NEW YORK — The din from Madison Square Garden had barely settled when Caitlin Clark sat down to dinner in Manhattan on Saturday night and felt something she rarely gets to feel: the uncomplicated joy of being a fan.
The city was still vibrating. Hours earlier, the New York Knicks had escaped San Antonio with a 105-104 victory over the Spurs in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, according to ESPN, building a 2-0 series lead and edging closer to their first championship since 1973. Now, with the series shifting home to MSG for Games 3 and 4, the whole borough was buzzing.
Clark absorbed all of it. Then she admitted she hopes it does not end quickly.
“I’m a fan of basketball, so I love great games,” Clark said after the Fever fell 83-75 to the New York Liberty at Barclays Center. “I don’t want the Knicks to sweep it. I’m kind of indifferent on who wins, but I’m just such a basketball fan that I would love to see it go to seven games, just because I think it’s been such a great series.”
The sentiment cuts against the script of a lopsided series. No team in NBA history has won the championship after losing the first two Finals games at home, a statistic that makes the Spurs’ situation historically dire. The Knicks are on a 13-game postseason winning streak — the second-longest in NBA playoff history — and arrive at MSG on Monday night as overwhelming favorites to continue it against a San Antonio team that has yet to solve Jalen Brunson and a defense that held Victor Wembanyama quiet through the first half of Game 2.
Clark acknowledged none of that history as a reason to concede the series. She was not operating as an analyst. She was operating as someone who had spent that Saturday evening watching the Finals energy wrap around a city she was visiting for work.
“I was out to dinner last night, and it was fun to just see the buzz around the city, and how passionate fans are,” she said. “And I was joking with Lexi [Hull], I’m like, man, we should have gone right outside MSG after they won, because I always want to see those people. I feel like that would be the experience. I don’t know if my security guy would let me do that, but I want to.”
That she was joking about sneaking out to celebrate a Knicks win was not accidental warmth. Clark has no professional stake in this NBA Finals. She is a confirmed Yankees fan and a Kansas City Chiefs loyalist by NFL allegiance, but she has never publicly named a favorite NBA team, according to Sporting News. What she has is a genuine affection for the sport’s biggest moments — and a sharpened respect for what New York’s fans bring to them.
“Those Knicks fans are so passionate and crazy,” she said. “I admire it. It’s pretty awesome.”
There is an irony buried in her wish for a seven-game series. Game 7, if it happens, is scheduled for June 19 in San Antonio — but Clark almost certainly will not be in the stands to watch it. The Fever play the Atlanta Dream on both June 18 and June 19, meaning the kind of final-game theatre she is rooting for will, in all likelihood, play out without her in attendance.
The Spurs, for their part, are not operating as if history has already decided this. Wembanyama, the French prodigy who carried San Antonio through a grueling seven-game Western Conference Finals victory over the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, scored 29 points in Game 2 despite a slow start. De’Aaron Fox added 20. After the loss, Wembanyama offered a measured response that suggested his team had not yet conceded: “We can’t change the past. We’re already thinking about Game 3.”
Whether three consecutive games at MSG — starting Monday at 8:30 p.m. ET — complicate that calculation remains an open question. The previous two teams to win the first two Finals games on the road, the 1993 Chicago Bulls and the 1995 Houston Rockets, both went on to win championships. The question of whether Donald Trump’s attendance at Game 3 adds another layer of distraction to an already-charged atmosphere at the Garden remains to be seen.
Clark, who finished Saturday’s loss to the Liberty with 10 points, nine assists and seven rebounds while battling persistent foul trouble, will be back in the gym on Monday, not watching at MSG. Breanna Stewart led the Liberty with 30 points, 18 of them at the free-throw line, as Indiana fell to 5-5 on the season. The Fever face the Washington Mystics on Monday before turning their attention to the second half of a schedule that gives them little room to watch anyone else play basketball.
Still, she is pulling for seven games. Not for the Spurs, not for the Knicks — but for the series to outlast her calendar.
