SAN ANTONIO — "Wow … more Knicks fans?" said a local child, dejectedly, as he rounded a corner on the River Walk, only to encounter a cheerful man wearing a "Nueva York" edition David Lee jersey. Saturday morning, before Game 5 of the NBA Finals, this child's Spurs team still had life in it yet. But from the tone of his voice, it was clear that he had lost some emotional battle already.
Presumably this child had heard the visiting fans calling out "Knicks in five" from the guided river boat tours, like a flotilla of insurgents. He'd seen them traveling in packs on foot, downing margaritas, turning his sweltering city walkable by force of will. He knew the enemy was in his midst and there was nothing to be done about it. When I heard his voice, I began to consider the comic-book supervillainous aspect of a fanbase that can simply pick up and drop a borough's worth of its bravest—or most unwell, or least fiscally responsible—soldiers onto any city in the country.
Then I remembered that the Knicks still had a game to win. If turning a road game into a home game by sheer invasion would help finish the job, after 53 years of waiting, then so be it. Sorry to that child. He'll get his in time.
The Knicks fans who made the trip out to Texas did it in style. They were rocking Eddy Curry jerseys at the Alamo. They were putting Jalen Brunson in a turban and putting that on a T-shirt. They had flown solo from Singapore for a single game, before flying right back. They were digging out vintage gear that had sat folded in a closet for 25 years, still bearing those creases on this day of salvation. They were stomping down the River Walk with a blue and orange cowboy hat, multiple chunky Knicks necklaces, baggy denim shorts emblazoned with the team logos, and argyle socks to match. Does it require decades of misery to build such religious fervor? Do you need to be traumatized to care this much, or do you just need to be priced out of your home stadium? When people this obsessed finally have a good team on the floor, how can you ever stop the swarm?
At least while the sun was up, all the Spurs fans were polite and mild. My whole day leading up to the game was full of good-natured roasting and ribbing from the locals. "Man, you got the wrong jacket on," an airline employee said, sweetly, as I walked off the plane, which had departed seven hours late but dumped me sleepless into town with 12 hours to kill before tipoff. My driver from the airport spent the drive fondly reminiscing about Queens, where he'd grown up, then on arrival told me not to wear that "New York shit" around town, because he was with Victor Wembanyama now.
Literally every local I spoke to appeared to regard New Yorkers as violent degenerates, making frequent reference to viral videos of Spurs fans attacked in the streets of Manhattan (though their own fan base returned the favor that day with eggs and fists, as some New Yorkers and Hell Gate's Max Rivlin-Nadler experienced firsthand). Personally, my most confusing heckler was a guy in a Spurs hat leaning out of a car to yell "Yo, Knicks in six, fuckers!" How are you passionate enough to curse us out, but only confident enough to project your team will win one more game?
Despite the team's attempts to limit ticket sales to people with billing addresses within 150 miles of San Antonio, as soon as I lined up to get into the arena it was clear from the saturated hues of the clothing that the crowd would be at least half Knicks fans. Their concentration appeared to increase the farther you ascended from the court: My section in the nosebleeds was at about 80 percent strength, and within an arm's length I could converse with Long Island, Harlem, and Westchester. On supposedly enemy turf, I could still look directly behind me and locate a Nate Robinson St. Patrick's Day jersey. (Other Knicks jerseys spotted, awash in a sea of Brunsons: Danilo Gallinari, Jamal Crawford, and a No. 50 that could've been Mike Sweetney, Zach Randolph, or Eddie House, depending on its wearer's depravity; I couldn't see the back to confirm.) Walking around on the concourse, neighbors and friends bumped into each other, 1,800 miles from home. I walked by an impromptu prayer circle, tightly bound by hugs, and one arm peeled away to give me a fist bump.
Spontaneous chants of "Let's go Knicks" dueled with "Go Spurs go" as fans went up the escalators to find their seats, already deafening with an hour before tipoff. A guy walked into the bathroom, looked around, and shouted, "Oh, it's a Knicks bathroom. I didn't realize I was in New York." I can understand why they wanted to keep the invasive species out. This was the sort of NBA Finals where role players could still earn chants on the road, so loud you can hear them on the broadcast; even hard-working Deuce McBride, who threw up bricks for a week, earned them earlier in the series. From where I sat in this game, the local "Olé, olé, olé, olé" chant was drowned out, repurposed into "Jose, Jose, Jose, Jose" in tribute to Knicks backup point guard Jose Alvarado.
