SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 at the Frost Bank Center on Saturday night to claim their first NBA championship since 1973. Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, including thirteen straight in the fourth quarter. The arena, by halftime, had emptied of Spurs fans. The four people most visibly losing their minds courtside were not, as the broadcast cut away, the players. They were Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet, John Turturro and Ben Stiller — the four most-famous, most-decade-long, most-tortured Knicks fans in American show business.
Chalamet, ten feet from the court at the final buzzer, walked directly toward Karl-Anthony Towns and embraced him. The hug, by ESPN’s SportsCenter sideline reporter, lasted twenty-one seconds. The microphone Chalamet was handed afterwards caught the line that, by Sunday morning, had become the night’s most-shared celebrity reaction. “Way rather this,” he said, both arms still slightly raised, “than the Oscars.”
The line, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, lands inside a specific recent personal arc. Chalamet has been nominated for, and lost, the Academy Award for Best Actor in two consecutive years — for 2024’s Wonka and 2025’s A Complete Unknown, in which he played Bob Dylan. The Oscar he most plausibly should have won, by every Hollywood-handicapper’s reading, was the one for the Dylan film. He did not get it. He had, in March, told W Magazine the loss “felt fine.” The Knicks line, mid-celebration on Saturday, was the first time he had said anything about the Oscars on a hot mic in three months.
Spike Lee, eight feet to Chalamet’s left on the floor, was at the same time being interviewed by ABC’s Lisa Salters. Lee, who has spent fifty-three of his sixty-eight years as a Knicks season-ticket holder, was crying. “Fifty-three years,” he kept saying, almost a chant. “Fifty-three years.” Lee was at the 1973 championship game as a sixteen-year-old. He has missed, by his own running count, twenty-six Knicks home games in the half-century since. The Salters interview ended with Lee saying he would not be in his Brooklyn editing room on Monday morning. “I am taking the day,” he said. “And maybe the week.”
The other two New York celebrities present — John Turturro, who was sitting two rows back, and Ben Stiller, in the corner suite — took up less of the post-game broadcast. Turturro, who has appeared in five Spike Lee joints, was photographed with Lee and Knicks owner James Dolan in the tunnel. Stiller posted a one-line tweet at 11:34 p.m. Central: “Forty-six years of waiting. Slept on the floor of the Garden after Game 7 in 1973. Not sleeping tonight either.”
The wider 2026 Knicks Finals celebrity-row arc has been the entertainment-press subplot of the playoffs. Taylor Swift’s Game 4 ‘Stevie Knicks’ shirt at MSG, Mariska Hargitay sprinting ten blocks from a Broadway curtain call, Sydney Sweeney’s mocked Brunson jersey at Game 5, Hank Azaria’s televised complaint that Swift’s courtside seat was ‘ridiculous’ — all of it folded, by Saturday’s championship, into one running joke about who got to celebrate. Lee’s answer, by ABC’s microphone, was direct: “All of us. All of New York. Everybody.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s late-night piece on the Lee and Chalamet reactions did note, however, that Chalamet’s Oscars line travelled fastest. By 4 a.m. Sunday, the clip had cleared four million views on X and was the most-shared Game 5 moment on TikTok. “Way rather this than the Oscars” was, by mid-morning, on a Knicks-branded T-shirt that an online retailer had pre-printed and was shipping by Monday. Chalamet, asked by a tunnel-side TMZ photographer whether he had heard of the shirt, smiled. “I do not need royalties,” he said. “I just want them to know I meant it.”
The Knicks fly back to New York on Sunday afternoon. The championship parade, by Mayor Eric Adams’s confirmation, runs Wednesday from the Canyon of Heroes up Broadway to City Hall. Lee, Chalamet, Turturro and Stiller will all be on it. So, by their own announcements, will Mariska Hargitay, Swift, Spike Lee’s wife Tonya Lewis Lee, Tracy Morgan, and Jerry Seinfeld. Karl-Anthony Towns, asked by ESPN’s sideline reporter what he would tell the parade crowd on Wednesday, looked across the floor at Lee. “That,” he said, indicating Lee, “is who is making the speech.”
