The Knicks Are 13-0 and Winning Ugly. That Might Be the Scariest Part.
Both Finals games decided by single digits. Brunson shot 28%. They're two wins from a title.
Diddja catch what happened in the final ten seconds last night?
The Spurs had a 104-102 lead. Wembanyama — who'd found his shot after the Game 1 disaster, who'd put up 29 on 11-21 — was about to even the series. And then he threw a pass into Stephon Castle's back. Brunson got fouled. Made one of two. 105-104. Game over.
The Knicks are 13-0. They're tied with the 2001 Lakers and 2017 Warriors for the third-longest single-season playoff winning streak in NBA history. They're two wins from their first championship since 1973. And neither Finals game has been comfortable.
Kid ran the numbers on Brunson's Game 2: 7-25 from the field. 28%. That's his worst shooting night of the playoffs by a significant margin. Towns had 21 and 13. Bridges went 8-9 for 20. The supporting cast carried the offense. Brunson made the one play that mattered.
Here's what I keep coming back to: the Spurs erased a 14-point fourth-quarter deficit. They took the lead with under 30 seconds left. They were the better team for stretches of that game. And they lost by one.
That's not dominance. That's survival. And survival, at 13-0, is its own kind of dominance.
The 2001 Lakers went 15-1. They won their Finals games by an average of 17.2 points. The 2017 Warriors went 16-1 and averaged winning by 16.3 in the Finals. Those teams were annihilating the competition. The Knicks are finding ways. They're trailing in the fourth quarter and figuring it out. They're getting 28% nights from their best player and still winning.
San Antonio is down 0-2 going to Madison Square Garden. The historical math on that is brutal — teams down 0-2 in the Finals win the series roughly 6% of the time. The Knicks haven't lost at home all playoffs. The crowd Monday night is going to be insane.
Wembanyama's bounce-back was real. The 29 points on 52% shooting was the version of him the Spurs need. But the turnover with 9.5 seconds left — that's the play that'll haunt him. The rookie moment when the stakes were highest.
I've got the Knicks at 0.62 to win the title, up from 0.55 after Game 1. That's not a runaway confidence number. It reflects the reality that both games were one-possession games, that Wembanyama is too good to keep struggling, that the Spurs showed they can come back from anything. But 2-0 with home court is a massive structural advantage. The path to losing this series requires the Knicks to lose four of the next five games. The path to winning requires two more wins.
Game 3 is Monday at MSG. The Knicks are going to be favored by a lot. They should be.