It was always going to require a miracle.
If the New York Knicks—the most dismal, down-and-out franchise of the past half-century—were going to win their first NBA championship since 1973, it would require a zillion things to break just right. Every ball would have to bounce their way for them to reach the top of the basketball world after 53 years of waiting.
So it was fitting that Saturday night, as they aimed to clinch the NBA Finals, the Knicks flirted with disaster again and fell behind by 15 points in the second half. It was only then that New York mounted a furious comeback. Superstar point guard Jalen Brunson converted impossible layups and crashed to the floor for a loose ball. The Knicks’ steely defense held Victor Wembanyama to just 3 points in the fourth quarter.
And when the dust settled, New York had made history by beating the San Antonio Spurs, 94-90, to become NBA champions again.
Back in New York, five boroughs of fans gathered to watch anywhere they could: in Central Park and on street corners, in living rooms and bars packed past capacity. They hardly needed televisions, projecting the Knicks onto the walls of New York itself. And when it was over, joy erupted from sidewalks around the city, as entire generations of New Yorkers drank in a sight few of them had ever seen: Their Knicks lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Saturday night was just the final chapter of the most unlikely, unhinged and downright unbelievable playoff run in basketball history—a collection of spectacular streaks and last-second comebacks to cast aside decades of heartbreak.
“You have to have a little luck in life. You’ve got to have a little luck in sports,” head coach Mike Brown said during the Finals. “But you can also make your luck, too.”
For decades, the Knicks had been unable to find a single scrap of it. They went 27 years without making a Finals appearance. They hired general managers just to fire them a couple of years later, burned through coaches and signed washed-up star players to crippling contracts.
When the playoffs started, New York’s long-suffering fans hardly believed this was the squad that would end an era of misery. The Knicks were a pretty good team in a pretty bad conference, sitting in third place in the woeful East. Their playoff run, in fact, nearly ended before it began. In their opening round series, the Knicks fell 2-1 behind the Atlanta Hawks.
But then the Knicks transformed overnight. They went from so-so to absolutely unstoppable as Brown tweaked the offense—less dribbling, more cutting and passing—and Brunson morphed into one of the all-time clutch heroes of New York sports.
A team that had never won so much as nine straight games during the drowsy regular season suddenly rattled off 13 straight victories in the playoffs. And they didn’t simply win—they blew teams away by 21 points per game, the most dominant such stretch in postseason history.
“I can’t deny it,” Brown said. “Our guys are playing pretty good basketball.”
The Finals, though, brought the San Antonio Spurs and the NBA’s next great superstar: 7-foot-4 phenom Wembanyama. That meant that the run of blowouts immediately ended, replaced by something else: some of the most down-to-the-wire basketball the playoffs have ever seen.
To win Game 1, the Knicks leaned on a last-minute flurry from Brunson. Game 2 turned on a Wembanyama error, when he threw the ball off of a teammate’s back in the closing minutes. And Game 4 was simply the greatest comeback in Finals history, as the Knicks clawed back from a 29-point second-half deficit to triumph on a last-second OG Anunoby tip-in.
Every game was within four points in the final minute. And in every single victory over the Spurs, the Knicks trailed by double-digits—the most comebacks of at least 10 points in the championship round since at least 2001, according to Stats Perform.
The win doesn’t just vault the 2026 Knicks into New York immortality—it makes Brunson perhaps the most beloved New Yorker since Derek Jeter roamed the Yankee Stadium infield. When Knicks president Leon Rose signed Brunson in 2022—at a bargain rate—he was just a former second-round draft pick who had spent most of his career as a backup. But from the moment he came to New York, Brunson has been the NBA’s most reliable crunch-time performer.
Since he put on the orange-and-blue jersey, Brunson leads the NBA in fourth-quarter playoff points. But the more remarkable feat is how he leveled up an inept franchise into a champion, step by step. First Brunson led the Knicks to the conference semifinals. Then to the conference finals.
Now, to the mountaintop.
Brunson wasn’t alone, of course. Rose built a smart, unlikely championship roster around him, turning up-and-comers and mid-level stars into the perfect Brunson backups. Karl-Anthony Towns, a gifted but inconsistent center, transformed into an ace scorer and sturdy defender. Anunoby evolved into the player capable of hitting the greatest shot in Knicks history.
The Knicks became the first champion in 22 seasons not to have a single player who has ever been first-team All-NBA—and they didn’t need one.
As the final buzzer sounded, thousands of New Yorkers who had traveled to San Antonio yelled, hugged and cried. It marked the official start of a weekslong celebration that New York had waited half a century to unleash.
