Knicks win first NBA championship since 1973, beat Spurs 94-90 in Game 5

SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks are NBA champions.

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It is a sentence that has not been written in 53 years. It is a reality that was out of reach for the franchise from the late 1970s through the 1980s and felt oh-so-close in the 1990s, only to be laughably far away for much of the last quarter century.

Yet, Saturday in Texas, a Knicks roster that had been assembled, taken apart and overhauled over the past six years ended more than a half-century of waiting by closing out San Antonio, 94-90, in five games to clinch New York’s third NBA title, and first since 1973.

The young Spurs, playing in just the first postseason of 7-foot-4 superstar Victor Wembanyama’s career, entered these Finals having beaten 2025 champions Oklahoma City Thunder to win the Western Conference. New York had reached its first Finals since 1999 by taking what seemed to be a less arduous route.

New York, however, won the first two games in San Antonio and clinched a championship while holding off the Spurs in the series’ emotional, unpredictable fourth and fifth games.

Knicks fans arrived in Texas’s hill country in droves Saturday, wearing jerseys bearing last names such as Monroe and Starks, Ewing and Anthony, Anunoby and Brunson, all in orange and blue. They filled out sections from the arena’s upper-most rows to its swankiest courtside seats, and they all hoped to witness the Knicks claim their first NBA title in five decades years.

They received their wish after the Knicks completed a 16-point comeback, a fitting coda to a series where New York overcame double-digit deficits to win all four of its games.

Trailing 93-90 with 8.5 seconds left, San Antonio’s Dylan Harper missed his first free throw, then was forced to intentionally miss the second in hopes San Antonio would grab an offensive rebound. But the Knicks grabbed the miss instead, and sealed their win with an OG Anunoby free throw at the other end.

As Knicks players ran onto the court at the final buzzer, icon Patrick Ewing hugged filmmaker Spike Lee as head coach Mike Brown walked around high-fiving staffers, seemingly in a daze.

Hours before the celebration spilled onto the court at Frost Bank Center, all was quiet underneath the arena’s grandstands.

Past and present overlapped inside the visitors’ locker room. Retired Knicks Hall of Fame center Patrick Ewing paused briefly to dap New York’s current big man star, Karl-Anthony Towns. No words were exchanged, nor needed: The Knicks were just four quarters away from the franchise’s first NBA title in five decades.

Down a long hallway in the other direction San Antonio’s 7-foot-4 Wembanyama pulled on tall, black socks in silence. In the Spurs’ locker room, Wembanyama’s corner locker sits next to a black plaque emblazoned with a Jacob Riis quote that, for the past three decades, has become something of a Spurs mantra. It tells the allegory of a stonecutter who pounds a rock 101 times before it at last splits in two. It is about having the faith, and the persistence, to pull off seemingly impossible job by focusing on the task at hand — not dissimilar to overcoming a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals, perhaps.

That was the unenviable task the Spurs faced Saturday. Only one team in Finals history has ever overcome such a deficit, and if that was not daunting enough, the Spurs were only in this predicament because three days earlier, they had lost a 29-point lead, the largest collapse in Finals history.

The lead the Spurs lost Saturday wasn’t as large, but it was filled with late-game, self-inflicted mistakes that will follow the franchise into the offseason, and send the Knicks into a summer of celebration.

San Antonio led by as many as 16 points in the first half, but that lead was down to five at halftime before running up to double-digits again in the third quarter. But New York, as it has all series, held its composure to gradually chip away. With 1:53 remaining in the fourth quarter, it led 88-85, and an eruption of noise from Knicks fans cheered a missed free throw by Wembanyama, who sounded as though he was shooting in a road arena.

When Spurs rookie Dylan Harper scored a tying basket with a minute to play, Brunson answered with his own to push the Knicks ahead, 90-88. When Harper drove for a layup with 30 seconds and not only missed, but didn’t earn a foul, San Antonio had to resort to fouling.

As the Knicks entered the playoffs, there were few signs they were about to author one of the most dominant playoff runs in memory, finishing with a 16-3 record and a score differential more than double the next-closest team’s.

New York finished the regular season with the third-best record in the Eastern Conference and trailed 2-1 during a first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks. But from April 25 to June 5, the Knicks did not lose, a 13-game winning streak that is the second-longest in NBA postseason history.

They rallied from 22 points down in the fourth quarter to win Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals against Cleveland, from down 14 to win Game 1 of the NBA Finals against San Antonio, and down 12 to win Game 2. After losing Game 3, they authored the largest comeback in Finals history in Game 4, erasing a 29-point hole in a victory that stunned the Spurs and shook Madison Square Garden.

New York was once the center of the basketball universe after NBA titles in 1970 and 1973. Yet, after advancing to the conference finals in 1974, the Knicks were aimless for a decade and a half and didn’t return to the East finals again until 1993. After knocking on the door in the 1990s, with Finals losses in 1994 and 1999, New York receded from championship relevance.

Between 2001 and 2025, a combination of 15 head or interim coaches produced just seven winning seasons and eight playoff appearances, and just one of those postseason trips advanced beyond the second round. That lone outlier was last season’s conference finals appearance — after which the Knicks fired coach Tom Thibodeau and spent a month looking for his successor in a much-criticized search.

The big decision to fire Thibodeau and hire Brown as his successor was consistent with the way Leon Rose has built the team since he was hired in 2020 to lead all of New York’s basketball operations. A prominent longtime agent, Rose was an unconventional pick, but through free-agency meetings, draft-night swaps and blockbuster trades, New York pieced together its 2026 roster in a way like few other contenders.

Only one of its regular rotation players, center Mitchell Robinson, was drafted by the Knicks. Rather than attempt to acquire big names like Joel Embiid or Donovan Mitchell, Rose opted to build the team around Jalen Brunson, who had previously been a backup in Dallas. During the 2024 offseason, the Knicks officially went all-in on a championship-or-bust path by doling out five first-round draft picks for wing Mikal Bridges and trading away Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Minnesota big man Karl-Anthony Towns.

The fit of this roster was not always seamless. But this spring, it began ripping through the postseason in dominant blowouts and stirring comebacks, leading to Saturday’s clinching opportunity in San Antonio.

The Knicks didn’t allow San Antonio to drag out the series any longer. Start spreading the news: New York is home to the NBA champions.