Jalen Brunson scores 45 points as the Knicks clinch Game 5 on the road, beating the Spurs to win their first title since 1973.
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SAN ANTONIO – Finally, New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson was overcome with emotion.
Stoic throughout the regular season and playoffs while professing the most important game is the next one and refusing to look past that even on the cusp of an NBA championship, Brunson reached the point of the season where no games remained and he was on the winning side of the season’s final game.
The tears of joy were unstoppable as Brunson celebrated his first NBA championship with dad, Knicks assistant and former NBA player Rick Brunson.
It was the franchise’s first championship since 1973. Fifty-three years of frustration, disappointment, heartaches and near titles evaporated with Brunson’s remarkable playoff run, capped by his 45-point performance in the Knicks’ 94-90 victory against the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
“I was emotional for a good, 5-10 minutes, and then the excitement started to kick in,” Brunson said.
For certain, the title was for Brunson, his teammates, the coaching staff, the front office, governor James Dolan and the franchise.
But it was also for Knicks fans, the ones from the boroughs and suburbs near and far from Midtown Manhattan who take the MTA subway and buses, NJ Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road and cabs to Madison Square Garden.
New York has Breanna Stewart’s Liberty, Reggie Jackson’s Yankees, Mark Messier’s Rangers, Derek Jeter’s Yankees, Joe Namath’s Jets, Eli Manning’s Giants, Bryan Trottier’s Islanders, Willis Reed’s, Walt Frazier’s and Dave DeBusschere’s Knicks, Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees and Mickey Mantle’s Yankees, Doc Gooden’s and Darryl Strawberry’s Mets.
Now, New York has Brunson’s Knicks.
Knicks peak at playoff time
The third-seeded Knicks were 53-29 during the regular season and had the league’s No. 4 offense and No. 7 defense – all three marks indicative of a quality team. Still, it was also difficult to assess how the Knicks would fare in the playoffs because the Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics finished ahead of them in the East, and the West produced two teams with 60-plus victories, the Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder.
While the Knicks won the Emirates NBA Cup against the Spurs in December, they hit a rough stretch in January, losing nine of 11 games. At 25-18, they were tied for third place in the Eastern Conference but were closer to 10th place than to first.
“There’s always rocky moments during the course of the season,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said. “That’s what the season’s there for. I actually hoped there would be some big, rocky times or adverse times because you have to try to fight through them as an organization, not just as a team, but as an organization, to see if everybody can stay connected during those times.
“Getting to the Finals is not easy. If you can navigate through some of those adverse or tough times throughout the season, you’ll give yourself a chance when it really matters, which is the postseason.”
New York finished the season 28-11 and opened the playoffs against the Atlanta Hawks who took a 2-1 series lead. The Knicks then went on a 13-game winning streak and won 15 of their final 16 playoff games, including nine on the road.
The Knicks are the first team to win both the NBA Cup and an NBA championship in the same season.
While the Knicks did not have a lot of Finals experience, they had veterans who understood the mission. A redeeming quality of the 2025-26 Knicks was their ability to play through every possession and not get bogged down in their mistakes.
That served them well with a 22-point comeback in the fourth quarter against the Cleveland Cavaliers in East finals, a 29-point rally in Game 4 of the Finals and a comeback in Game 5 against the Spurs when they trailed for most of the game.
“For us, another thing that we’ve talked a lot about with our guys is possession over outcome, possession over outcome,” Brown said. “Just worry about the next possession. Lock into the details, play as hard as you can, give everything you can until that next possession. Don’t worry about the outcome of the game or the series.”
The Knicks find their coach
Knicks coach Mike Brown speaks to the media after Game 5 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
Brown, 56, is an NBA lifer. After graduating from San Diego in 1992, he joined the Denver Nuggets as a video coordinator and scout, and Bernie Bickerstaff hired him as an assistant coach for the Washington Wizards in 1997.
He has been on an NBA bench ever since, most notably as head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings. He was also an assistant for the Spurs and Golden State Warriors where he was part of four championship teams – one with the Spurs under Gregg Popovich and three with the Warriors under Steve Kerr.
“Pop is iconic, especially here in San Antonio,” Brown said. “When you talk about the game of basketball, he’s iconic to everybody that enjoys the game of basketball. The neat part about him is, it’s not just about the Xs and Os that you learn, you know you can never be him, but you learn people skills, you learn how to connect, not just the 15 or 18 players, you learn how to connect an entire city, maybe even an entire state.”
