NEW YORK — The last time the NBA Finals came to Madison Square Garden, JFK Jr. was sitting courtside in pleated slacks, and the Knicks lost in five games to a San Antonio Spurs team led by a 22-year-old phenom named Tim Duncan.
Monday night, the Finals return to the Garden for the first time in 27 years. The opponent is again the Spurs. The Spurs again have a 22-year-old phenom. And yet almost everything else has changed — starting with which team showed up to San Antonio and took both games before heading home with a commanding lead.
The New York Knicks arrive at Game 3 riding 13 consecutive playoff victories, according to ESPN, matching the seventh-longest such streak in NBA postseason history. They outscored their opponents by a combined 273 points during that run — an all-time record for any 13-game stretch. They swept Cleveland in four games in the Eastern Conference Finals, beat the 76ers in four, rallied past Atlanta in six, and now stand two wins from ending a championship drought that stretches back to Willis Reed and 1973.
What nobody predicted when the playoffs began was that the engine driving all of it would be Karl-Anthony Towns.
The center, who spent the better part of a decade in Minnesota accumulating All-Star selections and losing records, has become the decisive figure in this series. In Game 1, Towns finished with 18 points and 12 rebounds as the Knicks rallied from 14 down in the second half to win 105-95 in San Antonio. In Game 2, he produced a 21-point, 13-rebound performance on 8-of-12 shooting that, as NBA.com noted, made him the first Knick with a 20-point double-double in a Finals road game since Dave DeBusschere in 1973. That was, of course, the last time New York won the championship.
The symmetry is not lost on anyone inside the locker room, or outside it.
Jalen Brunson, the Knicks’ captain and reigning Clutch Player of the Year, was asked Thursday what he would consider worth spending $7,500 to watch — the going price on the secondary market for the cheapest available Game 3 ticket in New York. He paused before offering his answer: a live Michael Jackson performance. Whatever Brunson thinks of the price, the rest of the city has apparently decided the Knicks are worth it at any cost.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order temporarily relaxing children’s bedtime hours after Game 1. The MTA decorated several subway stops around the arena in blue and orange. The Empire State Building lit up in team colors. Thousands who could not get inside Madison Square Garden to watch Game 1 celebrated outside in the shadow of the building itself, as the Associated Press reported.
The Knicks’ postseason has been built on a structural adaptation. Under first-year head coach Mike Brown — who arrived from Golden State as a defensive specialist — the franchise finally distributed its offense beyond Brunson’s shoulders. Mitchell Robinson, limited throughout the regular season with a broken right pinkie, returned for the Finals and has been deployed specifically against Victor Wembanyama in clutch moments. Landry Shamet hit three of seven three-pointers off the bench in Game 2. Miles McBride is averaging career highs in scoring and minutes. A team that could only go so far on Brunson’s 35-point nights can now survive the games when he goes 7-of-25 from the field, as he did in Game 2 — because someone else fills the gap.
Brunson still scored 20 that night, still hit a tying elbow jumper with 39 seconds remaining, and still converted the go-ahead free throw after a Wembanyama turnover with 9.5 seconds left. The Knicks won 105-104. New York became only the third team in NBA history to win the first two games of a Finals on the road, joining Michael Jordan’s 1993 Bulls and Hakeem Olajuwon’s 1995 Rockets. Both of those teams won the championship.
The question this series has not yet answered is whether Wembanyama can find what he has not yet found. The 7-foot-4 Spurs center has produced massive statistical lines in both games — 26 points, 12 rebounds and three blocks in Game 1; 29 points, nine rebounds and four blocks in Game 2. He also shot from 20 feet in the final seconds of Game 2 when he needed something closer to a layup, an error his coach declined to characterize as anything other than miscommunication. The Spurs have struggled when Wembanyama is not on the floor, and have struggled to close games even when he is.
San Antonio guard De’Aaron Fox, expected to be the team’s second option in this series, managed just seven points on nine shots in Game 1 before bouncing back for 20 in Game 2. Julian Champagnie, a native New Yorker on San Antonio’s roster, scored 15 in Game 1 and acknowledged to the Associated Press that he “kind of expected” the Knicks contingent that filled roughly 20 percent of the Frost Bank Center crowd — something he attributed to having grown up watching how New York fans travel.
On Monday there will be no ambiguity about whose building it is. The NYPD announced there will be no outdoor watch party directly outside MSG — a decision made in coordination with the Secret Service, given President Donald Trump’s confirmed attendance. Trump received a personal invitation from Knicks owner James Dolan and, if he appears courtside, will become the first sitting American president to attend an NBA Finals game in person. Watch parties were being organized at Wollman Rink in Central Park and at Brooklyn Bowl.
What none of the security arrangements can contain is the weight of the moment itself. The Knicks have not been here since the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, when they arrived as the eighth seed, somehow reached the Finals, and lost to the same franchise they are now playing. That team’s best player was Tim Duncan. This year’s Spurs best player, by every statistical measure, is also their center — a Frenchman drafted No. 1 overall who was not yet born when JFK Jr. watched from those courtside seats.
The franchise’s last championship, in 1973, predates most of New York’s current roster by decades. Brunson was born in 1996. Towns, who grew up in New Jersey, was born in 1995. The history they are chasing belongs to a team neither of them watched. What they know is what the building will feel like Monday night, and what it would mean to the city if they leave it 3-0.
“Every single day, we try to chip away, trying to be the best team we can be,” Brunson told NBA.com ahead of Game 3. “Even with what the series is now, next game, mindset has to be 0-0 again. You can’t be comfortable, you can’t be satisfied with anything.”
Game 3 tips off Monday at 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC. The Knicks, who last won a title 53 years ago and have not appeared in a Finals since Bill Clinton was president, are two wins from changing both facts at once. What that means for the city, and what it will do to the building on 33rd Street, is the one thing this series has not yet decided.
