Newsman: The New York Knicks won in five on the road and made the history of coming back after 53 years with 94-90 win over the San Antonio Spurs. The New York Knickerbockers last reached the mountaintop in 1973, when they defeated the Lakers on the road in Game 5, draped in cobalt blue.
Fifty-three years is a long travel, from the legendary Forum in Inglewood back in 1973 to the Frost Bank Arena in San Antonio on Saturday night. The one tether, the one constant, across two landmark moments in New York City history was the Knicks’ blue away uniforms, with orange and white trim.
Fifty-three years ago, the series ended with an outlet pass to Wilt Chamberlain, who slammed home a dunk that meant more to him personally than it meant to the series—it was his final basket scored in an NBA game. On Saturday, the buzzer sounded shortly after Victor Wembanyama clanked a 3-pointer off the backboard.
But it wasn’t Wemby’s time. The Knicks made damn sure of that, amid one of the greatest playoff runs the NBA has ever seen. The Knicks are now only the third team in the league’s best-of-seven era—which started in 2003—to win a championship with three or fewer losses across their entire run. They are tied with the 2023-24 Celtics for the ninth-best postseason win percentage of all time. Only the 2016-17 Warriors have won more consecutive playoff games. The list goes on: The best postseason net rating of any team since Michael Jordan’s Bulls. The greatest comeback victory in Finals history, capped off with a game-winning tip-in by OG Anunoby that has already been etched into eternity. And, most importantly, an all-time night from Jalen Brunson, the 2026 Finals MVP, who stands alongside Jordan with the most points in a championship-clinching performance on the road with 45.
That vision begins and ends with Brunson’s individual brilliance. Throughout the series, he shot 38.5 percent from the field in the first three quarters; that number spiked to 51.4 percent in the fourth. In a closeout game on the road, Brunson’s 45 points were just four short of the rest of the team’s total. He is undeniably one of the great clutch performers in NBA history. “I know what I’m made of, I know what I put into this,” Brunson said in a postgame interview on NBA TV. He was shaking, on the verge of tears as he stood next to Lisa Salters, talking about all the summers he’d spent, practically since he was born, refining his game and pushing his endurance to the brink. There is poetry in Brunson being the Knicks’ savior. He was never the prince that was promised, but he’d internalized that raw electricity of Knicks fandom at a young age. He grew up in those Madison Square Garden locker rooms. He saw his dad among the dozen other worn-down bodies on the last Knicks team to make it to the Finals. He saw how much the city wanted it then, never mind how desperate it’d become in the 27 years since.
This is forever. This was the most-watched NBA Finals since Jordan’s last run with the Bulls—a gold mine for the attention economy and those with the means to profit off an undeniable cultural moment. Alvarado—who was raised in an affordable housing co-op in Williamsburg that was the most ethnically diverse apartment building in the country—crash-landing into former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg (whose net worth exceeds $100 billion) in Game 3 is the kind of metaphor that could take years to fully unpack. Fans were priced out of game tickets, fenced out of watch parties, and forced to endure the scourge of celebrity, commodity, and privilege engulfing the basketball of it all. But then Brunson, in the biggest game of his life, delivered a timeless masterpiece to snap it all back into focus. New York’s gravitational pull can be so all-encompassing that it can convince you of destiny. At last, we can say the Knicks have reentered that orbit. End of article
Knicks coach Mike Brown speaks to the media after Game 5 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
Brown, 56, is an NBA lifer. After graduating from San Diego in 1992, he joined the Denver Nuggets as a video coordinator and scout, and Bernie Bickerstaff hired him as an assistant coach for the Washington Wizards in 1997.
“Pop is iconic, especially here in San Antonio,” Brown said. “When you talk about the game of basketball, he’s iconic to everybody that enjoys the game of basketball. The neat part about him is, it’s not just about the Xs and Os that you learn, you know you can never be him, but you learn people skills, you learn how to connect, not just the 15 or 18 players, you learn how to connect an entire city, maybe even an entire state.”
Of Kerr, Brown said, “My time as an assistant under Steve, that was fantastic for a lot of reasons, not just professionally, but personally, too. I had an absolute great time being an assistant coach in San Francisco under Steve, with those players.”
