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From one New York sports champion to another: Game 5 of the NBA Finals was déjà vu all over again.
For the fifth time in this series, the San Antonio Spurs took a double-digit lead in the first quarter. And for the fourth time in five games, the New York Knicks didn’t care, instead making all the winning plays down the stretch to complete yet another methodical comeback.
Led by 45 points from Finals MVP Jalen Brunson, the Knicks won Game 5 94-90 to clinch the franchise’s first title in 53 years. It might take 53 more years for the partying in New York to stop.
Amid all the celebration, for one final time this postseason, let’s break down how the Knicks finally returned to the NBA mountaintop, and what the Finals outcome means for both the Knicks and Spurs.
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Game-by-game reaction: 4 | 3 | 2 | 1
Takeaways | Schedule | Bracket | Playoffs
Entering Game 5, Brunson’s status as New York’s MVP in this series was far from assured. Karl-Anthony Towns excelled through the Knicks’ first two wins in San Antonio. And OG Anunoby was the hyperefficient hero in their historic comeback in Game 4.
But that uncertainty clarified quickly on Saturday. Towns and Anunoby dealt with foul trouble and combined for 13 points on 4-for-18 shooting, as part of broad offensive struggles for the visitors. Through the first 16 minutes of the game, the Knicks had five made shots, five shots blocked by Victor Wembanyama and nine turnovers.
One player kept the Knicks’ offense afloat, however: Brunson, who finished the postseason as the top scorer (28.4 points per game) in the whole playoff field.
He saved his best for last in Game 5, scoring 45 points on 14-for-27 shooting (and going 13-for-15 on free throws). After the Spurs went up by 10 points early in the fourth quarter, Brunson scored 10 points in a row to bring New York even. He added three more points following a Spurs jumper, then the game-winning bucket on an 11-foot floater with 1:06 left.
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
In total, Brunson scored 48% of New York’s points in Game 5, which is the second-highest ratio for any player in a closeout game in Finals history, according to ESPN Research — behind only Michael Jordan’s legendary performance in the “Last Dance” 1998 Finals.
Highest scorers in Finals closeout gamesPlayerFinalsPoints% of Team PointsMichael Jordan19984551.7%Jalen Brunson
On a night with little effective offensive process from either team, Brunson pulled out every trick in his bag to stage a dazzling display for a decidedly Knicks-friendly crowd in San Antonio.
He pulled up from distance …
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
… and from the midrange.
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
He created space with his off arm …
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
… and baited three different Spurs into fouling him on 3-pointers in the second half.
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
And despite his size, he consistently found openings by driving to the rim, both to his left …
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
… and to his right, past Wembanyama.
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— KramClips (@KramClips) June 14, 2026
Brunson’s performance improved as the Finals went along, and he grew increasingly comfortable attacking the Spurs’ fearsome defense, in a way that no other All-Star creator — not Deni Avdija, nor an injury-addled Anthony Edwards, nor even back-to-back MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — managed this postseason. Brunson’s game score (an all-in-one measure of single-game performance) increased in every successive game in the series, culminating in a closeout for the record books.
That performance made the high school state champion and two-time NCAA champion an NBA champion, as well, and a legend in New York forever.
“It’s everything I ever dreamed of,” Brunson mentioned afterward. “It’s why I came to New York.”
The Knicks’ triumphant title will resonate across the NBA not only because of the franchise’s sheer number or fans or the length of its championship drought — 53 years between titles is the longest gap in league history — but because they don’t look like most NBA champions.
Brunson has three All-NBA second-team honors to his name, but no first-team nods. Neither do Towns (three third-teams) or any other Knicks. Thus New York is only the second champion since 1980 without any All-NBA first-teamers, joining the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons — another scrappy, well-rounded bunch that coalesced into more than the sum of its parts and upset a favored Western Conference opponent in five games.
Moreover, in a season overwhelmed by tanking discourse, the Knicks built their championship roster from the outside in, rather than with top draft picks. Of the 10 Knicks who scored a point in the Finals, not one came to New York via a first-round pick.
How the Knicks were builtPlayerAcquisition MethodJalen Brunson
And of course, the Knicks won a championship despite the relatively diminutive size of their best player. In a league long dominated by 7-foot centers and 6-foot-8 wings, the 6-foot-2 Brunson stands apart, which is a credit both to Brunson himself and to the complementary roster around him, which accentuates his strengths and compensates for his weaknesses.
