Destiny. Guess you don’t really believe in it until you see it unfold on a basketball stage.
Until Jalen Brunson, a 6-foot-2 point guard — the same one Becky Hammon said could never lead a team to a championship as its best player — scores 45 points in a closeout victory of the 2026 NBA Finals, leading the Knicks to the franchise’s first title in 53 years.
“Words can’t describe it,” said Brunson, the 2026 NBA Finals MVP, a newly crowned king in New York, “but I’ll say I put a lot of time and effort into trying to be the best player I can be to try and help a team win. Just really thankful to have an organization, a coaching staff, my teammates, to have my back every single day. I think that means the most to me.
“And my family.”
In the aftermath of Saturday’s 94-90, series-clinching win, Brunson embraced his father, Rick, an assistant coach in New York and a member of the Knicks in 1999, when last they seriously attempted to end this championship drought. They have been a laughingstock of the league for much of the past quarter century, until Leon Rose, Brunson’s godfather and the lead executive in New York, recruited Brunson to the Knicks in 2022 free agency.
“I could never envision this,” conceded the elder Brunson.
On the podium, as he accepted his NBA Finals MVP award, Jalen was also surrounded by two of his best friends, Knicks teammates Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges. Together they delivered national championships to nearby Villanova, too. This is the stuff of storybooks.
“Man, those are my brothers for life,” Hart said of Brunson and Bridges. “We have a bond for life. We obviously won the [national] championship, but this one takes the cake. But those are my brothers. I wouldn’t want to go into a game with anyone else besides them at my back. I love those guys, and we are going to be friends and brothers for a lifetime.”
Along the line — in 2024, when he was traded to New York, or earlier in these playoffs, when he embraced this championship brand of Knicks basketball — Karl-Anthony Towns, a New Jersey native, a Kentucky alum, was adopted by the ‘Nova Knicks to his hometown team, not so long after he lost eight family members, including his mother, to COVID-19.
“God is good,” said Towns. “It’s all happening.”
This family of Knicks, forever minted in New York, includes OG Anunoby, whose put-back to win Game 4, if it weren’t touched by God, was tipped in by something. Destiny maybe.
“When someone tells you you can’t do something,” said Anunoby, “that’s when you can.”
How else to explain what became of these Knicks, a 53-win No. 3 seed from a mostly underwhelming Eastern Conference, who caught lightning in a bottle for much of these playoffs, finishing 16-3 with the highest net rating (+15.4) among champions in history.
These Knicks were not supposed to beat 7-foot-4 French phenom Victor Wembanyama and his San Antonio Spurs, at least not according to oddsmakers, and not only did they beat them, they tore their hearts out, comeback by comeback. They fell behind by double digits in each of the series’ five games, retook the lead in all five and won four of them.
Game 4 will be remembered forever and maybe even blend in with Game 5 in our minds. After all, the Knicks roared back from a record 29 points down in Game 4, and then, in a mirror image, stormed back from 16 down in Game 5, each time outperforming the much younger Spurs as the more veteran team in clutch situations — together, really, as a family.
“We conduct ourselves like family, and [Leon Rose] has always had that family mantra in everything he’s done,” said Towns. “Doing that, I think that’s real. The connectivity, the unity this team represents every single night regardless of what the deficit is. … As a family, you never want to let your brothers down, and you never want to disappoint them.
“So, for us, it’s always about just being the best for each other and understanding that regardless of what happens in the world or what people say, we’re all we got and all we need. As a family, when you truly do believe in your family, you feel anything is possible.”
Even an NBA championship in New York. Destiny or not.
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