The Night the Knicks Finally Exhaled
The wait is over. Fifty-three years after their last title, the Knicks are champions again. “Tonight, if I have any tears,” said Patrick Ewing, “it will be tears of joy.”The Night the Knicks Finally Exhaled
The wait is over. Fifty-three years after their last title, the Knicks are champions again. “Tonight, if I have any tears,” said Patrick Ewing, “it will be tears of joy.”
How do you calculate the weight of a 53-year championship drought? Or the hopes and dreams of 8 million New Yorkers? Or the burden of becoming their basketball savior? If you could measure it all, what would it look like? Feel like? Would it be too much? Would it be unbearable?
If we could have strapped a heart monitor on Jalen Brunson late in Game 5—with his Knicks trailing the San Antonio Spurs by 10 points, with eight minutes remaining, with history, legacy, and the Larry O’Brien Trophy all hanging in the balance—what would it have told us?
Perhaps it would have revealed everything there is to know about thriving under pressure. Or perhaps nothing at all. Or maybe the data, like Brunson’s demeanor, would just be a steady, repetitive beat—never wavering, never deviating.
“No pressure,” Brunson said late Saturday night, after he had scored every critical basket, granted every Knicks fan’s fondest wish, and seized the championship that had eluded them for more than a half century. “No pressure whatsoever.” He was talking broadly about becoming the Knicks’ franchise star. He might as well have been explaining how he’d rallied them once again, for what felt like the thousandth time in two months, to turn a potential loss into the most consequential Knicks victory in modern times.
“I just trust my work,” Brunson said after putting up 45 points in a title-clinching 94-90 victory at San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center. “I'm just never afraid to fail.”
A franchise placed its trust in Brunson, Brunson placed his trust in his work, and now the Knicks—the New York freaking Knicks!—after decades of ridicule, scorn, and general dysfunction, are NBA champions once more, having vanquished Victor Wembanyama and a precocious Spurs cast that was just as relentless and feisty as the Knicks themselves.
All five games were decided in the final minutes, and Brunson was nearly always the one with the answers. He averaged 32.6 points across five games, and 11.2 points in the fourth quarter.
“I hope you guys recognize what this man is about,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said of Brunson, “because he is A1 MVP. He is him.”
The final ledger, 4-1, suggests a lopsided “gentleman’s sweep.” But it was an intense, hard-fought Finals that was won in the margins, where the Knicks’ experience and discipline repeatedly won out in crunch time. The Spurs built double-digit leads in all five games, but simply failed to hold them in four of them, including an infamous 29-point collapse in Game 4. All told, New York outscored San Antonio by 12 points total, or 2.4 per game.
The Knicks, personified by Brunson, were simply steadier when it mattered most. That was the case again Saturday, when Brunson scored 15 points in the final eight minutes on gutsy drives, deft finger rolls, and difficult fadeaways and stepbacks. Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle couldn’t contain Brunson. Wembanyama couldn’t deter him.
“That’s who he’s always been,” Allan Houston, the former Knicks great and now a team executive, told The Ringer. “I think he gives everybody hope and confidence, because you know what he’s capable of.”
Twenty-seven years ago, Houston led another Knicks team against the Spurs in the Finals, and lost soundly in five games, marking New York’s second Finals defeat of the ’90s. Brunson was 2 years old at the time, scurrying around the Knicks’ practice court as the son of Knicks journeyman Rick Brunson. Now Rick Brunson is a Knicks assistant coach, and Jalen is a certified Knicks legend, and a Finals MVP.
A dream come true. In ’99 I cried because we lost. And tonight … if I have any tears, it will be tears of joy.Patrick Ewing
“They finished what we started,” a smiling Houston said of Brunson and Co. “They finished it. They did an incredible job sticking together. They fought through every obstacle. Every time it looked bleak, they overcame. They just found a way.”
There was nothing typical about this Knicks run. They were built around a 6-foot-1 guard with modest athleticism. Brunson has finished as high as fifth in the MVP voting just once. Nearly everyone on the roster—from Brunson to Karl-Anthony Towns to Josh Hart to Mikal Bridges to Landry Shamet—had been dismissed or undersold along the way, making this title run all the more unlikely and all the more satisfying.
“A dream come true,” Knicks legend Patrick Ewing, now a team ambassador, told The Ringer. “In ’99 I cried because we lost. And tonight … if I have any tears, it will be tears of joy.”
Even the scene at the Frost Bank Center took on a surreal tone, as several thousand Knicks fans flooded the arena, creating large pockets of blue and orange amid the opposition’s black-white-and-silver. Spike Lee was among them, along with John Turturro, Ben Stiller, Tracy Morgan, and Timothée Chalamet. Dueling chants of “Let’s go, Knicks!” and “Go, Spurs, go!” boomed through the building. The Knicks faithful got even louder during the on-court trophy presentation, repeatedly drowning out host Ernie Johnson and a series of team executives and coaches.
"It's everything we ever dreamed of," Brunson told Johnson. "It's why I came to New York."
By the time all the Knicks took their places on the stage, the moment felt almost inevitable, preordained. For two months, the Knicks had demolished everyone in their path, from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Cleveland, looking very much like a team of destiny. But that’s an illusion: a trick of memory and recency bias.
The truth is, there was never anything predictable about this run, or this team. That’s what made it so special. New York was not a popular pick to win when the season tipped off in October, nor at midseason or when the playoffs began in mid-April. The Pistons and Celtics had the superior records; the Thunder and Spurs had the glitzier stars.
