The New York Knicks are NBA champions after another epic comeback ends a 53-year drought
By Kyle Feldscher, CNN
(CNN) — The New York Knicks are NBA champions for the first time since 1973, using another epic fourth-quarter comeback to defeat the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and taking the series 4-1.
The Knicks trailed by as much as 16 in the game and nine points early in the final quarter before charging back behind the heroics of Jalen Brunson. New York won 94-90.
A spring of the city coming together in celebration of the Knicks, who at one point won 13 straight games in their journey to the title, has ended in a championship summer.
The tears after the final whistle showed what it meant – not just to the team, but to the city of New York and a fanbase that has been tortured by playoff heartbreaks and decades of malaise for more than 50 years. As the clock ran out, years of pain were screamed out in Frost Bank Center as the Spurs’ home court sounded like it was parked in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
The fourth-quarter comeback was incredibly appropriate. A franchise that has come back from the dead rose once again, just days after producing one of the most incredible rallies in NBA history in Game 4. Jalen Brunson’s 45 points, most of them coming in the second half as he put his team on his relatively diminutive back and carried the Big Apple to a championship that they’ve ached over for decades.
Brunson was in tears after the game, barely able to speak when asked by ESPN what the moment meant.
He squeezed out softly, “(It’s) everything I ever dreamed of.” He was named the Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player of the Finals.
ESPN cameras caught the moment between father and son when Jalen hugged Rick, a team assistant who played on the Knicks’ 1999 Finals team.
Another slow start
The opening half started as so many others in this series have. After coming out hot in the opening quarter, the Spurs’ lead grew to 16 early in the second quarter as Victor Wembanyama used his size and skill to pace his team to the big lead. Wembanyama wreaked havoc on the defensive end with five blocked shots before halftime.
In the face of accomplishing history, the Knicks started off ice cold. Through the first 16 minutes of Saturday’s game, they were 5-for-26 from the field, a whopping 19%. Added to that underwhelming start were nine turnovers, all of which contributed to a middling offensive performance that helped San Antonio build its sizable lead.
It didn’t take long for that lead to get cut in half as the Knicks, as they are wont to do, turned it on in the middle of the second quarter.
It was Brunson leading the way for New York, as he got to any spot on the floor that he wanted, ending the half with 16 points. A Mikal Bridges shot with 2:45 to go in the second quarter brought New York to within six points as they traveling Knicks fans in San Antonio screamed – though their revelry was cooled seconds later when Karl-Anthony Towns picked up his third foul.
With Wembanyama and Towns out for the final two minutes and change of the half, the Knicks’ Josh Hart drew a flagrant foul from De’Aaron Fox as he laid the ball in on a fast break. Hart made the free throw to cut the Spurs’ lead down to five and Bridges scored on the ensuing possession to make it a three-point game.
Devin Vassell sank a shot as the buzzer expired, a nice shot of momentum for the Spurs after the Knicks had nearly erased their big lead.
A key moment took place just after the restart when Towns picked up his fourth foul, yet another game when the Knicks star was locked in intense foul trouble. With him on the bench, Wembanyama surged and helped lead his team back to a double-digit lead with more than nine minutes to play in the quarter.
The lead stretched to 12 before Brunson and the Knicks rallied again, cutting the lead down to five halfway through the quarter.
A moment of controversy came after Brunson nailed a 3-pointer with 5:29 to go in the third quarter when Wembanyama got one of his long legs in the star guard’s landing area. Brunson’s ankle rolled slightly and he was slow to get up, as the Spurs went down the court and nailed another three. Brunson and his coach, Mike Brown, were heated, believing the French star should have been whistled for a flagrant foul.
There was no call – and the story repeated itself seconds later when Bridges took a hand to the face from a Spurs defender. With the quarter running down, the lead went to 15 as the Spurs made a 9-0 run with Towns on the bench.
The Knicks chipped away, as Jordan Clarkson scored the first points for the New York bench late in the third quarter and then Mitchell Robinson tipped in a miss just before the clock ran out to make it 72-65 going into the final frame.
One last comeback
The Spurs started the fourth quarter by rebuilding their lead – a huge dunk by Wembanayama extended the lead to a nine-point margin with 10 minutes to go.
Brunson would not go quietly, using another flurry of points to cut the Spurs’ lead back down to six as the quarter neared the halfway point. After an empty possession, Brunson drove past Wembanyama to cut the lead down to four.
The Spurs turned the ball over again on the next possession. Suddenly, it was starting to sound more like a Knicks home game than a comfortable crowd for the Spurs as the traveling New York fans felt the momentum changing.
Brunson continued his magnificent game with a drive that drew a foul, sinking both free throws to cut the lead down to two with five minutes to go. The Spurs stayed cold, allowing the Knicks to tie the game on Brunson’s 40th point – a high layup off the top of the glass with Wembanyama on the bench.
Two free throws from Brunson with a little more than three-and-a-half minutes to go brought the Knicks into the lead for the first time since the opening quarter.
