Karl-Anthony Towns finished Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night much in the same way he’d started Game 1: with the ball on his fingertips for the win. The first time it happened, during the series-opening tip in which he faced off against the 7-foot-4 Victor Wembanyama at center court, Towns jumped up and swiped the ball back to his waiting teammate Josh Hart to let the games begin. This was a minor, fleeting micro-victory, the kind no one dwells on in the grand scheme of things, but it was nevertheless a symbolic one: Thanks to Towns, the New York Knicks got to embark on their first championship quest in 27 years with the ball squarely in their own court.
There was nothing small or short-lived about the play Towns made at the end of Game 4, though, even if it did take a little while for me to see what he’d done. With 1.7 seconds on the clock and New York nursing a miraculous one-point lead after having trailed by 27 at the half, Towns was the one tasked with defending San Antonio’s last-gasp inbound pass. Positioned inches away from Spurs rookie Dylan Harper on the sideline, Towns did everything he could, bouncing around with both arms waving high, looking a lot like a flailing “car dealership tube man,” as he was once memorably described. When Harper’s pass finally found Stephon Castle under the basket, the Spurs guard bobbled it, and time expired without San Antonio ever getting off its would-be game-winning shot.
It was only afterward, basking in various slow-motion highlights with excited, exhausted tears still streaming down my face, that I realized that the reason Castle had bobbled the basketball was because Towns had gotten a few fingers on juuust enough of it to alter its trajectory—and maybe, just maybe, the whole arc of this Knicks franchise—forever.
“The greatest currency you can earn in New York is not money,” Towns, 30, had told reporters a few days before the NBA Finals began. “It’s respect. And to have the respect of the fans in the city, we’re rich beyond belief here.” This Knicks team, he said, had achieved something rare: They had “[brought] the word ‘hope’ back to the city.”
Thanks to that improbable comeback victory Wednesday night, that hope is still with New Yorkers. The Knicks now hold a 3-1 series lead as the championship heads back to San Antonio for Game 5. If it can win one more game, New York will have its first NBA title in 53 long years. Not that, uh, anyone’s been counting.
More on the Knicks
To be a Knicks fan over the past several decades has been to romanticize—even pine for!—some of the most upsetting losses and crushing disappointments imaginable. For anyone younger than roughly 60 years old, the Knicks championship squads from 1970 and 1973 exist merely as stories told by lucky oldheads who all claim to have somehow been in the building for the Willis Reed game. The glory days of the 1990s Knicks that folks my age never shut up about, meanwhile, are covered in very little actual glory.
Knicks fans have long bonded by invoking the most dismal formative memories they can conjure—Charles Smith missing layup after layup in 1993; John Starks going 0-for-11 from the 3-point line in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals; the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1997 that left multiple Knicks starters suspended, not to be confused with the bench-clearing brawl against the Miami Heat in 1998 that left Jeff Van Gundy clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg like a child who doesn’t want to be dropped off at day care; various gut punches and/or faxes from the likes of Reggie Miller and Pat Riley—and then shaking their heads in communion. And all that’s, like, only the half of it! The other half, which we at The Ringer merely scratched the surface of here, is far darker.
In other words, as a Knicks fan, I’m extremely accustomed to all manner of meltdowns and fuckups, to all forms of seeing some other team’s game-winners go in with a swish (or, worse somehow, game-tiers go in with a 10-foot bounce). As such, I typically fret when things appear too good to be true, and I immediately sulk when the going gets rough. Like a doomed gal with a gruesome premonition in some Final Destination installment, I find myself catching vivid peeks of all the ways things will surely come to an end.
What I’m not used to, though, is what happened during the grim second quarter of Game 4, when I found myself swept up by a sensation so foreign that it felt like an out-of-body experience. This strange feeling? Oh, just the clarion calm of unshakable faith.