That winning group came together via a series of risky transactions — risky, but necessary, for it’s not easy to build a championship roster in a hypercompetitive 30-team league.
The average NBA team has a 3.3% chance (1 in 30) to win a title in any given year. Give that average franchise five years, and it still has only a 15.6% chance to win a title; give it a decade, and it’s up to only a 28.8% probability. Against those long odds, a front office needs to be both lucky and good, and it needs to take some chances. Playing it safe won’t suffice.
The Knicks’ embrace of this philosophy traces back to the summer of 2019, which brought two fateful failures to New York. The first was outside the team’s control: Despite a league-worst 17-65 record, they landed the No. 3 pick in the draft, thereby missing out on seemingly can’t-miss prospects Zion Williamson and Ja Morant. And a month later, two superstar free agents added insult to injury, when Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving chose to join forces with the crosstown Brooklyn Nets rather than the Knicks.
At that point, the Knicks weren’t lucky or good, and the whole league knew it. So they changed course during the 2019-20 season, hiring agent Leon Rose as their new president of basketball operations. Rose soon embarked on a series of five risky moves that all paid off and played a key role in delivering the franchise’s first title since 1973:
1. The Knicks signed Brunson to a four-year, $104 million contract in free agency in July 2022. At the time, many analysts viewed this deal as an overpay, as he was a small guard who had never averaged more than 16.3 PPG in a season while serving as Luka Doncic’s sidekick in Dallas.
2. They traded RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley for Anunoby in December 2023. Anunoby is an excellent role player, but he was also an injury-prone zero-time All-Star who almost immediately commanded a massive five-year extension. The Knicks could have instead held on to Barrett and Quickley, who were two rare draft success stories for the franchise. Before Barrett (the No. 3 pick in 2019, after Williamson and Morant), they had infamously failed to extend a single one of their first-round picks since Charlie Ward, who was selected a quarter-century earlier in 1994.
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3. They traded five first-round picks and a swap for Mikal Bridges in July 2024. Like Anunoby, Bridges was another excellent role player and zero-time All-Star. Unlike Anunoby, Bridges’ acquisition was far riskier because of the opportunity cost: The Nets valued him like a superstar to even consider sending him to their rivals, and the Knicks paid up, despite the deal leaving them without a meaningful pick to use for future upgrades.
4. They traded three-time All-Star Julius Randle and beloved shooter Donte DiVincenzo — a member of the Villanova crew — for Towns in October 2024, despite Towns’ hefty salary and a general perception that the former No. 1 pick was too erratic and defensively vulnerable to live up to his potential.
5. They replaced coach Tom Thibodeau with Mike Brown in the summer of 2025, even though Thibodeau’s floor seemed higher than the ceiling of just about any other Knicks coach — and there were a bunch — in the 21st century. Thibodeau won four playoff series with the Knicks, while New York had just one playoff series victory in the previous 20 years leading up to his hire in 2020. But they needed a new voice with a different understanding of playoff adaptability, so they took one final risk and made a coaching change.
Those five moves ranged from moderate risks to potentially franchise-altering gambles, but they all worked out as well as, or better than, expected. Equally as important were the risks that the front office didn’t take. What if the Knicks had been ostensibly lucky in the summer of 2019 and drafted Williamson or Morant, or signed Durant and Irving? What if they’d traded all their draft capital for Donovan Mitchell instead of (or in addition to) signing Brunson? What if they’d held on to their picks in anticipation of Giannis Antetokounmpo being made available, instead of spending them on Bridges?
The alternate possibilities are endless, and elsewhere in the multiverse, the Knicks’ title drought surely remains unsated. So much has to go right to build a champion.
But in our universe, everything did go right for the frequently ill-fated franchise. The Knicks didn’t just win the title, but largely cruised to it, with a 16-3 playoff record and record-setting plus-14.9 postseason point differential, which ranks them just ahead of the 2016-17 Warriors and 2000-01 Lakers, widely considered among the best teams in NBA history.
Highest Playoff Point Differentials for NBA ChampionsTeamPoint Differential2026 Knicks14.91971 Bucks14.52017 Warriors13.52001 Lakers12.81991 Bulls11.71961 Celtics11.61987 Lakers11.41996 Bulls10.61986 Celtics10.31985 Lakers10.22018 Warriors10Placing New York on those teams’ level is tricky. On the one hand, the playoff numbers don’t lie. But on the other hand, they built up their historic point differential against weaker opponents before finishing with a more mediocre plus-2.4 mark in the Finals, and they were a solid but unspectacular 53-29 in the regular season — albeit with another championship win over the Spurs in the NBA Cup — before ascending to a higher plane this spring.