Game 5 followed the usual pattern of the series: The Spurs built a double-digit lead in the first quarter, looking nimbler and younger, like something from the future. The Knicks missed 16 of their first 18 shots, and managed just 37 points even after a big run to close out the second half. But the Spurs hadn't fared much better, posting just 42, and the game was about to follow another familiar pattern. As the ending neared, the Spurs still looked younger, only this time in a bad way—skittish, stubborn, unable to find reliable methods. Once again, the Knicks began to thrum. They stirred out of their stupor, got their stops, and stayed within arm’s reach, before lurching ahead right at the finish. If you'd cut out every game of this series at the 46-minute mark, the Spurs would have won in five.
The Knicks' signature style of victory in these Finals—grinding, steady inevitability—must have been engineered in a lab to heal decades of fan heartbreak. It is a balm to any viewer who has been conditioned by this fandom to expect the exact opposite. So much of this year's Knicks team, in fact, seems designed to counteract the past. Instead of hunting for washed-up and bloated superstars, as the franchise did for decades, team president Leon Rose assembled a roster with patience and discipline, building toward on-court harmony rather than blindly mashing together big names. Instead of being undermined by meddling from the top, as they had been for so long, all this hard work was done while team owner James Dolan was distracted, building his lurid dream in Las Vegas. Instead of letting team dynamics sour and fester, as they did so often during the Isiah Thomas and Phil Jackson eras, they threw together a group of actual childhood friends, then let an affable coach run the show. And after spending some 15 dire years without a credible point guard, they found Jalen Brunson.
For a franchise defined by tumult and collapse, Brunson manufactures calm and certainty. He has made a habit of correcting a whole team's worth of mistakes in the last five minutes of a game, often singlehandedly. He does so not with nonchalance, but with one bruising, pivoting, pump-faking drive at a time. The phrase that kept popping up in my head in this game was "skilled labor," because it indeed looked laborious, especially against defenders as physical as the Spurs, and because the technical details of Brunson's game are so visible, with each stutter step and shoulder bump. Every centimeter of separation from the defender is earned the hard way.
While this Knicks postseason had been defined by its collective overlapping brilliance of many players at different times, at the end, it simplified itself down to the little guy at its core. As Karl-Anthony Towns flamed out with foul trouble—some habits die hard—the outrageous shooting of OG Anunoby chilled, and the deep bench struggled to contribute, Brunson authored his first and last classic of the series, 45 points of myth-making. He figured out how to solve the spatial riddle of Victor Wembanyama, arcing pull-up threes over the big man's fingertips, dislodging him with a well-placed forearm, making him dance and getting him tired. The Knicks captain was unambiguously the best player on the floor, and even though two of his co-stars looked like contenders for the honor at earlier points in the series, the Finals MVP was cohering in real time.
For all the hard work Brunson did, the last few minutes of the game are still a blur in my memory. Heartbeats spiked amid the clanked free throws that could have salted away the win earlier. The Knicks fans in the upper deck seemed to experience a spiritual sphincter-tightening all at once, as the championship approached, and perhaps some old memories of failure flashed unbidden into our minds. But then Wemby missed a desperation three, the last seconds melted off the clock, and there was nothing left to do: 94-90, Knicks in five. People around me hugged, screamed, cried, called loved ones up on the phone, sat stunned with heads in hands. For me: mostly fuzzy shock. I grabbed my friends, hopped around, and recorded a video that mostly depicts a stairwell. The belief that it had actually happened, and the little tears that came with it, only hit me many hours later, as I revisited the collective evidence in postgame interviews and slowed-down highlights.
Spurs fans streamed out promptly and Knicks fans trickled down to the bottom of each deck, where they watched the trophy presentation and savored the possibly once-in-a-lifetime catharsis of booing James Dolan as he held the Larry O'Brien Trophy. In that moment, I became aware of a new type of Knicks fan: one invested in the team enough to fly to Texas, but somehow unaware of why fans might boo the owner, and asking a neighbor for an explanation.
As the players took the mic in turns, they were each hailed by all these travelers who saw clearly what each piece of this ensemble had contributed along the way. Fans leaked slowly out of the arena, chanting and embracing still, then pooled again outside the arena to shout about Becky Hammon or Trae Young, pose by the statue of a Spur, hold up at least one hand-written sign about how it'd be OK to die now, and take photos with bands of euphoric strangers, as two cops on horses looked on. Then all of them slowly diffused out to bars across town, where they caroused and sang and got beat up and got on planes and got the hell out of San Antonio.
