The Athletic has live coverage of Spurs vs. Knicks in Game 3 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
NEW YORK — Before collectiveness became the defining trait of the New York Knicks, signs of it began to sprout earlier this season.
The Knicks sit only two wins short of their first championship in 53 years. But a few months ago, with a ring yet to pop up in such clear sight, one man sacrificed for the greater good.
At the end of January, head coach Mike Brown plopped Jordan Clarkson, a former sixth man of the year winner, at the end of the bench. Clarkson, whose silhouette could have been the logo of the national bucket association, had fallen into basketball’s oblivion, parked on the end of the bench without any burn unless the Knicks were mired with injuries.
So he vowed to change.
He barely played in February. In March, the Knicks faced his former Utah Jazz. New York assistant Mo Cheeks suggested in a coaches’ meeting that Brown use Clarkson, for whom it could be an emotional night. Brown obliged, and Clarkson went off: 27 points in 26 minutes, leading the Knicks to victory in a game that was too close for comfort.
It was Clarkson’s final scoring outburst of the season. It was also his return to the rotation.
No longer did Clarkson’s signifier, all those points, matter. An old dog, a 12-year veteran, had learned new tricks.
From then on, a new, unrecognizable version of Clarkson formed. He started full-court pressuring opposing ballhandlers — and doing so with success. Wherever Clarkson moved to on defense, he did so with burst. He puffed out his chest, a grin across his face, when he learned that the analytics said he was pressing dribblers even more than Jrue Holiday, possibly the staunchest defensive guard of his generation. “Now, I definitely gotta keep this up,” he said. He darted after offensive rebounds. From the moment he returned to the rotation through the end of the regular season, he was one of the NBA’s feistiest guards on the glass.
This was not Clarkson, the man whose value wrapped into whether or not he made shots. It was a Josh Hart impersonator, someone who cared about everything but putting the ball in the hoop.
Earlier this season, a reporter asked the Knicks’ captain, Jalen Brunson, if Clarkson’s reinvention (and the unselfishness that inspired it) could be an example for the team’s young players. For Brunson, the question’s premise was not extreme enough.
“It can be an example for anybody,” Brunson said.
Anybody — including Hart, Mitchell Robinson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby or even Brunson himself.
After contributing in some fashion to nearly every victory during the Knicks’ miraculous playoff run, which includes 13 consecutive wins, the second-longest postseason winning streak ever, Clarkson did not play in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, which New York pulled out by one point to take a 2-0 series lead over the San Antonio Spurs.
Before departing Frost Bank Center, he stood at his cubby in the visiting locker room. Next to him was Robinson. He turned to his dear friend and dropped two words.
“No egos,” he said.
Robinson nodded.
The moment defined a team that now requires only two wins to reach immortality, the Knicks’ first championship since 1973.
The Knicks dropped two of their first three games to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round. It didn’t matter. They fell 22 points in the fourth quarter against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It didn’t matter. They trailed by 14 in Game 1 of the finals and 12 in Game 2; it took them only three minutes to hand a 14-point advantage back at the end of Game 2. None of it mattered.
Each time, from the stars all the way down to the lesser-known players, they stayed within their roles. Each time, they won.
“You work on connectivity throughout the course of the year for moments like these,” Brown said. “And no matter what run (the Spurs) went on, no matter what time of the game, our guys just kept uplifting one another, not just the guys on the floor but the guys on the bench.”
At times, the Knicks look like they share one brain.
With four minutes to go in the second quarter of Game 2, telepathy set in. Brunson drove to the hoop, but the Spurs’ towering shot-blocker Victor Wembanyama was in the way. He fired a pass to Landry Shamet in the corner. Shamet drove to his left. Wembanyama helped, and Shamet bounced a pass to Bridges in the opposite corner.
Less than five seconds remained on the shot clock by the time Bridges dribbled the basketball at Wembanyama. Most players would prepare for a hasty jumper in that moment, especially with the world’s most intimidating defender impeding a path to the hoop. But the Knicks don’t panic late in possessions. Somehow, they know what each teammate is thinking.
