Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, including 13 straight for New York in the fourth quarter, as the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 in Game 5 to win the NBA Finals 4-1 for the first time in 53 years.
SAN ANTONIO — The celebration didn’t wait for the last buzzer. It began the moment the Knicks proved, again, that they could turn the lights back on when everything looked dark.
In Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Saturday night, Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, including 13 straight for New York in the fourth quarter, and the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 94-90. New York captured the series 4-1, and for the first time in 53 years, the franchise rules the NBA.
“I have no words,” Brunson said during the on-court celebration. “It’s everything I ever dreamed of.”
Brunson closed with a Finals flourish that belongs in the record books. He set a Knicks record for points in a finals game. topping a mark that had been 38 by Willis Reed against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3 of the 1970 series. Now it belongs to the left-handed point guard who changed New York’s fortunes when he arrived four years ago.
Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart — the other two parts of the “Nova Knicks” trio that also includes Brunson — combined for 27 points. Bridges scored 14 and Hart had 13. Those numbers mattered, but it was the way the Knicks kept finding a gear at the exact moments the Spurs seemed poised to bury them.
Afterward, Brunson tried to describe a feeling that didn’t fit neatly into a single sentence.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling,” he said. “I’m in awe. Whenever someone counted us out, we found a way to come back and do something about it.”
For the Spurs, Dylan Harper scored 25. Victor Wembanyama had 19 points, 14 rebounds and five blocked shots.
New York’s win came with the kind of stakes that make sports history feel less like a concept and more like a weight on the body. The Knicks improved to 4-0 in closeout opportunities this season, winning all of them on the road. It did not feel like a road trip for a fan base that filled the stands in Texas for a moment 53 years in the making.
The series had already trained everyone to expect the unexpected. In three of their four previous wins, New York rallied from double-digit deficits, including the largest comeback in NBA Finals history.
On Wednesday night, the Knicks erased a 29-point deficit in Game 4 to win 107-106 on OG Anunoby’s tip-in with 1.2 seconds left.
So when Saturday night brought a 16-point deficit, it didn’t land like a crisis. It landed like a question New York had already learned how to answer.
The opening minutes followed the familiar shape of the series. San Antonio took a double-digit lead in the first quarter, then carried a lot of it into the second. The Spurs became the first team in the play-by-play era. which started in the 1996-97 season. to lead five Finals games by 10 points or more in first quarters.
The Knicks, though, struggled to find their rhythm early. New York missed 16 of their first 18 shots and didn’t make each of their first 11 two-point attempts. At one point in the second quarter, Wembanyama had more blocked shots (five) than the Knicks had made shots (four). San Antonio’s advantage reached as many as 10 in the first quarter and as many as 16 in the second.
None of it held up.
A 22-9 run in the second quarter got the Knicks within three before Devin Vassell scored just before the halftime buzzer to give San Antonio a 42-37 edge at the break. The 79 combined points in the first half were the lowest in a Finals game since Game 7 of Lakers-Celtics in 2010. and the 31.8% combined field goals by the Knicks and Spurs in the first half was the lowest in a Finals game in the play-by-play era.
It was a bad opening for New York and a strong one for San Antonio — and still, it didn’t matter the way it usually would. The Knicks kept coming back, and this time, they finished the series the same way they started finding momentum: with Brunson at the center of it.
Brunson’s path to this moment runs through the very ground of Texas. He won NCAA titles twice with Villanova — both in Texas, the 2016 championship in Houston and the 2018 championship in San Antonio, just a few miles away from the arena the Spurs call home.
A Texas three-step of titles brought him here, and on Saturday night, the final stop was the sweetest.
Jalen Brunson New York Knicks San Antonio Spurs NBA Finals Game 5 94-90 53 years Mike Brown Mikal Bridges Josh Hart Victor Wembanyama OG Anunoby Devin Vassell