NEW YORK – Jalen Brunson walked to the podium at Lincoln Center three times on Wednesday night, and each time the David H. Koch Theater gave him something louder than the last. The third applause, when Marcello Hernández read his name as Best Athlete in Men’s Sports, was the kind that comes when a room recognizes it is not simply applauding an individual but ratifying a year. Brunson won Best Championship Performance, Best NBA Player, and Best Athlete in Men’s Sports at the 2026 ESPY Awards, NBC News reported, completing a three-award sweep that the ceremony’s New York return made feel less like a broadcast event than a ratification.
The ceremony returned to New York City for the first time in more than 25 years, a decision that turned the evening into something closer to a local celebration than a neutral industry event. The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, which more regularly hosts ballet than broadcast television, filled with a crowd that arrived knowing how the night was likely to end. Hernández, the Saturday Night Live cast member, became the first Latino host of the ESPYs in a quarter century. His monologue worked through a room full of athletes who had spent the previous twelve months producing championships, records, and collapses worth covering, and moved between them at the pace of someone who understood that the hardest jokes land when the subjects are in the building.
A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces claimed the same two-award night on the women’s side that Brunson achieved among men. Wilson won Best Athlete in Women’s Sports and Best WNBA Player, Yahoo Sports reported. She has won the WNBA’s individual hardware so consistently across multiple seasons that the question at these ceremonies is less whether she will win and more what the acceptance speech will contain. Wednesday night’s was brief, which is its own kind of statement from an athlete who has run out of ways to surprise the room on award night.
Best Play went to OG Anunoby for the tip-in that completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. That basket, a redirected miss in the final 1.2 seconds of Game 4 at Madison Square Garden that produced a 107-106 Knicks win and gave New York a 3-1 series lead, was already the decisive moment of the Knicks’ championship run before the ESPYs made it official. The Anunoby tip-in completing that comeback has been replayed more than almost any single sports moment of the year, and the award confirmed what anyone who watched Game 4 already understood: it was not close.
Myles Garrett of the Cleveland Browns won both Best NFL Player and Best Record-Breaking Performance, the latter for setting a new NFL single-season sack record. Shohei Ohtani claimed Best MLB Player, Connor McDavid won Best NHL Player, Scottie Scheffler took Best Golfer, Carlos Alcaraz won Best Tennis Player, and Terence Crawford was named Best Fighter. The category list ran long and the pace was deliberate, but the evening kept returning to basketball, which had produced the most decorated athletes and the most decorated team in any sport on the night.
Stephen Curry received the Muhammad Ali Sports Humanitarian Award, a distinction that carries weight beyond the podium. On accepting it, Curry said the award connected to Ali’s legacy was “incredibly humbling,” a reaction that landed differently given that Curry’s humanitarian work has operated largely outside the structured public-relations frame that governs most athlete philanthropy. Lauren Betts of UCLA basketball won Best College Athlete in Women’s Sports and used the moment to say something the room received differently than a routine thank-you: “Your mental health is not separate from your success,” she said. “It is the foundation of everything.”
Lionel Messi won Best Soccer Player and was not in the building. He had been in Atlanta 24 hours earlier, helping Argentina beat England 2-1 in a World Cup semifinal that sent La Albiceleste to Sunday’s final at MetLife Stadium against Spain. The award was accepted on his behalf. What Messi would have said, and whether he will return to New York on Sunday as world champion for the fourth time, is the question the 2026 ESPYs left deliberately unresolved.
Brunson’s three-award night carried weight that the category totals alone cannot fully explain. The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years in June, closing out the San Antonio Spurs four games to one at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio. Brunson scored 45 points in the clinching game, including 13 consecutive in the fourth quarter. His Finals averages of 32.6 points, 4.6 assists, 4.2 rebounds, and 2.2 steals made the MVP vote unanimous. Accepting his first award, he said “I am forever indebted to them, thank you.” When the Knicks went up as a group for Best Team, he extended it: “Thank you to my family for sacrificing everything day in and day out. Thank you to the entire Knicks organisation and my teammates.”
Alysa Liu won Best Breakthrough Athlete for a figure skating return after a two-year absence from competition. “I took two years off,” she said, “so for me it really feels like I broke through for myself.” Jim Abbott won the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance. Christian McCaffrey won Best Comeback Athlete. Fernando Mendoza of Indiana football won Best Men’s College Athlete. Each of these stories occupied time on the program that the broadcast camera would have preferred to give to basketball, and each carried a weight the results column cannot hold.
The 2026 ESPYs handed out their final award before the sports year it was cataloguing had finished running. Messi plays Sunday in the World Cup final. The WNBA season continues past Wednesday’s ceremony. The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale still has three rounds after an unknown 26-year-old opened with a 65. The awards are a snapshot taken in motion, and what the David H. Koch Theater in New York confirmed on Wednesday is that the snapshot, at least for basketball, had a clear subject. What the rest of the summer does with that clarity is a question for the next set of cameras, not the ones that went home after the ceremony ended.