Playing at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks were trailing the Spurs by 20manysomething points, a lead that threatened to keep growing. It appeared possible that the San Antonio Spurs might never again miss a 3-pointer for the rest of their lives, which meant, if you extrapolated from there, that it was also growing increasingly possible that the once-buoyant Knicks might not win another game in this series. In the days leading up to Game 4, I’d been riffling through all forms of worst-case scenarios in my head. Now, several of them were playing out just as I’d feared.
Weird whistles—and, worse, swallowed ones? Check. A rowdy Madison Square Garden falling still, all those celebs and financiers stunned into silence? Check! Towns on the bench in absurdly early foul trouble? Wemby getting all demonstrative with it? That lingering stench, from earlier in the day, of an antagonistic and off-putting Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. press release titled “MAYOR MAMDANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER TISCH ARE NEW YORK CITY’S BIGGEST PARTY POOPERS”? Check, check, and check!!! It seemed we’d reached that part of the party when everyone realizes, all at once, that it’s already over.
And yet. Maybe because I really hate parties being over; or maybe because I’d already witnessed the Knicks, in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, rally back after trailing by 22; or maybe because my battered brain had simply decided it was time to shut down and self-preserve—I felt borderline sanguine about the predicament the Knicks had gotten themselves into. Instead of rolling my eyes and scoffing my typical epithet—same old Knicks—for some reason, I dared to dream that this group of guys could be different from all the rest.
Turning to my husband, I started making alarming comments that weren’t even sarcastic, like “All we need is one 14-0 run, and we’ll only be down 10 at halftime!” At one point, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, I even think I heard the words “Fuck it, we ball!” leave my mouth. (Don’t worry: I also wailed about that missed goaltend by Luke Kornet and how helpless I felt; I wasn’t completely gone.) My husband regarded me carefully throughout, as if I were one of our kids on the precipice of a hangry tantrum in a public location. All he would reply, in a nonthreatening tone, was: “... yeah!”
I could see the confusion on his face, and I felt it myself: Since when am I some kind of cheesy believer? And upon reflection, I think it happened in 2024, after the arrival of the Knicks’ bighearted big man and soft, gooey center: Karl-Anthony Towns.
“You’re never by yourself!” Towns yelled in the direction of Knicks captain Jalen Brunson during the happy chaos following Game 2 in San Antonio. The two teammates had just embraced after the Knicks eked out a sloppy win to take a 2-0 series lead back to Manhattan. “You’re never by yourself! I’m always with you! Step by step!”
This struck me as a bold thing to holler so publicly to the far less constitutionally effusive Brunson—and that’s what made it so beautiful. What’s more, Towns’s words seemed like a concise summation of the winning ethos of these New York Knicks and of his own loud supporting role on the squad.
Throughout the playoffs, the big cat known as KAT has been showing up as the very best version of himself. When the Knicks were down 2-1 in their opening-round series against the Atlanta Hawks, he put up his first career playoff triple-double to lead New York to a Game 4 victory. In back-to-back sweeps of the 76ers and the Cavaliers, he became an able “hub” in a point-center role in head coach Mike Brown’s “equal opportunity” offensive system. (You don’t have to take it from me: Even LeBron James was impressed.)
Initially drafted with the first pick by the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2015, Towns played his first nine seasons in a land of contrasts. He was Rookie of the Year, a four-time All-Star; in 2024 he helped lead the Wolves to the Western Conference finals, the franchise’s deepest playoff run ever. But he also played for seven general managers and five head coaches, was maligned for his seeming lack of improvement, and in 2018 was accused of being “soft as baby shit” by disgruntled teammate Jimmy Butler.
In his first year as a Knick—a team he’d loved since Linsanity, with the receipts to prove it—Towns returned to the conference finals once more, only to lose a heartbreaking seven-game series to the Indiana Pacers last spring. And then, as he played for Brown this season, something within him unlocked.
It took only a few minutes last Wednesday, during Game 1, to understand that Towns, having finally made his way to this stage, was here to perform: to play the hits and rise above the din and boogie to an inner metronome all his own. “When you get an opportunity like this, you have to maximize it,” he had said a few days before his first career Finals appearance. “You never know if you get another chance. You never know what life has in store for all of us. And these opportunities are very far and few between, and you gotta make the most of them.”
