SAN ANTONIO — Midway through the third quarter Wednesday night, the New York Knicks found themselves in a position they haven’t been in much over this past magical month: staring up at an opponent on the scoreboard, thanks to an inability to consistently generate good looks.
Trailing by 13, Jalen Brunson got what might’ve been his cleanest look of the night — a catch-and-shoot 3 created by old buddy Josh Hart driving to the middle, drawing the help of the perpetually menacing Victor Wembanyama and leaving the Knicks’ leading scorer all alone in the corner. But Brunson — who’d limped back to New York’s locker room after a collision with San Antonio Spurs forward Harrison Barnes late in the first quarter and who’d missed 12 of his first 17 shots in Game 1 of the 2026 NBA Finals — couldn’t cash in:
It was par for the course in what had been a struggle for the Knicks against a fast, physical, snare-drum-tight Spurs defense, with Stephon Castle at the point of attack and Wembanyama blanketing the half-court on the backline. Less than a minute after Brunson’s miss, San Antonio rookie phenom Dylan Harper spun through the defense of Mikal Bridges for one of his many fantastic finishes in Game 1, giving the Spurs their biggest lead of the game.
The bad news: The Knicks were down 14 points on the road to a 62-win team that just vanquished the defending NBA champions. The good news: This team has been down way more, with way less time on the clock, and lived to tell the tale.
“You know, we’re down double digits tonight, and we were also down double digits in Game 1 against Cleveland,” Knicks head coach Mike Brown said after the game. “And for our guys just to stay with it is huge. Because anything can happen in a 48-minute game, as long as you stay the course.”
As they did against Cleveland to open the Eastern Conference finals, and as they did to Boston in Games 1 and 2 of their second-round series last year, the Knicks did a hell of a lot more than just stay the course. They didn’t just stay in the fight; they planted their back foot and started throwing haymakers, outscoring the Spurs 54-30 over the final 18 and a half minutes of Game 1 — a turnaround that stunned the hosts, delivering New York a 105-95 win to take a 1-0 lead and claim home-court advantage in the 2026 NBA Finals.
It stunned the Spurs, but you can’t really call it stunning. Not when the Knicks just keep doing stuff like this.
“These guys are resilient, man,” said Brown, who got the W in his first NBA Finals game as a head coach in 19 years. “They get better as the game goes along.”
That improvement is a collective effort. It starts, as all things for these Knicks do, with Brunson, who’d been bottled up through three quarters but completely took the game over in the fourth, scoring 13 of his game-high 30 points in the final frame.
“Jalen, he was the MVP in the second half,” Brown said. “He was huge for us. He did what MVP candidates are supposed to do. He carried us home. We put the ball in his hands and he got it done for us down the stretch.”
After struggling to find the range and touch on his jumper through three quarters, Brunson got going by repeatedly attacking the paint, quickly generating some rhythm by pushing the tempo off turnovers and hunting opportunities against Spurs forward Julian Champagnie. Brunson had scored 17 points on 22 shots through three quarters; he scored eight points on three shots in about a minute and a half after checking in for crunch time and drained a pair of huge jumpers to help the Knicks ice it — including another catch-and-shoot triple from the same right corner where he’d missed in the third.
“With the ball in his hands, I’m never surprised,” a smiling Karl-Anthony Towns said at the podium. “I tell you, that last shot — I think it was a shoot floater. That was nasty, I ain’t going to lie.”
“I think it starts with my confidence. It comes with my work ethic,” said Brunson, who now has 30 career 30-point games in the playoffs — tied for 26th in NBA history. “I think most importantly, knowing we’re on the road, and knowing my teammates have my back, I think that’s the biggest thing in an environment like this. The trust they have in me and the trust I have in them, it’s gotten us to this point.”
Withstanding the Spurs’ onslaught through three quarters and finding yet another monstrous closing kick required a collective effort. It required Towns to continue his brilliant postseason by being the best all-around player on the floor for the bulk of Game 1.
He scored 18 points on 7-for-15 shooting, with the bulk of that coming on consistently aggressive drives to the rim, whether guarded by Wembanyama or smaller defenders on cross-matches. He grabbed 12 rebounds, including four on the offensive glass, where he repeatedly hunted chances to fight for interior position after Wembanyama had vacated the area to defend elsewhere. He dished four assists against two turnovers, once again acting as a playmaking hub from the elbows. And he played fantastic defense on Wembanyama, whom he held to just 2-for-12 shooting with four turnovers when he was the primary defender on the MVP finalist.
“He was amazing. The double-double was huge. He came up with some timely buckets for us. He’s a problem,” Brown said. “You put a small guy on him, he’s got a chance to offensive rebound. You put a big guy on him, he’s got a chance to pick-and-pop and go around guys. We have to just keep trying to move him around based on who is guarding him throughout the course of the ballgame, but he was huge for us.”
It required Hart to shake off a frustrating first half in which he picked up three quick fouls and to find the right way to atone.
“I had a lot of energy — I think I played like seven minutes in the first half,” Hart joked after the game. “You know, I knew I had to come out and be aggressive. I think those were three of probably my dumbest fouls, especially the one I had with two fouls, reaching. So I knew I had to clean that up. But just come in, and inject energy.”
Hart did precisely that, not allowing a quiet offensive game — just three points on 1-for-5 shooting, as he once again struggled with an opposing center playing ghost coverage on him, like he did in Game 1 against Cleveland — to limit his ability to impact the game elsewhere. The final tally: 15 rebounds, 6 assists, 4 steals, 1 block and zero turnovers in 27 minutes, in which the Knicks blew the Spurs’ doors off by 22 points.
“Yeah, that’s just who he is. He’s always been that way,” Brunson said. “I can’t explain it. He just has a knack for doing things like that, and in crucial times, as well.”
