Jordyn Woods did not plan for an orange purse to become a New York Knicks talisman. It just worked out that way. The model, entrepreneur, and fitness brand founder — engaged to Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns since Christmas Eve — carried a designer orange bag to her first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden and the Knicks won. She kept carrying it. They kept winning. Then she wore it to what turned out to be the clinching Game 5, and the Knicks walked out of Frost Bank Center in San Antonio on June 13 as NBA champions for the first time since 1973.
“It just happened,” Woods told The Hollywood Reporter on June 13. “It wasn’t intentional. Social media did, but I’m definitely loving it.”
The Purse, the Superstition, the Series
The Hollywood Reporter’s Lexi Carson spoke with Woods on June 13, 2026, the day of Game 5 in San Antonio. By then, the orange bag had accumulated a mythology of its own: social media had tracked it across the Finals, and a single loss — when Woods couldn’t bring it to a game — was retroactively treated as confirmation of the charm. Sports superstitions run on that kind of selective evidence, and Knicks fans, starved of a title since Willis Reed limped to the Garden floor in 1973, were not inclined to question the logic.
Towns, the 6-foot-11 center who arrived in New York via trade in September 2024, scored in double figures throughout the series. The Knicks had assembled around Jalen Brunson — who dropped 45 points in the championship clincher — but Towns’s interior presence gave the team the size to match San Antonio’s 7’5″ Victor Wembanyama. On June 13, Brunson scored the basket that gave the Knicks their first lead in the final two minutes, and the team held on, 94–90.
The City, the Moment, the Bridal Era
Woods on the energy in New York during the Finals run: “The city is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It has brought so many people together.”
The championship closes a particular chapter for Towns, who was eliminated from the Finals with the Minnesota Timberwolves twice before arriving in New York. For Woods, it arrives at a moment she described as a season of its own: “I am in my bridal era, so we have a lot to look forward to, getting married.” The couple has not announced a wedding date.
Deadline reported on June 13, 2026 that Brunson wept postgame celebrating with his father, Rick Brunson, a Knicks assistant coach. Towns was not alone in connecting the personal to the professional in this run.
Celebrity New York in Championship Mode
Woods was one of many recognizable names absorbed into the Knicks’ gravitational pull during the Finals. The courtside crowd across the series included Spike Lee, Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Ben Stiller, Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Swift, Este Haim, Chris Rock, John McEnroe, Tracy Morgan, and Kylie Jenner. Hank Azaria called Taylor Swift’s front-row seat “ridiculous” on The Dan Le Batard Show — then clarified he was only half kidding. Mariska Hargitay sprinted ten blocks from her Broadway debut at the Hudson Theater to catch Game 4 — and called it possibly the greatest night of her life.
For Woods, the personal stakes were different. Her fiancé was playing. The bag was a vehicle for everything the series meant to her, and the fact that it went viral gave a version of that feeling a public shape. The Hollywood Reporter’s full gallery of celebrity sightings across the Knicks–Spurs series captured the breadth of the moment. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce took Saturday night off from the courtside watch to catch Maya Rudolph on Broadway — the same night the Knicks were in San Antonio closing it out.
Woods built her public profile after 2019 through her fitness app, a podcast, a supplement line, and a sustained presence in wellness culture that put some distance between her name and the tabloid cycle that once defined it. The Knicks championship and the viral orange purse land in an entirely different chapter — one Woods has already named: bridal.