And here he is, walking the walk. On offense, Towns hoops like he’s playing the tuba, driving into the lane with deep adagio confidence and dictating the tempo from the top of the key. On the far end of the court, he’s been quieting the noise around the Spurs’ young sensation Wembanyama, interrupting San Antonio’s usual winning rhythms and distorting its flow the way few others have. In the first two games of the Finals, playing on the road, Towns hauled in 25 rebounds—seven of them off the offensive glass—and put up a respective 18 and 21 points, a good number of which were right in Wemby’s face. At halftime of Game 2, the Inside the NBA crew wondered aloud whether the Spurs’ young star was “in shock” from the experience.
It was a marked change from last postseason, when much of the chatter related to Towns on Inside the NBA had revolved around his penchant for missteps. (“God only knows,” Towns replied at the time when Charles Barkley asked him: “Why do you be getting them dumb fouls?”) Even during one actual in-game broadcast last year, when opinions tend to be more muted, Stan Van Gundy argued passionately that he would not feel comfortable having Towns on the court in a crucial final possession situation because he might do something “crazy.” Fast-forward to this year, when the Knicks’ bigger problem is what happens when Towns is not on the court. One of the reasons Game 4 unraveled so quickly for New York was that Towns picked up two quick (and, if you ask me, questionable!) fouls in the first 65 seconds of the game, parking the team’s best answer for Wemby on the bench for long, early stretches. Here, his absence only showcased the true magnitude of his presence.
Towns’s contributions on both ends of the floor over the past weeks and months have garnered enough notice to put him in the Finals MVP conversation and grant him that most precious of currencies: respect. And with him on the roster, the Knicks have earned themselves something even more rare from NBA fans: the benefit of the doubt.
Karl-Anthony Towns celebrates after OG Anunoby’s game-winning shot
Towns would be the first guy to stress that he’s just one of many Knicks playing their finest this postseason. Over the course of their romp through the playoffs, this entire Knicks lineup has come together to produce the sort of harmonious, symphonic basketball that sings because everyone has both full command of their personal God-given instrument and a deep understanding of everyone else’s best range of notes. Towns’s tuba, resonant on its own, sounds even better when it is synced to the march of Brunson’s drumbeat. And when the whole team gets in tune, some unforgettable music is the result.
It crescendos when Hart sets up Mitchell Robinson for an alley-oop and-1; or when the viscid Towns, with umpteen defenders closing in around him, wriggles his way out of the teeth of the defense to find Mikal Bridges in the corner; or when, like, everyone on the court swishes and dishes to everyone else like they’ve been playing in a damn jam band together since they were in college. (Three Knicks starters—Brunson, Hart, and Bridges—won a national championship together back at Villanova, so I guess that’s not too far off.) Sometimes, a Knicks player will go off on a little solo, like when Landry Shamet drained a trio of 3s in Game 1. And sometimes, someone will pop a guitar string or need to clear the spit out of their saxophone, and in those situations, another bandmate will be there to pipe right up.
Late in Game 4, Hart missed an all-time crucial gimme that could have quite literally haunted Knicks fans forever (is no. 3 cursed?!), and Brunson struck a discordant note on his attempted game-winning shot. But then, flying in without missing a beat, came … OMG, that’s OG Anunoby’s music! One second he was blocking De’Aaron Fox on a potential Finals-altering fast break, and the next he was putting back Brunson’s last-second miss, giving the Knicks the one-point lead that they wouldn’t give up (and giving Anunoby his own decent MVP shot).
In the moment, Towns hugged Anunoby—like, really hugged him, head sideways on shoulder and everything—and then he went out and sealed the game. He smartly urged some courtside Knicks fans to crowd Harper juuust a little bit closer; he lunged skyward juuuust enough for his fingers to disrupt, however imperceptibly, the inbound pass.
In the press conference afterward, Towns smiled—because Towns always smiles—when he was asked about Anunoby’s shot. “Right hand of God,” he declared, christening forever that divine tip that had just given New York new life.
