SAN ANTONIO — The number that mattered most Friday night at Frost Bank Center had nothing to do with the final score. It was 1973.
That was the last year a New York Knicks player posted a 20-point double-double in a road NBA Finals game. The player was Dave DeBusschere, a Hall of Fame forward and a cornerstone of the team that beat the Los Angeles Lakers that May to deliver New York its second championship and its last. Fifty-three years passed. Patrick Ewing came and went. Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston came and went. Nobody did it.
On Friday, Karl-Anthony Towns did it. He finished with 21 points on 8-of-12 shooting, three triples on five attempts, and 13 rebounds in a 105-104 survival of the San Antonio Spurs that sent the Knicks home with a 2-0 series lead and Towns at the top of the Finals MVP conversation. His night was not faultless — he committed some costly turnovers and let the game nearly slip away in the fourth quarter while Jalen Brunson played elsewhere on the floor. But it was the kind of performance that rewrites what people thought was possible from him.
Whether Towns wins the award or not, this series is already doing something to his legacy that a regular season full of double-doubles never could.
“He’s been great,” Brunson said after the game. “He’s been phenomenal on both sides of the ball.” Then, pausing briefly, Brunson offered the line that has become something of a Knicks postseason mantra: “But we need more.” There was no critique in it. It was appreciation bundled inside expectation — the highest compliment this particular team offers a teammate.
What makes the DeBusschere comparison more than a trivia footnote is its context. DeBusschere was the defensive anchor of those Knicks — a player whose value was understood by teammates long before the broader basketball public caught up. Towns has spent most of his career being evaluated against a different standard: not the player he actually was but some imagined version of himself who was supposed to be softer, more stat-conscious, less willing to grind. That version never entirely existed, but the criticism was loud enough that it became the defining frame through which he was discussed.
In Game 2, he spent the night challenging Victor Wembanyama physically. Not by accident and not by assignment alone — by choice. He bodied Wemby in the post on three separate sequences, drew a foul on a fourth, and disrupted his shooting rhythm in a way no Spurs opponent had managed in the Western Conference Finals against Oklahoma City. “It’s very different from previous series,” Wembanyama said of the Towns matchup. “It’s bringing us into difficult areas.” That is not the kind of admission a 20-year-old superstar makes unless the difficulty is real.
The statistical case for Towns as Finals MVP is clean. Through two games he is averaging 19.5 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 4.0 assists with a shooting split of 56 percent from the field, 43 percent from three, and 100 percent from the line. No other player in the series is running at anything approaching that level of efficiency. His plus-minus in the two games stands as the best on either roster. According to ESPN Insights, his 239 postseason plus-minus entering the Finals trails only Stephen Curry’s record 244-plus mark from the 2017 Warriors run.
Charles Barkley delivered the endorsement in the least equivocal terms available to him on Inside the NBA Friday night. “He’s been criticized in Minnesota,” Barkley said. “He’s been criticized in New York. The MVP of the Finals is gonna be Karl-Anthony Towns. That man earned his flowers. He has played two of the best games I’ve ever seen a big man play.” Shaquille O’Neal concurred. If it ended today, O’Neal said, Towns would be the Most Valuable Player without debate.
Spurs coach Mitch Johnson acknowledged what he was seeing without minimizing it. “He played two good games,” Johnson said after Friday’s loss. “We have to make it tougher on him. We’ve had some coverage breakdowns.” The admission is both honest and somewhat alarming for San Antonio: if this is Towns on a coverage breakdown, what happens when the corrections arrive and he adjusts?
There is a version of this series in which the question still matters. Game 3 comes Monday to Madison Square Garden, the first Finals game played at MSG in 27 years. Victor Wembanyama is not a player who accepts two consecutive bad outings — he is averaging 22.5 points and 10 rebounds in the series himself, and his fingerprints were on the 14-point comeback attempt that nearly erased Friday’s lead entirely. A Wemby takeover at MSG is not only possible; it is the most likely path for San Antonio to get back in this series.
What is less certain is whether Towns can be slowed by anything short of a complete strategic overhaul. The Spurs tried to crowd his catch points in Game 1 and he made them pay with passing. They gave him space in Game 2 and he shot 43 percent from three. His ability to pull Wembanyama away from the paint has opened the driving lanes that Brunson and Mikal Bridges have feasted on — remove Towns’s floor-spacing threat and the Knicks offense contracts significantly. The Spurs understand this. What they have not yet found is an answer to it.
NBC Sports reported that ESPN’s Brian Windhorst put it plainly before Game 3: Towns is having a transformation in this series that has been “stunning,” and the difference it is making against Wembanyama is “absolutely the difference in what’s going on right now.”
What the 1973 comparison does not tell you is what DeBusschere actually felt carrying the weight of that team’s hopes. What it does tell you is that the Knicks won that year, and that the player whose fingerprints were on that Finals run is now in the Hall of Fame. Towns is not there yet. But through two games in San Antonio, he is making a case that the critics who defined him for a decade had the wrong player in mind the whole time.
Whether he finishes this series as the Finals MVP is a question Game 3 and beyond will answer. What is already settled, in San Antonio at least, is that the Knicks are two wins from a championship and that the player most responsible for keeping them on that path is the one who spent a career being told he was not built for this stage. Towns has spoken about the memory of his late mother Jacqueline Cruz-Towns as the source of his motivation through these playoffs — a thread that now runs through one of the most complete Finals performances a Knick center has produced since Willis Reed limped onto the Garden floor in 1970. That championship followed. The Knicks survived a 14-point fourth-quarter comeback to win Game 2, and the margin between these two teams has never felt so much like one player.
In 1973, that one player was DeBusschere. The question New York is now asking, loud enough that even Frost Bank Center could hear it Friday night, is whether 2026 belongs to Towns.
