2000-Zero-Zero
This is it: it’s time for us to go to the wire. With one team having punched its ticket to the championship round over a week ago, and the other having had to punch its way through the widely-regarded toughest matchup in the league, the NBA Finals are finally set. For the first time since 2014, the San Antonio Spurs are returning to what’s become familiar ground since 1999.
At the same time, for these Spurs as well as the rest of the NBA, it is new territory because, for the eighth time in the last eight seasons, there will be a non-repeat NBA champion. None of the San Antonio players has even won a playoff series as a member of this franchise before this season. Parity being Adam Silver’s singular objective for the first decade of his stewardship of basketball bodes well for the league’s shift into international markets, at least as a roadmap. All anyone needs is a roadmap.
If Victor Wembanyama has anything to do with it, though, that tide may soon turn. Has he arrived ahead of schedule, or perhaps have his teammates? Is San Antonio going to auger in a new period of parity before it had a chance to launch? The short answer: not if Jalen Brunson and the New York Knicks have anything to say about it in the next three weeks.
In taking advantage of a shorthanded Oklahoma City Thunder team and winning a seven-game slugfest over the now two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Spurs shifted the tide of the Western Conference, and therefore of the entire league. They’d beaten them four out of five already in the regular season, but OKC came in with the experience, though also with several long series and thinning treads.
By no means was Vic the only one on Saturday night, nor throughout the series: with De’Aaron Fox limited to five games and Dylan Harper to seven, each with maladies, the Spurs had been shorthanded most of the series; Victor Wembanyama’s very presence has, at least thus far, made sure that none of his teams fall under that designation, covering everybody else’s ground[1] with a righteous rigor.
Playing within Mitch Johnson’s offense and working within the seams, Julian Champagnie had a Game 7 during which he was slowly increasing the volume. After two threes in the first half, Champagnie finished with six, accounting for 18 of his 20. Stephon Castle put the kind of defensive effort on SGA that should trouble Jalen Brunson as well as the Josh Hart-Mikal Bridges-Anunoby crowd to whom he figures to switch following screens.
Dylan Harper – “The Rookie Outta Rutgers,” as Mike Tirico put it, which has a decent chance to go tops with the WFAN crowd – had 12 points, as did Alex Caruso and recent exile of both of Duke University and the Philadelphia 76ers Jared McCain. Cason Wallace had 17. J-Will had 11 in J-Dub’s absence.
In a moment that surely will confuse fanbases of both teams for years to come, for many reasons that they’ll only discover later, Luke Kornet lavishly blocked Isaiah Hartenstein in the midst of the fourth quarter, a LeBron-esque move a round early that nevertheless sent the same message a decade after The Block: nope.
All SGA could do was his best, to the tune of 35 points on 12/21 shooting, with nine assists, four rebounds and three steals. It was a valiant effort from the MVP, and it is going to beg questions of everybody else: how healthy will Jalen Williams (or, for that matter, Ajay Mitchell) be going forward? Is Lu Dort a CFL player at heart, and might he just do that instead?
Second only to hoodwinking draft picks out of unsuspecting MBAs, Sam Presti and the rest of the brass need to determine if Chet Holmgren is their salve for Victor Wembanyama. Holmgren is a very good basketball player who would figure to be the guy against Wemby, but that particular guy he was not: in the seven-game series, Chet managed 10.7 points, seven rebounds and a block per game, all down from 17.1 points, 8.9 rebounds and nearly two blocks per game during the regular season.
“Back in October, we knew we had a chance to be pretty good,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. By late April, it is safe to assume that most Knicks fans hoped they had that chance, too.
After losing their two regular season games against OKC by a combined 14 points[2], and after beating San Antonio in one of their two – as well as the NBA Cup Final, which is either important or not important here – it figures that the Knicks, or at least fans hereof, would have preferred the Spurs, a full 27 years after last appearing in the Finals against the very same team. Via the transitive property, anyway, the case is there.
After coming out covered in rust against the Hawks and, acknowledging not doing getting through to anything productive for the first three quarters in Game 1 against Cleveland, there is every possibility that New York comes out flat. Wemby seems on a warpath, albeit one paid with the kindness of playing chess against strangers in Washington Square Park on a rainy day in December. Do not be fooled: this man is a stone-cold killer.
That they have had over a week since completing their second-consecutive sweep could be unsettling stasis in their minds, or it could be the peace they’ve been seeking the whole time. Every new interview from a Knick rep is more inscrutable than the last.
Not that either is giving the other the benefit, but the press and the Knicks are making Mitchell Robinson’s pinky surgery and recovery a scratch that one can’t quite get to absent a wall or a power drill. Though he lives to outrebound the Cleveland Cavaliers and Joel Embiid, specifically, Robinson is an important player against the likes of Wembanyama, Kornet and anyone else who comes looking for a Knicks miss on the offensive glass, so Mitch’s presence, or lack thereof, could shift the tide before us.
And yet….and yet. Wemby’s versatility is almost a hindrance in this case; OG Anunoby figures to be doing most of the work here, and Karl-Anthony Towns[3] is the most locked-in of his life, able to cover switches and dropping in coverages that the Spurs might think they favor when Wemby dips inside.
Speaking of which: Karl Towns is averaging the most assists per game of his career during these playoffs, with 5.9 per game. Mike Brown having him operate out of the elbow and high shoulder as a playmaker – and one who can open up secondary passes back to himself, to boot – is the next step KAT has needed to take. That he’s doing it with such aplomb, to the tune of averaging 2.2 assists for every turnover he commits, appears to be a sign of pointed growth.
Karl’s dishing does lead to swishing: New York, who finished the league fourth in team three-point shooting during the regular season at 37%, are up to over 40% in the playoffs. Scheming around Josh Hart can be a point of interest, and San Antonio is going to force that issue. Also: Anunoby and Bridges, the latter shooting every light out of your lovely mantel setup with pinpoint accuracy, are going to force issues of their own.
Pop quiz hotshot: do you know against whom Jalen Brunson’s career-high game occurred? I remember ruing the day like many of the others in which I found myself awoke one morning: in a 130-136 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in December 2024, with a rookie Wembanyama going for 40 points and 20 rebounds, JB bucketed 61 on the road. That game had all the thrill of a series waiting to happen, if only.
Jalen Brunson’s per-100s in the playoffs are better than in the regular season once again. They’re a little better this year in light of the massive amounts of stickball for strength that Tyler Kolek and Jose Alvarado have had to play in the fourth quarters of several of these games.
For Knicks fans, this is as good as it was ever going to get. After trucking through the East in fewer than 21 games, they stand to face a depleted, young, inexperienced yet hungry Spurs team that, as they had 27 years ago, have recently acquired a generationally-talented big man and, more than that, central presence.
With the New York Rangers, it had been 54 years. For the Knicks, it has been 53. Ah, but for the Spurs, it has been a cool twelve. When does a curse begin anymore, and why? This is a series devoid of superstition, with the modern poles staring each other in the face. Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson are the two stars most fit to have to go against each other and let the rest of their teams figure it out. Here we go: the NBA Finals are about to begin.
[1] Especially and prominently defensively, and he’s caught errant passes and made volleyball passes that are on the border of not making sense for literally any other NBA player based on where the ball was and the angle of the pass in history.
[2] Curiosity getting the better of me: OKC limited San Antonio to exactly 100 points in each of those games, though at slightly different paces due to when they achieved garbage time.
[3] KAT!
Tuesdays With Horry 