That photo up there is of Jalen Brunson, who hit some huge shots down the stretch of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, led all players on both sides in scoring, and was talked up by his head coach as the hero of a game the underdog Knicks won, 105–95. "He did what MVP candidates are supposed to do," said a glowing Mike Brown, who pushed every correct button Wednesday night. "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."
I am going to tell myself that Brown heaped particular praise on Brunson not only because Brunson hit some big shots, or because Brown was still stirred by Brunson's recovery from what looked like a scary leg injury in the first quarter, but because he does not want to draw attention to what really won the game for the Knicks. New York triumphed in Game 1 because they pretty well ate up Victor Wembanyama, because they convincingly won the matchup against the player whose sudden ascendence to the very pinnacle of the sport has been the defining story of this NBA season. Nobody seemed to want to talk about it, after Brunson's theatrics: Across two ESPN recaps, neither coach is quoted so much as uttering the name of the man who outplayed Wemby. Allow me: Put simply, Karl-Anthony Towns kicked Wembanyama's ass.
Here was a fun, somewhat bewildering challenge for a Thursday morning: To search among the photos available in Defector's subscription with Getty Images and to find one that contains both Wembanyama and Towns. The image, in this case, should depict these two behemoths in relation to one another in such a way that the composition tells some essential truth about the contest. Shouldn't be too hard! Wembanyama played 37 minutes and Towns played 34 minutes, and the two guarded each other a lot. Turns out, this is an impossible task, possibly because it is just very difficult to frame up two players of their combined size.
If you didn't watch the game or check the score, and hadn't yet read anything about it, you might expect this image to do the job:
Here we have Wembanyama shooting the ball over Towns, releasing from an impossible height. Towns's lunging contest looks comedic, way down there. Wembanyama certainly did attempt to score over Towns Wednesday night, by my count getting up 12 shots with Towns as his defender. This image won't do, though, because it doesn't show the ball thudding off the side of the backboard or feebly grazing the outermost molecules of the rim before being rebounded by New York's Josh Hart. It also doesn't show Wemby attempting a second dribble move after having been stoned on a first-step, getting stoned again, and either pitching the ball back to a well-defended teammate or bonking the ball off of his own knee. Wembanyama made just two of the 12 shots he attempted while being guarded by Towns in Game 1, and committed three of his six turnovers. Towns, as a defender, gave Wemby a kind of hell that he has not yet experienced in his short playoff career.
How about this one?
Here we have Towns desperately trying to get a layup over Wembanyama. He has driven Wemby under the basket and crammed a forearm into his neck, but still Wembanyama's terrible left arm, itself approximately as long as I am tall, is up there between the ball and the basket. Wembanyama made this an impossible shot, and Towns missed it, and in fact after a review Towns was called for an offensive foul on the play.
This image also won't do, because it doesn't show Wembanyama having to lower himself into a defensive stance and pressure Towns way up the floor, and Towns ripping through Wemby's arms and beating him on a straight-line drive, pulling in a startled help defender—some diminutive Spurs guard possessed of all the force and authority of a rodeo clown—and thundering to the cup for a gorgeous layup. Towns roasted Wembanyama in this fashion twice in the first quarter; in the second quarter, with the Knicks down five and Miles McBride running point and the world holding its breath about Brunson's injury, Towns pivoted away from a thwarted hand-off, dribbled right, used a meaty shoulder to dislodge Wembanyama, and dropped home a full-speed up-and-under, and even managed to keep his feet in order to race back for a defensive stand. Towns finished with 18 points, 12 rebounds, and four assists; six of his seven buckets came with Wembanyama on the court, and four of them came with Wemby as his primary defender. The Knicks won Towns's minutes by 14 points.
