This Is How It Feels

We all got it slightly wrong. After the first round, it was never Knicks in six, as poetic as the phrase imminently is. It was Knicks in ’26.

Down double-digits yet again at halftime, I nevertheless had full confidence, after all of what we’d already seen, that the New York Knicks were going to win the championship. I told Megan, Steve and anybody else who would listen. They believed, for they had also borne witness.

Believe though I did that this would be the ultimate outcome, more or less for the transitive property than for any other reason once the San Antonio Spurs literally and metaphorically got the Oklahoma City Thunder out of the paint, I was nervous for every one of these games.

Only at the final whistle on Saturday night did I feel an unfamiliar warmth in the familiar heat of the East Village. We marched from Avenue A up to Madison Square Garden, high-fiving strangers and chanting the various Knicks chants. This is why you live in New York City. This is when it feels like nine million become one, for this team, on a gorgeous June night. The country’s biggest city became not much more than one giant neighborhood for the duration of this run. All the pieces matter.

Jalen Brunson scored 45 of the Knicks’ 94 points and was the unanimous MVP; anybody who thought it would be anyone else after roughly Game 2 was living a delusion tantamount with thinking the Knicks could do this in the first place. And yet.

Below are a collection of some of the thoughts that I’ve had in the many hours since the New York Knicks, twice of 17 total wins in 82-game seasons in fairly recent memory, won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years. We told you the Knicks would win the title all the way back in October. Listen to me then; believe me right now.