Seated on the dais to Towns’s side was his teammate Jose Alvarado, a bench player born and raised in New York whom the Knicks had picked up at the deadline and who contributed a couple of cool, key little riffs of his own—a whirling move in the paint, a yooge 3-pointer—late in Game 4. Asked about Alvarado, Towns, you guessed it, smiled. “It’s tough for me to be a Dominican talking about a Puerto Rican,” he joked lovingly. It reminded me of how a few days earlier in the series, after Brunson had told reporters, “I truly love that dude” about Towns, KAT had reacted to the high praise in his own merry way.
“Did he say that with Josh [Hart] around, or no?” Towns quipped, referring to Brunson’s bestie. “Oooh, Josh is going to be jealous …” Having gotten that out of the way, he grew more serious. “I’m glad I’ve been able to not only earn [Brunson’s] respect even more as a basketball player, but as a man. For him to appreciate the advice I give him on the daily, in daily life and things I see, it means a lot.” It’s a testament to Brunson’s leadership that KAT’s unique personality still shines through as brightly as ever, even and especially as the stakes keep going up. And Towns’s own testimonies demonstrate why he’s been able to make the most of the position he’s in, on and off the court.
Playing on a team that is famously powered by friendship, Towns has grown into a towering 7-foot totem of the power of love. After Game 1, while being interviewed by the Inside the NBA crew, Towns answered a question about whether he’d felt nerves in the game by offering up a serene and affecting reflection about how, on the contrary, he’d just kinda felt like an AAU kid again, playing for and through the joy of the game. “I just felt a calm and a peace,” he said, “that had to be coming from the woman above.”
He was referring to his late mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, who was born in the Dominican Republic and who died in April 2020 of complications from COVID-19. “In a way,” he told the world, “I felt like I was seeing her in the stands.” After his remarks were shared far and wide in the following days, Towns continued to chat about the worst loss of his life with patience and grace in follow-up interviews. His joy and gratitude were infectious, his proud vulnerability strong enough to move mountains.
As the Knicks have advanced through these playoffs, it’s been said that Towns has shed the label of being “soft” that’s followed him across his career. But I’d argue that he hasn’t so much shed the label as he’s redefined it, in much the same way that Navy SEALs have that mantra that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. In KAT’s universe, being soft is a source—not an opposite—of playing tough. It’s how he earns respect and how he delivers hope.
Maybe that’s part of why the 2025-26 New York Knicks have been hitting different for months now, transforming the typically above-it-all, seen-it-all residents of New York City into a bunch of big ol’ orange-and-blue goofballs who gather in droves on every corner, in every borough, to high-five and freestyle and form hype circles around lit clankers and blow off all their excess enthusiasm by chanting glad tidings toward [checks notes] … UPS trucks.
And maybe it’s part of why, watching Game 4 on Wednesday night out here on the other side of the country, I had reason to believe that these Knicks really could do things differently than their predecessors. That was then, but this was Them: an emotionally mature, positionally fit team with playoff experience and the right state of mind. These Knicks aren’t players who lose their shit under pressure. As a fan, why not try to match their freak? So I didn’t automatically default to my tried-and-true, jaded “Welp, here we go again …” ways when the game appeared to be over almost as soon as it started. What would be the fun—where would be the love—in that?
Instead, I texted my best friend: “I have never been this posi vibes in my life … manifesting so hard … they can do this but they have to start this instant.” (Her phone was on Do Not Disturb, and for the first time in my life, I smashed that Notify Anyway.) I’m not sure whether you can say that the Knicks started that instant, but in the end, what they sure did do was do this.
The Knicks remain one win away from reaching their ultimate goal, and that last win is always the hardest. Towns and his teammates don’t hold the whole world in their big hands just yet. Still, every time Towns reaches those long arms of his out for the basketball, stretching up and up toward the heavens, I can glimpse how all of it is right there on his fingertips. Which means I already believe that everything the Knicks have been playing for is now well within their grasp.