As does OG Anunoby. After a quiet opening to Game 1, the All-Defensive forward came alive late, scoring 12 of his 17 points in the fourth quarter, including a pair of huge 3-pointers as the Knicks began to take control.
“Just my teammates finding me and being aggressive, ready to shoot,” Anunoby said. “Shoot with confidence.”
It seems safe to say that this one looked pretty friggin’ confident:
It required relentlessness on the interior. The Spurs came in allowing just 41.6 points in the paint per game in these playoffs; the Knicks finished Game 1 with 50, thanks partly to New York once again winning the possession battle.
“The offensive rebounds crushed us,” Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson said. “Twenty-three second-chance points. We’re up one point, 93-94, 94-95, get them to miss. Brunson hits a 3, they go on an 11-0 run. Tough.”
“We know we’ve got to control the boards. With this series, they like to crash the glass — KAT, OG, all them,” Spurs forward Devin Vassell said. “Can’t just be one half where we’re crashing the glass. We’ve got to help Vic. We’ve got to help the bigs down there. That’s going to be a huge part of this series.”
It required another big night from the Knicks’ second unit. Another 13 points, three 3-pointers and physical point-of-attack defense for Landry Shamet. A couple of great shifts for Jose Alvarado, who was pressed into early duty by Brunson’s injury exit and who kicked in seven points, four rebounds, an assist and a steal while helping settle New York’s offense down after a rocky start.
Six rebounds, a lob dunk and some great individual defense on Wembanyama for Mitchell Robinson, who didn’t miss a beat in his first action after surgery to repair a fractured fifth metacarpal in his right hand. And four assists and a pair of 3s for Deuce McBride — including a massive one on the move in the left corner at the end of the third quarter that knotted the game at 76 heading into the fourth, setting the stage for Brunson and Co. to bring it home.
“I think once we settled down and locked in as a team, we changed the game,” McBride said.
They changed it on the defensive end, holding the Spurs to just 40 points on 14-for-44 shooting (31.8%) in the second half — a ghastly 83.3 offensive rating — which Brown attributed to an increased level of physicality and more attentive work in limiting San Antonio’s transition opportunities. At halftime, the Spurs had 14 fast-break points; they finished the game with 15.
“These guys are just fast, and we can’t buddy-run — you’ve got to sprint back, and you’ve got to shift to the ball,” Brown said. “You’ve got to make the paint look crowded, and then you’ve got to get to their shooters, just because they are so good in transition.”
Taking away those runouts and early-offense opportunities forced the Spurs to try to operate in a more methodical, slowed-down game — and the Knicks, who’ve led the NBA in defensive efficiency since mid-January, were able to drag San Antonio into the same muck and mire that the Spurs had them in midway through the third. The Spurs scored just 81.6 points per 100 possessions in the half-court in Game 1, according to Cleaning the Glass — their seventh-worst offensive performance against a set defense of this entire season. Their worst? A March 1 loss to these same Knicks.
“Today, our offense didn’t show up until late and our defense was there from the beginning, and that’s what saved us,” Towns said. “If we can find a way to get the offense going and continue to improve our defense — not only just keep it where it was tonight, but improve on it — we’ll give ourselves a chance to win every night.”
Especially if they continue to find a way to limit Wembanyama, who finished with 26 points and 12 rebounds, but who shot just 6-for-21 from the field, committing a playoff-high six turnovers, and appeared to wear down as the game wore on under the strain of his responsibilities on both ends of the floor.
“Yeah, I mean, I was bad tonight,” Wembanyama said. “It’s not more complicated than that.”
That was the tone Wembanyama struck throughout his postgame press conference: unbothered, unpanicked, taking the long view. He said he thought the Spurs let Game 1 go, just like Donovan Mitchell said after Game 1 in the last round. But while that double-digit comeback in that Game 1 effectively broke the Cavaliers, setting up the Knicks to run the table on them, repeating the trick against a team as deep, talented and battle-tested as the Spurs promises to be a significantly tougher task.
“It’s the first-to-four series,” Wembanyama said. “We’re going to have time to work on it. […] We’ve been down in a series before. Never in the Finals, obviously. But I’m not kicking myself about anything really. I mean, I’m not worried in the slightest.”
If there’s one thing these Knicks have proven, though, it’s that they’re exceedingly capable of accomplishing tough tasks.
“We’ve just got a lot of tough guys,” Hart said. “A lot of guys that don’t quit. You know, everybody in this locker room has had adversity. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t, and they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t make it through that adversity. So whenever we’re down, we don’t panic. We continue to play our brand of basketball, and you know, that’s always … that’s cool.”
You know what else is cool? The run the Knicks are on right now.
Game 1 marked their 12th straight win in these playoffs, which is tied for the second-longest winning streak in a single postseason in NBA history with the 1999 Spurs and the 2017 Warriors — both of whom won the NBA title.
It was their seventh straight road playoff win by double digits — the longest streak in NBA history, according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes. The two teams whose record the Knicks broke on that streak, the 2013 Heat and 2017 Warriors, both won the NBA title.
It was also New York’s seventh straight double-digit win, and their 11th of these playoffs, one off the all-time record of 12. That record is held by four teams: the 2013 Heat, the 2014 Spurs, the 2016 Cavaliers and the 2017 Warriors — all of whom, say it with me, won the NBA title.
The Knicks are now three wins away from us being able to say that about them, too. Getting those three wins will demand absolutely everything they have to give — including the persistent, iron-willed belief that no matter how much they’re down, they’ve still got a shot. That they’ve always got a shot.
“We’re going to keep fighting, no matter what,” said Knicks forward Mikal Bridges, who finished with 9 points, 3 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 steals. “We all just were hungry and desperate. That’s all we’re going to be. Every single day. Every single game.”
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