• Starting at the top, this was a Jalen Brunson joint. Everybody else is a complement and counterpoint to the most anomalous lead guard (read: short) of an NBA championship team since Isiah Thomas. Becky Hammon is going to hear about small guards all summer, but plenty of other media figures sat in agreement with her until right now. Bomani Jones is clarifying his position on Karl-Anthony Towns even now. 45 points in a closeout game, the only one during these Finals in which the final winning total was under 100 points, is mammoth work. Jordan-esque, in fact. That the perfect counterpoint to the tall extraterrestrial – France is in space now – is a player in the mold of Victor Wembanyama’s former teammate Chris Paul makes every bit of sense.
• OG Anunoby’s tip-in is both the greatest putback in basketball history and the greatest single play in Knicks history. It’s nice to kill two birds with one stone.
• The sequence featuring Anunoby’s block on De’Aaron Fox going into that tip-in is also the greatest two-play sequence in Knicks history. That’s three.
• Karl-Anthony Towns was the best Knicks player for the first three rounds of the NBA playoffs, and he needed to be. Despite the foul trouble that haunted much of his Finals, he continued to play the best defense of his life, often on Wemby directly. His finishing with two points and fouling out of Game 5 will, fortunately, be lost to history given the way the rest of his playoff run went.
• Brunson drawing Wemby into an iso with two and a half remaining in Game 4 and knocking down the three in cold blood, after having made a similar shot in Game 3, is in the upper tier of ballsiest plays in NBA history.
• Nobody will talk about the NBA Cup-NBA Finals double that basically laid out the blueprint for what this series could look like, but the one extra game that these teams played against each other afforded everyone 48 more minutes of tape than the typical East-West home-and-home would. Mike Brown did his homework.
• Josh Hart was everywhere all the time, putting up Rondo-esque lines and outrebounding a guy nearly a foot taller than himself. He hit his threes when needed and was a necessary irritant on defense. It was an all-time run for him, too.
• Mitchell Robinson’s defense on Wemby when KAT got into foul trouble, particularly as the games devolved to free throw chicanery, was fearless. What pinky injury? What surgery?
• Jose Alvarado and Deuce McBride are arguments for depth as opposed to a shortened playoff rotation. When Brunson’s injury scares and needed rest facilitated their minutes, they performed with aplomb.
• I’m not really in the business of lauding people for taking less money than they’re worth – I was unemployed for the entirety of the NBA season, with additional burnt ends bookmarking both sides – and yet, Jalen Brunson’s sub-max contract allowed for three of the Knicks’ starters to match, say, the top two contracts in Boston. Bryan Toporek at Forbes pointed out that this might be the next exploitable market inefficiency.
• We’re all underrating the Wu-Tang Clan’s contribution. They performed at halftime of Game 4, when the Knicks were down 27, and Method Man blessed the denizens of MSG with “Knicks in 5” at the conclusion of their performance. OG Anunoby went got the tip to validate Tical’s prediction. Wu-Tang is for the children, indeed, and the children love the New York Knicks.
• Historically I am a particularly superstitious person — in addition to Knicks fandom, this is courtesy of my mother. I have a lot of weirdo hang ups that Rafael Nadal has sort of validated in his entire being. At both of Shannon’s and Lindsey’s behest, I threw all of that into the incinerator but for one (1) thing. My older, not oldest brother gave me what I’ll choose to describe as the most straightforward Knicks t-shirt in existence for Christmas a few years ago: it is that exquisite blue and orange logo set on a pure black background. As New York embarked on its thirteen-game playoff winning streak, I found myself inadvertently, and then on purpose, wearing said shirt every time I walked my dog in the mornings following Knicks wins. To the best of my knowledge, that brother and my dad are equally established as the very least superstitious people not only in my family, but that I know personally. They do not care, and neither of them especially cares about the Knicks. However, when Brian was asking all of us to respect the shirt, we followed. Even after the Game 3 loss, it fed into the anti-superstition to *maintain* that superstition, paradoxically. Credit where credit’s due, wherever that may be.
• Never heard of the five draft picks that went to a team that doesn’t exist. The only alleged fan of the Brooklyn team that I know is in Italy right now. Go Liberty.
• Speaking of Mikal Bridges and Villanova, maybe Pope Bob did tug on God’s ear, just this once. They both know the Bulls don’t need it for a little while longer; why not the gentlemen from the school just outside of Philadelphia, making good? They’re Augustinian-educated – nobody’s perfect – but Jay Wright’s Wildcat teams of a decade past have set a probably unrepeatable blueprint for the relatively wholesale transfer of college teams to the NBA.
• Miss you, Donte. You too, Julius. Not you, Jerome James.
• Leon Rose, you beautiful soul: special thanks to you.
• I’ve never considered the governorship of the New York Knicks and will continue to ignore it completely. Whomever they are, they have never done wrong and never will again.
• De’Aaron Fox’s $222 million extension kicks in this summer. Dylan Harper is incredibly good, already. Stephon Castle couldn’t stop hitting clutch shots until every Spur did. San Antonio may have a tough road ahead to build anything else around Victor Wembanyama.
• Victor, by the way, went ahead and destroyed all of the goodwill he’d built over the past few years and especially in taking down the reviled Thunder. He expected a coronation, and he got one, but that wasn’t his crown. He’s 22 years old, and he just led a team literally from the draft lottery last year to the NBA Finals this year. He’ll be fine, but he might be wondering if the Shaolin monks with whom he studied last summer have some Wu-Tang predilections of their own. It’s possible that getting through the gauntlet of the West just left a young and inexperienced team incapable of putting up much of a fight in the Finals, though no first half of any of these games quite has me there. Mitch Johnson wasn’t ready either.
• I can’t be moved to care about the various draft lottery machinations or why you think the NBA has it out against your team, specifically. If you believe that, stop watching. Let gambling brain get the best of you, and allow the conspiratorial mindset to destroy you from within. The Western Conference Finals were played between two teams based in cities that do feature in any of the other three major men’s sports. The Knicks had to get over losing out on generational draft lotteries in 2015 and 2019, then they built around a guy the Dallas Mavericks drafted in the second round. It took 53 years for a team in the country’s largest media market to win a title. If you don’t think free agents want to sign with your team, perhaps look at the infrastructure of your team, or the infrastructure of the city and state in which your team is situated. The rest of it is entirely out of all of our hands.
• None of this is about me. I know that and keep it close to my heart. When I think about the sort of adult I’ve become, perhaps as opposed to the 12-year-old excitedly watching Stephon Marbury’s edition of this team get swept in the 2004 playoffs, by a team that no longer exists, in a Florida hotel room with my dad, I get into my head about goals, and moving goalposts, and reconciling what failure has looked like with what hope could look like, I turn inward and deliberate. Sometimes it takes me years to deal with any one interaction, to confront what it meant in real time and how dragging it out made it worse. I’ve spent a lot of nearly full days in bed, staring at my ceiling and watching the sun cross diagonally during the limited direct daylight hours we get. Having this kind of time to oneself is dangerous. As the weather picked up and the Knicks kept winning, though, as long walks and bike rides in Central Park increased, it all felt just a little lighter. I haven’t let the intrusive thoughts get all the way to me in quite a while – my relationship with the George Washington Bridge is a stable one, which I know because I can stare it directly in the eye – and though leaning into something like sports as a distraction is a knee-jerk reaction for most anybody, that this team decided this was the year to take up the mantel and carry me through. When I looked down and saw only five pairs of footsteps sloshing through yet another freeze in mid-February, that’s when the Knicks were carrying me. They were never going to make me feel complete, but they gave me a piece of my soul that will glow for as long as I’m walking.
• That said, I’m relieved for people like my partner and my dad, whose long crises about people in their periphery yelling at the television about the Knicks has finally come to a conclusion. For now.
• In allowing the New York Knicks to win a championship on his decaying watch, LeBron James has once again done something Michael Jordan never did. Thanks Bron.
• Speaking of which, Reggie Miller still does not have a ring. Thanks Bron.
• I want to get this down one more time, for my own eyes and yours; for my mom’s and Mike Breen’s and Bill Bradley’s and Walt Frazier’s and Earl Monroe’s, whose jersey I will be wearing at the parade downtown on Thursday; for the hardos at The Cage, Rucker Park and Dyckman; for Patrick Ewing, for John Starks, for OAK; for the fellow transplants with a good enough reason, and if that reason was simply the community, all the better: the New York Knicks are the NBA champions.