It's been easier to think of the Spurs, of these two teams, as master problem-solvers, because the Spurs, as the younger and less experienced outfit, are having to figure out playoff basketball as they go, and because they've had the more impressive run of opponents. To me, any team that had already solved Oklahoma City could be expected to manage pretty comfortably the relatively pedestrian-seeming challenges posed by the New York Knicks. For one thing, Brunson, God love him, is a lot like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, only shorter and slower and far less athletically explosive. For another, though the Knicks have a trio of hellacious perimeter defenders in Hart, OG Anunoby, and Mikal Bridges, they don't have Oklahoma City's wing depth, and inevitably would need Landry Shamet to hold up against San Antonio's attacking guards, or would need an extremely well-meaning but tiny Jose Alvarado to battle through eye-popping positional mismatches, or [gulp] would have to survive consecutive minutes of the Jordan Clarkson experience. At one point Wednesday night the Knicks had Shamet and Clarkson on the floor together, and the realization hit my brain like a huff of smelling salts: Holy shit, man, this is the NBA Finals, you can't be serious with this.
But what the Knicks have that the Thunder do not is Karl-Anthony Towns. Towns is a particular problem. If you jammed Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein into Seth Brundle's telepods, the creature that emerged would first of all be even more repulsive than the Brundlefly, but also it would not be as troublesome an opponent for Wembanyama and the Spurs as Towns is. Towns has all of Hartenstein's strength and all of Holmgren's perimeter skills, but with the court vision of a genuine playmaker, with a veteran's command of the dark arts, with a star's comfort under intense pressure, and with his own showman's sense of the moment. And unlike OKC's duo of supporting ogres, Towns has a mandate to Go Off. For all of Brunson's possession-chewing solo artistry, New York's offense is not usually so focused that one of his teammates can't get some time to eat up a mismatch or enjoy the hot hand. A real strength that the Knicks can claim and Oklahoma City cannot is that it is possible at all to imagine the former winning a playoff game, even a Finals game, while being led by someone other than their star point guard. The guy they'd point to would be Karl-Anthony Towns.
This is part of why the Knicks seemed so far from panic when a limping Brunson was led into the bowels of the arena in the first damn quarter of the franchise's first damn Finals game since 1999. Towns is happy to link the action together from the top of the key, to set screens and do hand-offs and space the floor—sometimes in his career this has tipped over into passivity—but Wednesday night was a timely reminder that there are probably not more than one or two men his size or larger in the world who can match his combination of skills. Brunson was cold early and then was hobbled for a while, and didn't get it going, really, until the fourth quarter, but Towns kept the Knicks afloat by wearing out literally Victor Wembanyama, making the phenom with a convincing case for best living basketball player look weak, clumsy, and overmatched. And for good measure, in the second half he also worked over bumbling doofus Luke Kornet.
Brunson did his stone-cold-killer stuff down the stretch of the fourth, and when history reaches for a highlight from this game, it is likely to settle on Brunson's crazy, fading, contested jumper inside the final minute to put the Knicks up six points and take the last of the fight out of the home team. Brunson finished with 30 points, 13 of which came in the final frame, when the Knicks were pulling ahead and then away. But it was a struggle, and not only because of the bonked knee: Brunson had approximately the same troubles with San Antonio's terrifying defense that were experienced by Gilgeous-Alexander, with the same occasional breakthroughs to salvage what otherwise might've gone down as catastrophically inefficient shot-creation.
The Knicks swiped home-court advantage, flipped the series on its head, and heaped pressure onto the Spurs. What is fun about this is that they did it in a way that superficially satisfies the perception of them as Jalen Brunson plus some supporting guys, while showcasing once again that they only achieve They Might Truly Do The Shit levels of excellence when Brunson's teammates are freed to kick someone's ass, and the tiny dribbling guy can pick out his moments. In Game 1, the Knicks had a solution to the biggest problem the sport has to offer, and it was Karl-Anthony Towns, who'd been hiding in plain sight all along. His heroics may yet escape public attention the way they evaded professional photography. You can be sure the Spurs have noticed.