Of Kerr, Brown said, “My time as an assistant under Steve, that was fantastic for a lot of reasons, not just professionally, but personally, too. I had an absolute great time being an assistant coach in San Francisco under Steve, with those players.”
After losing to the Indiana Pacers in six games in the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals, the Knicks dismissed Tom Thibodeau and hired Brown, a two-time NBA Coach of the Year. The Knicks sought a coach who was less rigid and more willing to develop a bench while managing minutes for starters so they wouldn’t be exhausted by the conference finals.
“In terms of the minutes, it’s a philosophy I had,” Brown said. “One of the many things I learned from Pop and Steve. Steve was really good at trying to play a lot of different guys. Not only that, a guy that hadn’t been in the rotation for a while, one game he might throw him out there as a starter. That kept guys engaged or on their toes, however you want to call it.”
It worked. The Knicks peaked at the right time.
Brown, who was fired by the Cavs twice, the Lakers once and the Kings once, is affable, tells dad jokes and still fears repercussions from his mom for swearing during his postgame news conferences. He proved to be the coach the Knicks needed. He wasn’t afraid to go with his coaching instincts even if that meant putting Josh Hart on the bench or using Jose Alvarado in crunch time instead of Mikal Bridges.
Brown was a head coach in the Finals for the first time in 2007 with the Cavaliers and LeBron James, losing to the Spurs and Popovich in four games. Nearly 20 years later, he returned to the Finals as a head coach.
“I’m a firm believer that stuff happens for a reason. I mean, I’ve enjoyed every single job that I’ve had,” Brown said. “At the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade anything that I went through along my journey for just being a head coach the whole time because I truly believe this: you learn probably more in adversity or getting knocked down than just riding a high wave.”
Now, he’s an NBA championship coach.
“It was surreal,” Brown said when the final buzzer sounded. “I couldn’t believe that it was happening. And I am so tired. I mean, I’m gassed. This stuff is harder than what you think.”
Knicks assemble a front office with championship vision
On March 2, 2020, the Knicks released a statement, naming Leon Rose, the powerful player-agent, as their president.
“Leon is one of the most respected executives in professional basketball, with decades of experience successfully working with NBA players and team management in all facets of the game,” Madison Square Garden executive chairman James Dolan said in a statement. “We are confident he brings the right combination of expertise and relationships to ensure the long-term success of our franchise.”
The Knicks were headed for their seventh consecutive losing season, and Rose, in an email to season-ticket holders, wrote: “Nothing about this is easy, or quick, so I ask for your continued patience. What I promise you in return is that I will be honest and forthright. We will develop a plan that makes sense, both to jumpstart our short-term growth and ensure our long-term success.”
Rose revamped the front office, hiring William Wesley, Gersson Rosas, Brock Aller, Walt Perrin, Billy Lange and Frank Zanin.
Rose is another agent-turned-team executive, like former Golden State executive Bob Myers who was in charge of basketball operations for Golden State Warriors’ championships in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022.
“Usually, those guys have a pretty good feel, the entire profession, because they’ve dealt with the GMs for many years,” Brown said. “Then they’re agents themselves, so they’ve played both sides of the coin, so to say, when it comes to doing deals and making trades.
“Then on top of that, because they represented players, and usually it’s the bigger agents that make that transition, so they had some pretty good players that they represented, they have the relationships there.”
Rose represented Knicks assistant coach and Jalen’s dad, Rick Brunson, as a player, and the younger Brunson has known Rose his entire life.
“He has a great basketball mind,” Jalen Brunson said. “He surrounds himself with good people. The way he’s been able to do this, especially here with all the scrutiny people do to him and everything, I just think the way he goes about his business is as good as anyone.”
The front office remade the roster, mainly through trades and free agency. Rose and staff had a vision of how the team should look. Chronologically, a previous front office drafted Mitchell Robinson who is still with the Knicks and the Rose front office drafted Miles McBride in 2021.
But the transformation truly began in the summer of 2022 when they signed Jalen Brunson during free agency after the Dallas Mavericks failed to re-sign him.
On the court, the story of the Knicks’ 2025-26 championship begins with Brunson.