Even devout Knicks fans had their doubts just seven weeks ago when Brunson and Co. fell behind the Hawks in the first round. There were calls to bench Mikal Bridges. There were concerns about Towns’s fortitude and Mike Brown’s playbook and the strength of the bench. It took a 13-game winning streak—stretching from the end of the first round through the first two games of the Finals—to snuff out any lingering skepticism.
They've unified the sports fan because of the way they play.Mike Breen
But New York wouldn’t cruise. It would have to scrap and claw and persevere to finish off the Spurs, with a steady and stubborn relentlessness. Most NBA champions are powered by supreme talents—Magic, Kareem, Bird, Jordan, Duncan, Kobe, Shaq, LeBron, Steph, Giannis, Jokic—but these Knicks were all underdogs of various stripes, powered by supreme will.
Brunson, modest in stature and athleticism, was an unheralded second-round pick whose original team (Dallas) repeatedly declined to re-sign him. Towns was an underwhelming former no. 1 pick who couldn’t deliver in Minnesota. Hart was discarded by three teams in six years, before becoming the Knicks’ most essential role player. Anunoby, though a defensive ace in Toronto, was maligned as an injury risk with limited offensive skills and massive salary demands. Bridges was a great fourth wheel in Phoenix, an overwhelmed first option in Brooklyn, and a mercurial 3-and-D guy who clashed with former coach Tom Thibodeau.
And then there’s Brown, who had been hired and fired four times as an NBA head coach—most recently by the dysfunctional Sacramento Kings—and arrived as Thibodeau’s replacement last summer only after the Knicks failed to land several bigger names.
The 2026 Larry O’Brien Trophy wasn’t just handed to the game’s flashiest stars or its smoothest pitchmen. It was seized by a scruffy band of overachievers and castoffs. Is there anything more New York than that?
“They've unified the sports fan because of the way they play,” Mike Breen, the ESPN broadcaster and longtime Knicks play-by-play man, told The Ringer. “They're so connected, they root for each other's success, and they’re not a pounding-their-chest type. When your great player [Brunson], your leader, has this humility about him, and also kind of an everyman way about him, and he's not this imposing athlete who's larger than life—if you went down to the park for a pickup game, when you're picking guys, he might not even be the first pick.
“But I think everybody can relate to him, because in some ways he's this underdog that has become one of the great playoff performers of all time. I think all those things play into why they've captured the hearts of the city.”
For younger New York fans, this is the first Knicks team in their lifetime that’s been worthy of their admiration and passion. For those raised on the ’90s Knicks, this is the first team that’s emulated the grit and toughness that defined the Ewing era. And for an older generation, the Brunson-Hart-Anunoby Knicks feel like the rightful heirs to the Red Holzman–era Knicks who won it all in 1970 and 1973—a champion built on teamwork, selflessness, and defense. Clyde Frazier, according to Breen, never compares current Knicks teams to his old squads. Until now.
“He's also said that a lot of Jalen Brunson reminds him of Willis Reed, and Willis is the most revered man in Clyde's life,” said Breen, a Yonkers native who grew up watching the 1970s Knicks. “One of the reasons I fell in love with basketball was because of those championship teams and the way they played, and there's generations of fans who fell in love with basketball because of the ’70 and ’73 teams. And I see that happening now. There are so many young fans who will be fans for the rest of their lives—not just of the Knicks, but of basketball—because of how they play.”
The Knicks as inspiring? As role models? As champions? None of this seemed remotely possible throughout the 2000s and 2010s, when the franchise became infamous for wild spending, dumbfounding trades, rampant turnover, endless infighting, and general dysfunction at all levels. Nor could anyone have foreseen such a profound rebirth when the Knicks hired Leon Rose—a longtime power agent with zero front-office experience—to run basketball operations in 2020.
Rose never held an introductory press conference, never publicly articulated a vision for building a contender, and never sat down for an interview with independent media over the last six years. What he did instead was quietly and methodically assemble the best team New York has seen in a half century, through a series of (mostly) quiet and methodical trades and free agent signings.
Rose hired Thibodeau, who had been fired a year earlier by Minnesota, to instill a culture of accountability and consistency. Two years later, he plucked Brunson from Dallas, where the smallish guard had played sidekick to Luka Doncic, to little fanfare. It was considered an overpay when the Knicks gave him a four-year $104 million contract.
Now Brunson has a claim as the greatest Knick of the 21st century and one of the greatest ever. Towns, who completely remade his game over the last two months, has shed just about every pejorative label he’s had slapped on him over the last decade. Even Knicks owner James Dolan—who was known mostly for being impetuous, petty, and thin-skinned—just earned a momentary image makeover.
In New York, euphoric fans flooded the streets and shot off fireworks. In the tunnels of the Spurs’ arena, a euphoric Ben Stiller—soaked in champagne and cigar smoke, with goggles still hanging from his neck and Brown’s dry-erase board tucked under his arm—tried to make sense of it all.
“The fans of New York have waited so long for this,” Stiller said. “I mean, it’s crazy what’s going on in New York right now—the emotions of the city, people my age who lived through it. People [who were fans] in the ’90s, who lived through it. My son, who’s 20, who grew up with the rough years. And now it’s finally here, and they did it, we did it, it’s incredible.”
