The New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs 105-104 in Game Two of the NBA Finals, their second straight win over San Antonio and the kind of one-possession result that can turn a series. Jalen Brunson tied it with an off-kilter jumper, then scored the winner after Victor Wembanyama threw the ball away in the closing seconds.
That finish mattered because the Knicks had already stolen Game One on the road, and now they leave San Antonio with a 2-0 lead. For a team that has spent much of this run being judged through bigger questions — whether Karl-Anthony Towns is the fulcrum, whether Mikal Bridges was worth the haul, whether Mike Brown could steady what Tom Thibodeau could not — this was the cleanest answer yet: New York has been the sharper team when the game tightens.
Wembanyama dragged the Spurs back into the game in the second half, and for a while it looked as if the home team might have enough to avoid the damage of losing Game One at home. But the final sequence belonged to Brunson, whose shot forced the tie before the turnover handed New York the opening it needed. The Knicks did not need a perfect night to win. They needed the last one, and they got it.
Bridges remains one of the most interesting pieces in that picture. New York paid a huge price to get him in 2023 — four unprotected first-round picks, a top-four protected first-round pick from the Milwaukee Bucks, an unprotected pick swap, a second-round pick and Bojan Bogdanović — after a stretch in which the Knicks had fallen in the second round to the Miami Heat. He had never missed an N.B.A. game, yet he still had not made an All-Star team and, for long stretches in New York, he had struggled to look like the player the front office thought it was buying. Even this season, there were warning signs; he struggled through the first three games of the first round against the Atlanta Hawks, and Brown benched him for part of Game Three.
That is what makes this two-game start so consequential. The Knicks fired Thibodeau after last season’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers and turned to Brown, hoping the roster would finally fit together under a new voice. In San Antonio, it has. The unanswered piece now is not whether New York can win a game like this; it is how much more pressure the Spurs can absorb after giving up both of the opening games and what Wembanyama does the next time the ball is in his hands at the end.
