treadmill in that Ocean City gym, he saw Rose walking by.

“He goes, ‘I just wanted to make sure you got here,’” Vernick said. “What a nice guy. I’m thinking, ‘Who does that?’ It was just one of those things that caught me.”

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About two decades later, when Rose was starting to coach basketball at the Katz JCC, he asked Vernick to be his assistant. Together, they spent the summer of 2004 preparing Cherry Hill-area kids for the Maccabi Games, a youth athletic competition for Jewish athletes from all over the world.

Parents and players said Rose took this as seriously as the NBA Finals. He’d carefully craft his rosters, thinking hard about how each piece would fit.

Once the team was constructed, he’d spend July running them into the ground with many of the methods Valore used at Cherry Hill East: switch drills, sprints, tap drills.

The week before the Games was by far the toughest. Players would be required to train twice a day and would arrive at the gym at 6:30 a.m. and return at 2 p.m.

“He got into us,” Friedman said. “But it got us ready. It got us prepared. It got us in shape. I hated it during it, but, looking back, those were memories I’ll never forget.”

This was a major time investment for one of the most high-powered agents in the NBA, but Rose was deeply involved. He continued to coach before and after his son, Sam, and daughter, Brooke, were eligible to play.

And he went far beyond what was expected of a volunteer. One year, Friedman said Rose took the team up to the Poconos for an exhibition game at Pine Forest Camp, which was known for its basketball program.

“He’s driving us up to play an exhibition game like it’s an NBA team,” Friedman said. “He didn’t have to do that as a coach. But he did whatever he could to get us prepped and ready to win a gold medal.”

About “80% of the team” came from Cherry Hill East, in Vernick’s estimation, and Rose often would be on the phone with Valore, asking about certain players.

Like his former coach, Rose gravitated toward toughness, and that style emanated from the teams he built. In 2004, South Jersey’s 16-and-under Maccabi team faced Washington, D.C., for the gold medal.

It was a low-scoring game, one that came down to the buzzer. Washington was bigger and more talented, but Rose’s group challenged every bucket.

“I remember I could hear sneakers squeaking the whole game,” Vernick said, “and I just smiled. And I thought, ‘This is the way you play defense.’”

South Jersey fell, 42-40, but it won gold the following year in Minneapolis.

Rose spent six summers coaching at the JCC throughout the 2000s, winning two gold and two silver medals. He looked and acted like any other coach, donning Cherry Hill East basketball gear and sweatpants.

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He rarely — if ever — talked about who he represented, or what he did for work, but the players occasionally got a glimpse.

When Friedman was a senior at Cherry Hill East, Rose arranged a surprise for his alma mater.

It was March 2010. The Cleveland Cavaliers were in town. After practice, their coach swung by to talk to the high school basketball team and answer any questions they might have.

It ended up being the coach who would lead the Knicks to a championship 16 years later.

“He had Mike Brown come over,” Valore said. “He was fantastic. Off the cuff, not scripted. He gave a wonderful speech to the kids.”

Rose and his family now live in New York, but they’re never too far from Cherry Hill. His 88-year-old father, Zev, still resides in the area, and is a regular at the Katz JCC.

Every once in a while, his son will send a limo to drive him and the 81-year-old Valore to Madison Square Garden. They were in the building for Game 4, sitting near the team president.

At first, it looked bleak for New York. The Knicks fell behind early and trailed by 29 points in the third quarter. But they came storming back in the fourth and completed the comeback on an OG Anunoby tip-in.

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It was the largest comeback in NBA Finals history; a gritty win two coaches from Cherry Hill East would be proud of.

Valore watched Game 5 at home in South Jersey. When it was over, just past midnight, the former coach texted his former player.

The octogenarian kept his message brief. He thought about the undersized point guard who changed a culture when he was in high school.

He thought about how he did it again, decades later, in New York; how hard he’d worked and the happiness he’d brought to his pocket of South Jersey.

“Thank you,” Valore wrote to Rose, “and God bless.”