Brunson relishes star role with Knicks
Brunson sat at the dais for a news conference between Games 2 and 3 of the Finals and the Knicks up 2-0. Asked what it was that scouts and executives missed about his game during the draft process, the 29-year-old Brunson smiled.
“Everything,” he replied.
With the Knicks, Brunson developed into an All-NBA guard who is a gifted scorer and one of the league’s elite clutch players. Brown repeatedly calls him an MVP-caliber player, and the Knicks are not champions without Brunson.
“He’s a gamer, man,” Brown said. “In the biggest moments, he shows up, and that’s what MVPs are supposed to do. We put the ball in his hands and said we are going to live and die with him. And he got it done for us, and that’s happened time after time after time.”
Jalen Brunson scores 45 points in the Game 5 clincher and is named NBA Finals MVP.
The Dallas Mavericks selected Brunson in the second round of the 2018 draft – 33rd overall and 30 picks after Atlanta took Luka Dončić No. 3 and traded him to Dallas.
“That was probably the only time it made me kind of question myself to see how hard I actually had to work to be in the position I wanted to be,” Brunson admitted.
He put in the work. He is as clever a scoring guard as the league has seen the way he uses angles, step backs and his body to create separation from defenders.
Brunson refuted the theory that a smaller guard – the Knicks list him at 6-foot-2 – could not be the lead player on a championship team. He starred in the playoffs, scoring at least 30 points in nine games including 39 against the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, 35 against the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference semifinals, 38 against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the conference finals and the 45-point masterpiece in Game 5 against the Spurs. It tied Michael Jordan for most points on the road in a Finals-clinching game.
Among players who played in at least four playoff games of clutch time – the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime when the score is within five points – Brunson was the second-leading scorer at 4.2 points per game in clutch time while shooting 42.4% from the field, 57.1% on 3-pointers and 85.7% on free throws.
He is a firm believer in process. “My focus comes from preparing,” Brunson said in December. “It’s not just game day. It’s the days leading up to game day. It’s the preparation from the summertime. It’s all the work you’ve put in your entire life. Your confidence comes from your work ethic. So that’s how I prepare on game day.”
In the Finals, Brunson made the winning shots in the first two games, scored nine points in the fourth quarter of New York’s improbable second-half comeback in Game 4 and scored 29 second-half points in Game 5.
“Words can’t describe it, but I’ll say I put a lot of time and effort into trying to be the best player I can be to try and help a team win,” Brunson said. “Just really thankful to have the organization, the coaching staff, my teammates, to have my back every single day. That means the most to me. And my family.”
Building around Brunson with Towns, Hart, Bridges, Anunoby
It took more than Brunson to reach this point. New York acquired Hart at the 2023 trade deadline, traded for OG Anunoby in late December of 2023, traded for Mikal Bridges in the summer of 2024 and swapped Julius Randle for Karl-Anthony Towns at the start of the 2024-25 season.
Brunson, Hart, Bridges, Anunoby and Towns formed the starting lineup, and the Knicks built depth with McBride, Landry Shamet, Mitchell Robinson, Jordan Clarkson and Alvarado.
All had their moments during the playoffs. Towns’ ability to score, pass and rebound complemented Brunson’s playmaking. Hart will do whatever is necessary to help win games, and Anunoby is a two-way force.
Anunoby’s tip-in in Game 4 with 2.1 seconds left in the fourth quarter gave the Knicks a 107-106 victory and 3-1 series lead. Brown said, “I don’t know if there’s a play bigger than any other play in the history of Knicks basketball.”
In the playoffs, Anunoby averaged 20.1 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.5 steals and made 48.9% of his 3-pointers; Towns averaged 15.9 points, 10.6 rebounds and 4.9 assists and shot 55.1% from the field, 45.6% on 3-pointers and 90.9% on free throws. Bridges averaged 13.5 points and Hart 10.4.
Shamet shot 47.5% from 3-point range, and Alvarado helped win Game 4. Robinson’s 10 rebounds in Game 5, including an important offensive rebound off a missed free throw by Hart, will go unnoticed but his contributions were necessary with Towns in foul trouble.
Yes, Brunson starred but it requires a team effort to win a title.
“I think everyone bonding, coming together, having the mindset of just believing in each other, never giving up, no matter what the situation was, made this all possible,” Brunson said.
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Jeff Zillgitt has covered the NBA since 2008. You can email him at jzillgitt@nba.com, find his archive here and follow him on X.