With the clock running down, the Spurs stayed cold but the Knicks couldn’t take advantage until OG Anunoby’s dunk with two minutes to go gave his team a three-point lead.
A critical moment came on the next possession when Towns fouled Wembanyama again, his sixth of the game, forcing him to the bench for the remainder of the contest. The superstar looked tired and missed one of two free throws to shrink the Knicks’ lead.
A turnaround jumper by Dylan Harper with a little more than a minute tied the game, but Brunson answered seconds later to give the Knicks a two-point advantage. As the clock ticked down, Fox missed a 3-pointer and the Knicks got the rebound.
After OG Anunoby and Josh Hart both made one of two free throws, the Spurs trailed by four and had to have someone make a play. Stephon Castle was the player to make it, rising above the fray to slam home a missed 3-pointer from Wembanyama to bring the deficit back to two.
With eight seconds to go, Harper fouled Mikal Bridges after Brunson nearly turned the ball over on a play that could have easily been whistled as a foul.
Bridges made one of two free throws, handing the Spurs an opening. They couldn’t take it. The Knicks fouled quickly and Harper missed two free throws, and Anunoby grabbed the rebound. He made one of two from the stripe, putting the game out of reach for the Spurs and sending the entire city of New York into tears of joy.
What they just erased
The Knicks are an iconic NBA franchise and one that, despite the presence of the Nets (first in New Jersey and now in Brooklyn), has been a part of the soul of the tri-state area for generations. But those most recent generations have known far more heartbreak than would really be considered fair for most other teams.
For the first 10 years after that 1973 championship, the Knicks were in the wilderness. There were a few playoff runs, but mostly they missed the playoffs. In 1985, a young center named Patrick Ewing, who had just starred at Georgetown, came to the Garden and a turnaround seemed not only possible but probable.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Ewing’s Knicks were regular playoff participants. But still, those teams could never get over the hump. In 1994, they finally got Michael Jordan out of the way (he went to play baseball), won a dramatic Eastern Conference Finals series against the Indiana Pacers in seven games and faced the Houston Rockets in the NBA Finals.
It went the distance, a full seven games, but that 1994 team fell short. And much of their Finals journey was overshadowed by the OJ Simpson case that began with a white Ford Bronco slowly driving down Southern California freeways in the middle of the opening game.
It took five more years, and another Jordan return and three-peat, for the Knicks to make it back to the biggest stage – against none other than the San Antonio Spurs. That Spurs team was just on the verge of becoming the next century’s most consistent franchise and easily dispatched the Knicks in five games.
And then for most of the next 20 years, the Knicks were terrible.
Sure, they had moments. Linsanity was fun. Carmelo Anthony had many productive years. Stars came and stars went. The only thing that stayed was the losing.
A turnaround decades in the making
It wasn’t until last year – when the Knicks made a series of tough off-season calls and traded for Towns and made Brunson their go-to guy – that suddenly it looked like a real possibility that New Yorkers would get to watch, and enjoy, basketball in June.
That run ended at the hands of Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals, but the stage appeared set for the Knicks in 2025-26.
What followed was a regular season filled with some high highs and some low lows as the Knicks ended up as the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference. But beneath that modest performance over 82 games was a beast ready to turn it loose.
After dropping the second and third game of their opening round series against the Atlanta Hawks, the Knicks turned it on. They rolled through the Hawks the rest of the way, blowing them away in six games. Next up were the Philadelphia 76ers, who were little more than a speed bump. The Cleveland Cavaliers, fresh off a seven-game upset of the top-seeded Detroit Pistons, couldn’t muster anything against the New York steamroller.
Through two games in San Antonio, it looked like the party would end in New York in four games. The Knicks used their experience and moxie to hold off the exuberant young Spurs’ early game runs, eventually turning the screws in the second and third quarters to build solid leads. They held off late charges and went back to MSG with a two-game lead and fan confidence sky-high.
When the series went back to New York, things got weird.
The prelude to Game 3 was hijacked by the presence of President Donald Trump and the intense security a presidential visit requires – not to mention the loud booing of the commander in chief when he was shown during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Spurs rose up and ruined that party, winning their only game of the series.
Before Game 4, Knicks owner James Dolan decided to go into a PR war with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, bickering over the status of the watch party that had become a staple outside the Garden in earlier rounds. That game started with the Spurs putting on one of the best halves by a road team in NBA Finals history, taking a 29-point lead in the third quarter.
Instead, the Knicks – determined not to get punked out on their home floor – made a charge for the ages. It took nearly the entire second half, and a full-on Spurs collapse, but they got there when OG Anunoby flew through the air and tipped in a missed shot with just 1.2 seconds left.
It was an incredible moment and one that many fans thought assured a title. But in June, nothing in the NBA is assured. Except, apparently, the 2025-26 Knicks, who made regular fourth-quarter comebacks in the biggest games.
From the beginning of the series until that Game 3 defeat, all of New York had the words “Knicks in four!” on their lips. After that loss, that became “Knicks in five!”
Those dreams have come true.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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