Bridges dished a pass to Brunson in the corner, then relocated to the right side. Brunson quickly swung the ball to Anunoby. Time slowed down. Only two seconds showed on the shot clock as Anunoby dribbled to the basket. This much movement in what should be a frantic moment is not the norm. Until Friday, it was not even an exception. It does not happen. And yet, the Knicks weren’t done.
Anunoby drove into Wembanyama at the basket and threw one more helper, this one an assist to Bridges in the right corner for a 3-pointer at the buzzer.
In 10 seconds, the Knicks reeled off four aggressive drives and five perfect passes. Not one player tried to be the hero.
Brunson described the possession as, “Just reading and reacting.”
“We were playing off each other,” he said.
But not everyone can read so quickly and react with such composure. Building to this moment took patience. And as Brown, Towns and others have dubbed it, it took “sacrifice.”
It took open-mindedness from the coaching staff and players alike when the early-season offense did not settle in properly. Brown wanted to run an attack more similar to the one the Knicks deployed against the Hawks, one that placed Towns as a passer in the middle with rapid movement around him. Towns could not get comfortable, and the Knicks veered away from many of the sets they tried in October.
That is — until they re-implemented them after falling 2-1 to the Hawks. Towns ran his sets with more precision. The plays he initiated came inside the 3-point arc, where they were supposed to begin all along, instead of too far from the paint, where they had errantly drifted back in autumn. Towns began passing on a higher percentage of his touches than ever, according to Second Spectrum. His defense reached levels it had never reached, taking another leap during his matchup with Wembanyama.
Towns bought in, as had everyone else.
Brunson moved off the ball more, which allowed him to bolt in every direction on defense. Bridges locked in as a point-of-attack defender, reaching levels of physicality he hadn’t in the regular season. Shamet went from out of the rotation to being unable to miss jumpers. Hart, who (as he has admitted) could lose sight of the grander goal on random nights when his minutes decreased, accepted that sometimes he must sit as Shamet or Miles “Deuce” McBride splashes in 3-pointers. Robinson is playing injured.
The Knicks did not arrive at this moment because of massive adjustments. It was a series of minuscule tweaks, some of which occurred long before the playoffs or even this season.
Want to see the subtleties of the Knicks’ wholly in-your-face dominance? Scan over to the weak side of the Spurs offense, where a long fascination of Anunoby is becoming a theme. The Knicks wing has obsessed for years over opponents’ screening tendencies. Through two finals games, he’s consistently blown up San Antonio’s.
Wembanyama will often lay a screen for whoever Anunoby is defending. But Anunoby isn’t going over or under or around the pick — nor is any other preposition appropriate to explain what is occurring on these plays. He is battering Wembanyama, ramming into a scrawny skyscraper and powering through. San Antonio’s plays cannot properly develop.
Robinson is contributing to a similarly nuanced cause. Back in 2024, the 7-footer refuted one claim from a reporter, who referred to him as a “shot blocker.”
He was no longer a spiker of dunks and layups, he insisted. That was the Robinson of old, the inexperienced one who left his feet to chase every possible swat. This version of Robinson was more refined.
“I alter shots,” he corrected.
At the end of Game 2, with a chance to even the series at one game apiece, the 7-foot-4 Wembanyama rose for a mid-range jump shot. Robinson, who Brown substituted into the game for defense, contested it. The ball hit the back rim, and the Knicks held on for a one-point victory.
“What I’m proud about more than anything else (is) Mitch defended him the right way,” Brown said. “Wemby is iconic. If he makes a shot, he makes a shot. You’re not blocking a shot. You make him work, you lead with your chest. … So just a heck of a job by Mitch guarding the most iconic player in the world on two possessions to possibly win the game.”
But Robinson’s discipline has long been in the making — as have Anunoby’s attention to detail, Towns’ resurgence, Shamet’s emergence, Brown’s scheming, Hart’s sacrificing and Clarkson’s mentality, which has trickled down to the rest of the group.
The stars, the miraculous fourth-quarter moments from Brunson or the constant demolition jobs from Towns, contribute to the Knicks’ greatness, but the factor that has sparked an all-time run extends far beyond talent at the top or even down the rest of the roster. New York is winning because its collective, at least so far, has been greater than anyone else’s. And if this team wins two more games, the collective will define its legacy.
