NEW YORK — The number that matters most right now in the 2026 NBA Finals is not the scoreboard after two games, not the 13-game winning streak the Knicks carry into Madison Square Garden on Monday, and not the oddsmakers’ line that has New York as a 1.5-point favorite to push San Antonio to the brink of elimination. The number is +239.
That is Karl-Anthony Towns’ plus/minus across 491 minutes of the 2026 NBA playoffs — the highest figure in the entire league, and six points away from erasing the single most dominant season-long postseason efficiency mark in NBA history. Stephen Curry set it in 2017, finishing at +245 as the Golden State Warriors tore through the bracket at a record 15-1, the closest any modern team had come to a perfect playoff run until now.
Towns does not need a spectacular performance on Monday to reach it. He needs, by the most literal possible arithmetic, a single solid game.
What makes the trajectory remarkable is where Towns was 16 months ago. A center widely critiqued for disappearing in pressure moments, for softness, for production that never quite matched the contract — the sort of player whose talent everyone acknowledged and whose ceiling everyone doubted. The 2026 postseason has rewritten every word of that file. Through 16 games, Towns is not merely leading the Knicks. He is leading the postseason, by a margin that the Hall of Famer whose record he is chasing once occupied alone.
In the first two games of the Finals against San Antonio, Towns finished +25 combined — the highest figure among all players on either roster. Josh Hart was next at +19. Mikal Bridges contributed +18. Victor Wembanyama, the player billed as the defining force of the sport’s next era, checked in at +3 across the same two contests. The gap is not close.
In Game 2 alone, CBS Sports reported Towns put up 21 points, 13 rebounds, four assists, a steal, and a block on eight-of-12 shooting. The Knicks were +11 with him on the floor — the best mark of any New York starter that night. He played with the efficiency of a man who had already decided how this series would end and was simply executing the plan.
Charles Barkley, who has spent the better part of a decade questioning whether Towns had the makeup to lead a team in a series that mattered, offered no qualifications after the Knicks went up 2-0. “The MVP of the Finals is gonna be Karl-Anthony Towns,” Barkley said on the TNT broadcast. “He has played two of the best games I’ve ever seen a big man play. He was great in Game 1, he was great in Game 2. That man earned his flowers.”
Shaquille O’Neal, another Hall of Famer who had been among Towns’ most persistent critics, arrived at the same conclusion. “He’s playing with pace. He’s playing smart,” O’Neal said. “He’s playing inside and playing outside. He’s controlling the offense with his passing at times. Listen, he’s just playing unbelievable basketball right now. And I agree with you. At the end of the day, he would definitely be the Most Valuable Player.”
The context that neither Barkley nor O’Neal mentioned — but that anyone watching closely has absorbed — is the grief Towns has been playing through. After the Knicks’ Game 2 win, Towns addressed the crowd and spoke about his mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, who died in 2020 after complications from COVID-19. “As you go through life, you lose a parent, anyone who’s listening, you just look for signs,” Towns said. “I’ll take any sign I can get and I prayed to her strong before that possession.” He appeared on ESPN with Scott Van Pelt shortly after and described how her death had reconfigured him as a person and, eventually, as a player.
The Knicks, now on a 13-game winning streak after their Game 2 victory in San Antonio, trail only the 2017 Warriors for the longest uninterrupted run in a single postseason. That Golden State team went 15-1 and swept through every round before losing Game 3 of the Finals to Cleveland. If the Knicks sweep the Spurs from here, they will equal that benchmark — and in doing so, Towns will have almost certainly eclipsed the statistical record Curry set during the most efficient playoff run in league history.
The comparison is not gratuitous. It reflects a genuine structural similarity between the two runs. The 2017 Warriors won with spacing, pace, and a center who could punish opponents from the perimeter and protect the rim when they collapsed the paint. Towns, as a two-way big who shoots nearly 40 percent from three and can switch onto guards defensively, performs the same function for a different franchise generation. What Curry was to Golden State’s system that spring, Towns appears to be to this one.
The matchup with Wembanyama has been the defining story of these Finals so far, though “matchup” slightly flatters San Antonio’s end of it. Wembanyama has not been bad; he has been outmatched, which is a different thing and in some ways a harder situation to assess. The Knicks won Game 2 despite Jalen Brunson’s late heroics being required to close it out — a sign that the Spurs, down 2-0, are not simply conceding. But through two games, on both ends, Towns has been the better player in the sport’s most anticipated individual confrontation.
What remains unanswered is whether the Knicks can finish. No team in playoff history has recovered from a 3-0 series deficit. Game 3 moves to Madison Square Garden on Monday, where the atmosphere will be unlike anything seen there in a generation. If they take a 3-0 lead, the arithmetic of a first championship since 1973 becomes very short. Towns’ record would follow shortly after. What it would mean for a career spent carrying the weight of its own potential — that accounting will take longer.
