These Knicks are now NBA champions. These Knicks are now legends.
SAN ANTONIO — It’s over. It’s really over.
The Knicks finally have won it all. They have won their first title in 53 years. And they did it with the flair and drama that have been their calling card during this remarkable postseason.
Jalen Brunson, the guard who was supposed to be too small to lead a team to a championship, gave an MVP performance that will be talked about for ages. With the rest of his team struggling offensively, Brunson put up a franchise-playoff-record 45 points in Game 5 on Saturday night to steer the Knicks to a 94-90 comeback victory over the San Antonio Spurs and the NBA title.
The Knicks no longer are just a team. They no longer are just players. They are legends.
And the biggest legend of them all is Brunson, who collapsed into the arms of his father, Knicks assistant coach Rick Brunson, at the end of the game.
“I got no words,” Jalen Brunson said in an on-the-court interview with ABC after he was voted the Finals MVP by unanimous decision. “Whenever someone counted us out, we found a way to come back and do something about it.”
It all transpired in front of a crowd that seemed to have as many Knicks fans as Spurs fans. As soon as it became clear that this was a possible closeout game — the very night that the Knicks took a 3-1 series lead by coming back from a 29-point deficit in Game 4 — Knicks fans began snapping up flights from any New York airport to San Antonio.
The urge to see history in the making is understandable. A huge chunk of Knicks fans were not alive when the team won its last NBA title in 1973. And a significant chunk of the younger fans can’t remember or hadn't been born yet during the Knicks’ NBA Finals appearances in 1994 and 1999.
What they were there for was to exorcise decades of disappointment and bad basketball. Since the Knicks’ last trip to the Finals — when they lost to the Spurs in five games in 1999 — Knicks fans have endured 13 coaching changes, multiple strange draft choices, nonsensical trades, some costly free-agent signings, a 17-win season and countless nights of being the butt of jokes by late-night comedians.
The transformation of the Knicks into a contender, starting with the signing of Brunson as a free agent in 2022, has been startling.
“I’ve seen the recipe being made. I’ve finally got to see it being done,” said Robinson, who was a rookie on that 17-win team.
The weight of trying to end 53 years of a lot of bad juju seemed to weigh heavily on the Knicks at the start of the season. The cliche that closeout games are the hardest to win apparently is a cliche for a reason.
As has happened in every game of this series, the Knicks were outplayed in the first quarter. Make that badly outplayed. San Antonio led 23-13 at the end of the first period, holding the Knicks to 4-for-22 shooting.
Brunson wound up scoring 29 points in the second half as the Knicks came back from deficits of 16 points in the second quarter, 15 in the third and 10 in the fourth. They finally took their first lead since the opening minutes of the game when Brunson went to the line for three free throws and converted all of them to make the score 86-85 with 3:40 to play.
Down the stretch, it was a team effort. Anunoby scored on a dunk on which goaltending was called. Brunson hit a runner with a little more than a minute remaining. Towns played solid defense before fouling out. Josh Hart and Mitchell Robinson grabbed big rebounds.
They are all legends now.
That’s how it works in New York. Just ask Walt Frazier, who is one of six players from the 1970 and 1973 teams to have their numbers retired and hanging from the rafters.
The win completes a historic postseason in which the Knicks pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of uniting a metropolitan area that never seems to agree on anything, whether it’s whom to vote for or where to buy the best bagels.
They enjoyed a postseason for the ages, one with so many highlights that it seems almost impossible that they could be jammed into a two-month period.
A 13-game winning streak in which the Knicks beat their opponents by an average of 21.0 points per game . . . back-to-back sweeps of Philadelphia in the Eastern Conference semifinals and Cleveland in the conference finals . . . scenes of Knicks fans taking over visiting arenas because tickets are a fraction of what it costs to get into Madison Square Garden . . . a comeback from a 22-point fourth-quarter deficit in Game 1 of the Cleveland series . . . a stunning start to the NBA Finals in which the Knicks took the first two games in San Antonio . . . a sitting U.S. President in the house as President Donald Trump attended the Knicks’ Game 3 loss . . . a Game 4 that will be talked about for generations to come, thanks to OG Anunoby’s winning tip-in with 1.2 seconds left that capped a comeback from a 29-point deficit. That will go down as one of the most famous shots, if not the most famous shot, in Knicks history.
And then the closeout game happened. It was almost too much to absorb. It wasn’t some fictional sports movie made by a Knicks superfan like Spike Lee or Ben Stiller, though it included enough plotlines and drama to be made into a pretty good one.
One we will be talking about for generations.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