But Knicks fans don’t want to hear about nuanced legacies or historical comparisons at this juncture. They rightfully want to bask in the glory of their team’s first title in half a century, and to celebrate all the players, coaches and executives who delivered that title without reservation. They’ve earned the right.
The Spurs’ playoff run ended with the bitter taste of failure, but their season can’t be considered anything other than a sweet, unqualified success.
Before this season, the Spurs hadn’t won a playoff series or more than 48 games since 2016-17 — their last season with a healthy Kawhi Leonard (until he landed on Zaza Pachulia’s foot in those conference finals). They’d missed the playoffs six years in a row in the 2020s, and they had the worst cumulative record in the Western Conference in that span.
But San Antonio went 62-20 in this regular season, followed by a marauding run to the Finals. Stephon Castle built on his award-winning rookie season to emerge as a two-way star. Dylan Harper flourished as a rookie and stands as one of the brightest young talents in the league. Julian Champagnie broke out as a shooter. Keldon Johnson won Sixth Man of the Year. Mitch Johnson — despite some tactical foibles in the Finals — proved his coaching bona fides.
And most of all, Wembanyama took, well, a Wembanyama-sized leap into full-fledged superstardom. He became the youngest Defensive Player of the Year winner in NBA history, and the first player to win the award unanimously. He staked a legitimate claim as the best player in the world. And he did it all before his 23rd birthday.
The Spurs were the second-youngest team in Finals history (behind only the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers). And despite repeated issues with their late-game approach and execution against the Knicks, they more than proved their resilience and mental fortitude in the conference finals, when they overcame a 3-2 deficit and eliminated the defending champions in Game 7 on the road.
Yet despite all the positives to emerge from this season, the manner of the Spurs’ Finals loss can’t help but sting. They were either leading or tied in the last two minutes of all four losses, and they lost two games in memorably disastrous fashion: Wembanyama’s turnover at the end of Game 2, and the largest collapse in Finals history in Game 4.
Throughout the Finals, San Antonio led for 178 minutes, while New York led for just 57, according to ESPN Research. That’s a three-to-one advantage and by far the highest percentage of time leading the Finals by the series loser since at least 1971 (the earliest year with that data available).
The Spurs could end up regretting this missed opportunity to claim a title, even if they were nominally ahead of schedule. After all, a return trip to the Finals isn’t guaranteed, even for a team with its youth and tremendous talent. The 2011 Thunder, with three future MVPs on the roster, infamously never made it back to the Finals. (However, there is no chance San Antonio trades reserve guard Harper this offseason, like those Thunder did with reserve guard James Harden.)
LeBron James reached the Finals as a 22-year-old, like Wembanyama, but he needed to wait four more years — and change teams in the meantime — for another Finals trip, and another year after that to finally win one.
More recently, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic both looked poised for long reigns atop their conferences. But both multitime MVPs must feel relieved that they won their rings when they had the chance, because neither player has even been back to the conference finals since the 2021 and 2023 Finals, respectively.
It’s not the most likely outcome at this point, but the Spurs could follow those anticlimactic paths. They could suffer season-altering injuries at inopportune times, which is what stymied the post-1977 Trail Blazers and their star center, Bill Walton. They could run into stifling financial troubles under the NBA’s punitive apron regime, with De’Aaron Fox’s four-year, $221.8 million extension a looming concern following a catastrophic — if injury-impaired — Finals showing. Or they could simply come up on the wrong end of future coin flip playoff clashes against the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are just as young, just as talented and just as hungry for another Finals chance.
Still, that pessimistic projection is far from the most probable path that Wembanyama, Castle and Harper can take in the years to come. It’s much more likely the Spurs are back in the Finals, and soon, for a chance to avenge their 2026 disappointment.
They have a loaded roster with ample room for further development — lottery pick Carter Bryant could be especially important, as he would give the Spurs a reliable power forward if he breaks out — and three budding stars all in their early 20s leading the way. Given the combination of its present ability, future potential and financial situation, San Antonio has the most enviable roster situation in the league.
The Knicks became the eighth different champion in the last eight seasons, extending an NBA record. The Spurs would be the clear and obvious choice to push that record even further next season, if yet another new team wins the 2026-27 title.
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