Jalen Brunson just scored 45 points in an NBA Finals closeout game and the Knicks are champions for the first time since 1973, and my dad texted me from the Shop Rite parking lot and I could feel him crying through the screen.
I don’t know how to explain what 53 years means to a family. My dad watched this team when they were good. Then he watched them hire the wrong coaches, draft the wrong guys, run the wrong offense, sign the wrong free agents, get embarrassed in the first round, miss the playoffs entirely, become the national punchline — and he just kept watching. That’s the thing about Knicks fans that nobody outside New York understands. It was never going to make us leave. The losing was the identity. The losing was the thing we bonded over at Thanksgiving.
And then Jalen Brunson, from Villanova, from a mid-level exception, the guy who wasn’t supposed to be THIS — went out and scored 13 consecutive Knicks points in the fourth quarter to erase a 10-point deficit and win us an NBA Finals game 94-90, and just like that the knicks 2026 nba championship is not a hypothetical anymore. It’s a fact. It’s in the record books. Nobody can take it back.
I’ve watched the fourth quarter seventeen times and I’m not stopping.
What gets me is that Brunson didn’t need us. That’s the part that kills me. He came here and people said he was too small, too slow, too Villanova for New York. He didn’t campaign for the city’s love. He didn’t show up with a “I’m coming to the mecca” speech or a billboard in Times Square. He just played basketball, every single night, and somewhere around year two the city quietly decided that was enough. That he was enough. Maybe more than enough.
That mutual thing, the city not asking him to be a symbol and him not needing to be one, is more New York than anything I’ve seen from this franchise in my lifetime. Patrick Ewing was a New York basketball god by declaration. Brunson got there by accident, by just being relentlessly, almost annoyingly good at the one thing that actually matters.
https://twitter.com/JCrossover/status/2066006626067472820
OG Anunoby said it best: “Resilient, mentally tough… no matter if we’re down, stays in attack mode.” Which is funny because the Knicks have been in attack mode from behind all series. OG Anunoby’s tip-in in Game 4 completed the 29-point comeback that I will be describing to my grandchildren whether they want to hear it or not. They rallied from double-digit deficits in all four wins. The Spurs had nothing that could hold this team down for forty-eight minutes.
And Brunson just keeps going. Forty-one minutes. Fourteen of twenty-seven from the field. Thirteen of fifteen from the line in a game that mattered more than any game this franchise has played since the Ford administration. Unanimous Finals MVP. Eleven for eleven voters. Joined Jordan, Giannis, and Bob Pettit as the only players to drop 45 in a Finals closeout. That list is insane. That list contains maybe four of the greatest players who ever lived, and now it contains the guy who grew up in New Jersey playing for his dad, who is now a Knicks assistant coach, which means Rick Brunson is also a champion with this franchise, which — I’m sorry — that’s not a sports story, that’s a movie.
https://twitter.com/Yankees/status/2066000519416455445
The parade is June 18. Mayor Mamdani announced it. Ticker-tape down the Canyon of Heroes. And look, I am going. I don’t care if it’s a Tuesday. I don’t care if I have to cancel things. As a lifelong Knicks fan, I have been waiting for this specific day since before I was old enough to understand what a championship meant, and I am not watching it from my couch.
Revis is coming too. He doesn’t know what the knicks 2026 nba championship means, but he’ll figure it out when he sees the blue confetti.
