Robert O’Connell covers basketball for The Wall Street Journal from New York. Previously, he wrote features on professional and college sports across America.
The New York Knicks Are Two Wins From a Championship—and They Might Never Lose Again
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SAN ANTONIO—Late on Friday night, it looked as if the New York Knicks’ magical playoff streak had finally run its course.
New York had won 12 straight postseason games, and they’d built a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 2 of the NBA Finals. But in a flurry of blocked shots, steals and Victor Wembanyama buckets, that lead evaporated. It was a tie game with 10 seconds left, and the San Antonio Spurs had all the momentum—and the basketball.
Then, the Knicks were granted one more miracle.
This one came in the form of a shocking Wembanyama blunder. Hurrying up the court, he threw a pass upcourt to a teammate who wasn’t watching, hitting him in the back. And when the ball rolled loose, Knicks superstar Jalen Brunson pounced.
“I threw that one away,” Wembanyama lamented. “I messed up.”
Brunson snatched up the ball, drew a foul and made a free throw. And when Wembanyama rose up for a would-be game-winner on the other end moments later, it bounced off the rim. The Knicks won, 105-104, and suddenly the entire complexion of the Finals had changed.
Not only was the winning streak alive—the championship that the Knicks have waited 53 years for now seemed within their grasp.
“It’s an amazing feeling as a coach, to know how mentally tough your team is no matter what the situation is,” said New York coach Mike Brown. “To see them continue to fight. And fight. And fight. And fight.”
The Knicks, of course, aren’t celebrating a 2-0 series lead. The only festivities Brunson had planned for the contest’s transition back to New York was a practice session to correct the team’s mistakes.
But New Yorkers have already started the party. Car horns blared in the streets of Manhattan, more than 1,500 miles away from south Texas, and fans mobbed the avenues outside Madison Square Garden nearly 72 hours before Game 3 tips off on the Knicks’ home court.
And while the team’s official line is that there’s work left to do, one of the Knicks’ unofficial ambassadors told a different story deep in the Spurs’ arena on Friday night.
“It’s looking good, it’s looking good,” a giddy Timothée Chalamet told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s looking like we got this.”
Chalamet isn’t wrong. Home-court advantage is such a massive factor in playoff basketball that only two other teams in NBA history—Michael Jordan’s 1993 Chicago Bulls and Hakeem Olajuwon’s 1995 Houston Rockets—have ever pulled off the feat of winning the first two games of the Finals in their opponent’s arena. Both of them went on to wrap up the championship, and Knicks fans are counting on being the third. The cheapest ticket prices for Game 4 at the Garden—the earliest possible clincher—have skyrocketed past $13,000 on StubHub, making it one of the most expensive evenings in sports history.
The Knicks don’t have to count on historical precedent or their supporters’ sky-high spirits to carry them through, though. That’s because they seem to have done something almost as uncommon as winning a championship. They’ve found a solution for Wembanyama.
Throughout the playoffs, the 7-foot-4 prodigy from France had emerged as the NBA’s next great superstar. He’d put up outrageous stat lines and even more absurd highlights while knocking off the defending-champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals.
But against New York, his shooting percentage has plummeted from 51% to 40.5%. His normally dominant defense was also muted, as Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns connected on 8 of 12 shots to score 21 points on Friday. And when Wembanyama lifted off to attempt the would-be buzzer-beater that could have become the signature highlight of his career, the Knicks had something almost no other team can claim: an answer.
It was backup center Mitchell Robinson—with his wide frame and 7-foot-4 wingspan—who took the job of making Wembanyama’s life a nightmare on his last shot. Though he didn’t lay a fingertip on the basketball, Robinson accomplished his mission, stretching his long arms into an obstacle even the super-sized Wembanyama couldn’t shoot over cleanly.
“Just a heck of a job by Mitch, guarding the most iconic player in the world,” Brown said. “Phenomenal.”
Many New York fans have never seen a Knicks title. But minutes after they won on Friday, one person who had witnessed both of this team’s championships firsthand couldn’t contain his excitement: Walt “Clyde” Frazier, the Knicks’ point guard for their 1970 and 1973 title-winning runs.
“Now, like the ’70s teams, this is our destiny,” said Frazier, dressed in an orange-and-blue suit. “These guys are gonna get swept.”
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