By Ian O'Connor The Athletic
SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks have no plans to ever lose again, do they? They have turned a wild fantasy into the sweetest of realities, and notarized it over and over and over.
You have to believe now. Whether they like it or not, basketball fans all over the world have to believe after what they saw at the end of Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
The Knicks are two precious victories away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, and their 13-game postseason winning streak — the second-longest in league history — and their eight-game road winning streak strongly suggest that this is happening.
The biblical drought is on life support. A question of if is suddenly morphing into a question of when and where and how.
The Knicks have beaten the San Antonio Spurs in four out of five games this season. What are the chances that the Spurs will turn this around over the next couple of weeks and beat the Knicks in four out of five?
What are the odds that these NBA Finals even make it back to San Antonio?
Of course, you can’t totally count out a 62-win team with a titanic franchise player, Victor Wembanyama, already destined to go down among the all-time lions of the sport. The Spurs still have to be dealt with in Madison Square Garden, site of Games 3 and 4.
They have won five championships, after all, three more than the Knicks have won, starting with the time Tim Duncan and friends partied in the Garden like it was 1999.
The Spurs aren’t the opponents the Knicks pancaked on the Eastern Conference side of the tournament draw. Gregg Popovich still hovers around his program, and his guys never quit. Never. That’s why the Knicks were so hellbent on defeating human nature Friday night and the instinct to settle for a split after taking Game 1 at Frost Bank Center. They played with urgency and desperation because you never punt a game to a team as dangerous as the Spurs.
“I think our mindset was 0-0, not being up 1-0,” Jalen Brunson said about his team’s approach to its heart-stopping 105-104 victory. “Even with the series it is now, next game, mindset has to be 0-0 again. It’s just how it has to be. You can’t be comfortable. You can’t be satisfied with anything. Just continue to push forward.”
All fine and dandy. That’s what you need and expect your captain to say.
However, 27 years later, Duncan is not walking through that MSG door. The 2025-26 Knicks have forgotten how to lose, and that is the greatest feeling of all. They blew a 14-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 2, and Captain Clutch himself, Brunson, missed a huge free throw in the final seconds with his team up one, right after Wembanyama committed a brutal turnover and fouled the Knicks star.
That Brunson miss with 9.5 seconds left? It should have meant the temporary end of a nonstop party that began all the way back in April, when the Atlanta Hawks seized a 2-1 first-round series lead, and it seemed Knicks coach Mike Brown and half his roster were two bad nights away from being FedEx’ed out of town.
But the 7-foot-4 Wembanyama missed his jumper for the win with two seconds left. Yes, Mitchell Robinson did a fine job contesting it, just like he did on the Wemby miss a half-minute earlier. No, that’s not a shot one of the league’s elite players should miss in that situation.
Wemby is 22 years old and will only get better and better as a big-game closer. Meanwhile, at the end of their ultimate win-now season, the Knicks are making the unthinkable very thinkable.
This is no longer about merely toppling Wemby the way the Knicks toppled a giant from the past, Wilt Chamberlain, to win the franchise’s only titles in 1970 and ’73. This is about trying to finish this dream season by matching the Golden State Warriors’ 2017 record of 15 straight postseason victories and going down as one of the most dominant and memorable sports teams New York has ever seen.
Once again, the Knicks played a style of hit-the-open-man ball reminiscent of their bygone glory days. Karl-Anthony Towns scored 21. Brunson scored 20. Mikal Bridges scored 20. OG Anunoby scored 17. Landry Shamet scored 13.
On one remarkable second-quarter possession, Brunson dribbled into the paint and passed into the right corner to Shamet, who hit Bridges in the opposite corner. Bridges darted into the lane and passed to the right wing to Brunson, who found Anunoby at the top of the key. OG then drove to the goal and kicked the ball back to the right corner to Bridges, who nailed the 3-pointer.
Just like Red Holzman drew it up.
“Somebody is always there,” Brown said.
Somebody is always making a pass and a play for the New York Knicks.
So, in the end, why is this team as connected as a basketball team can be?
“My door is always open,” Brown said, “and I don’t care whose idea it is that brings me an idea. It’s my decision at the end of the day to say yes and no for the group, and none of my coaches and none of my players are afraid to walk into my offices and say, ‘Hey, do this.’ But in the same breath, if I say, ‘Hey, do that,’ they are also not afraid to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I hear what you’re saying, but think about this, think about that.’ …
“The connectivity that we all have, the trust that we all have, but more importantly, the fact that none of them are afraid to come look me in my eye and tell me what I need to do better by holding me accountable is huge.”
And that’s why Brown’s Knicks hold a 2-0 finals lead over the team favored to win it all. Before Game 2, Wembanyama said the reason the Spurs lost Game 1 was “not even technical, tactical. … We just need to play our game. We just need to be normal. We don’t need to do anything incredible.”
As it turns out, something incredible is definitely required to beat the unbeatable Knicks. And it sure doesn’t seem the Spurs are capable of finding it over the next two weeks.
_This article originally appeared in The Athletic._