SAN ANTONIO — When Victor Wembanyama caught the inbounds pass and gathered himself for what should have been the game-winning jumper in the final seconds of Game 2, Karl-Anthony Towns was on the Knicks bench with his hands clasped. He was not watching the shot. He was praying.
“I needed that stop,” Towns told ESPN’s Lisa Salters moments later. “It’s amazing, as you go through life and you lose a parent — you just look for signs. I’ll take any sign I can get. I prayed to her strong before that possession.” When Wembanyama’s mid-range attempt fell short and the Knicks escaped with a 105-104 victory to take a 2-0 series lead, Towns looked upward. He knew exactly what had happened.
That posture — hands to the sky, a man looking through the roof of Frost Bank Center for someone who isn’t there — tells you everything the stat line cannot. Towns averaged 19.5 points, 12.5 rebounds and 4.0 assists across the first two games, shooting 15-of-27 from the field. He became the first Knick to post a 20-point double-double in a Finals road game since Dave DeBusschere in 1973 — the last year this franchise won a championship. The numbers are remarkable. They are not the story.
The story is Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, who died on April 13, 2020, at 58, of complications from COVID-19. She was, by every account from everyone who knew her, the engine behind her son’s career. A native of the Dominican Republic and a fixture at Timberwolves games from the first day Towns entered the league, she made no secret of what her son meant to her. After she died — after Towns had watched her condition deteriorate over weeks, had posted an emotional video on Instagram describing her time on a ventilator, had lost six other family members to the same virus — he got the date tattooed on his neck alongside Philippians 4:13. He wears a wristband with “4/13” stitched into it to every game. He is never, on any night, without her.
“I could do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Towns told ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt after Game 2, “but I was strengthened on April 13, when I lost my mother.” He paused. “I’m just grateful to be in this position because I know a lot of friends of mine who are not here to see this moment.”
What makes his Finals performances extraordinary is not just the production but the condition under which he is producing. He is guarding the most physically unusual player in the NBA — at seven feet four inches, Wembanyama generates defensive pressure that Oklahoma City’s Chet Holmgren declined to engage with in the Western Conference Finals. Towns has not only engaged it; he has exploited it. In Game 1, Wembanyama shot 6-of-21 from the floor with six turnovers. In Game 2, Towns dunked on him early in the second quarter — one dribble, skipped through a crease in the defense, two-handed slam — and screamed. The Frost Bank Center crowd went quiet.
After Game 1, Towns described the atmosphere at Madison Square Garden, and then in San Antonio, with an odd word: calm. “I don’t know what it was,” he said on ESPN. “I just felt a calm and a peace that had to be coming from the woman above. I felt like a kid. It was just fun out here.” That sense of freedom — playing without the weight of expectation, or rather playing with a weight far heavier than any championship series can impose — has produced the most complete two-game stretch of Towns’ eleven-year career.
That combination of two-way dominance over the best young player in basketball and the emotional clarity of someone who has remade his sense of purpose has made the Finals MVP conversation unavoidable. Jalen Brunson has been the crunch-time executioner, averaging 25.0 points per game and supplying the winning baskets in both contests. But Towns was a plus-11 in Game 2, the highest mark of any Knicks starter in a one-point game, according to CBS Sports. The Knicks trailed 27-19 after the first quarter, survived a 14-0 Spurs run in the fourth, and every time a margin needed erasing, Towns was at the center of it.
Even players from eliminated teams are paying attention. Cam Johnson, the Denver Nuggets forward who watched his team exit in the first round against Minnesota — the club that traded Towns to New York last fall — offered a clear-eyed assessment this week. “He’s their MVP at this point, for me, of the Finals,” Johnson said. “He has a very difficult task. It’s a very difficult defensive assignment, and offensively he’s asserting himself but not anywhere outside the confines of what he’s supposed to be doing. Everything he got was easy baskets that he created, or created baskets in flow. And 21-13-4 on 8-of-12 — that alone is a huge reason why they won the game.”
Wembanyama himself acknowledged after Game 2 that the matchup has presented challenges his previous postseason opponents did not. “It’s very different from the previous series. It’s bringing us into difficult areas because they’re good players,” Wembanyama told reporters. “We just need to figure it out.” Through two games, he has attempted more shots outside the paint than inside it and is shooting 40.5 percent from the field, down from 51 percent across the first three rounds.
Jalen Brunson, asked repeatedly about Towns’ role, was direct. “He’s been great,” Brunson said. “He’s been phenomenal on both sides of the ball.” Charles Barkley went further after Game 1, calling Towns, not Brunson, the night’s decisive performer. The NBA’s own Finals MVP ladder, updated after Game 2, placed Towns at the top.
The Knicks have won 13 consecutive playoff games. Game 3 is Monday night at Madison Square Garden, where a franchise that last raised a championship banner in 1973 will have two opportunities to close out the Spurs at home. What the city will make of that environment — 53 years of accumulated longing, Game 3 resale tickets already exceeding $11,700 — is something Towns anticipated before the series, when asked whether he might appear at a potential victory parade down Seventh Avenue. He laughed and said he would pray for the NYPD.
But before Game 3, before whatever happens at MSG, there is the question his performances have not fully answered and may not need to. Whether he wins the Finals MVP or Brunson does, whether the Knicks close out the series Monday or push it further, Towns has already made this postseason into something beyond a basketball achievement. He lost his mother before he ever played in a Finals game. He has spent six years looking for signs. In the final seconds of Game 2, on the bench, with Wembanyama in the air and everything on the line, he prayed. The shot did not go in. He took it as a sign.
