The New York Knicks are going to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, Jalen Brunson just won the Larry Bird Trophy unanimously, and I am sitting in my apartment in Hoboken at some ungodly hour writing this instead of sleeping because sleep is not something I can do right now.
I have been waiting 27 years for this. I was not alive for the 1994 Finals. I barely remember 1999 — I was a kid and the 8-seed Knicks stumbled into that series on the back of a lockout-shortened season that nobody counts. My dad counts it. I do not. This one counts.
What the hell.
JALEN BRUNSON IS GOING TO THE NBA FINALS.
The Knicks swept the Cavaliers 4-0, and it wasn’t close in any game after Game 1. Brunson averaged 25.5 points and 7.8 assists on 48.7% shooting for the series. He had 38 points in overtime in Game 1 when Cleveland was still threatening to be a problem. He then turned around and handed out 14 assists in Game 2. By Game 4, he was coasting — 15 points in a 130-93 demolition — because the Cavs had already been broken.
The 1999 Finals appearance was an asterisk and everyone who watched it knows it. Eight seed, lockout year, Tim Duncan won the whole thing in five games. That wasn’t the Knicks going to the Finals — that was the Knicks accidentally falling into one while the league was in freefall. This is different. This is 11 consecutive playoff wins, all by double digits, a +271 point differential through 14 games that is the highest entering any Finals in NBA history. The Warriors’ 2017 team — the one with Durant — had +196 through the same point. These Knicks have them beat by 75 points.
Donovan Mitchell scored 31 in a losing effort in Game 4. Afterward, he went on SportsCenter and said what he said:
https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/2059122499938373713
Donovan Mitchell is right. It was ass. It was completely, thoroughly, historically ass for the Cavaliers. And I feel terrible about that for Cleveland fans in the way that you feel terrible about something while also being completely unable to stop smiling.
Karl-Anthony Towns — who grew up in the area and said after the game that “the word hope has been gone for a long while” in New York — had 19 points and 14 rebounds in the clincher. Fans were on Seventh Avenue outside MSG with brooms before the final buzzer. The NYPD had banned outdoor watch parties at the Garden due to safety concerns. The fans gathered anyway, because of course they did, because this city has been waiting since before most of those kids were born.
The thing about Brunson that the national conversation keeps dancing around is this: he didn’t get here on a superteam. He came from Dallas, quietly, without the ceremony that usually accompanies a player who becomes This Guy for a franchise. There was no parade when he signed. There were takes about whether he was worth the money. Hell of a take in retrospect. There was skepticism layered on top of Knicks fan hope layered on top of more skepticism, the way this city’s fandom always works — belief plus armor, in equal amounts.
And now he has the Knicks four wins away from their first championship since 1973, the unanimous ECF MVP trophy, and a city that has decided he is its guy in the unreserved, unconditional way New York reserves for maybe three or four athletes a generation.
Every fan under 35 just experienced their first real Knicks Finals run. The whole childhood these people spent watching this franchise spiral through the Isiah Thomas era, the triangle offense era, the era of no particular era except losing — all of it was just the time before this. Brunson didn’t luck into it. He averaged 25.5 points a game over four games against a 60-win team and willed it into existence one play at a time.
The Finals opponent is still TBD — the Thunder and Spurs are tied 2-2 in the West with Game 5 in Oklahoma City on Tuesday, and Game 1 of the Finals is set for June 3 on ABC. I genuinely do not care who comes out of that series right now. I’ll care on Wednesday.
Tonight I’m watching broom videos from Seventh Avenue and texting my dad back.
He actually texted first this time.
