SAN ANTONIO – The New York Knicks defeated the Spurs 94-90 in Game 5 on Saturday night, cementing their status as NBA champions and ending the young San Antonio team’s season.
It marks the Knicks’ third NBA championship, and their first in 53 years.
The Knicks won the series 4-1, rallying from double-digit deficits in all four of those victories. The deficit was 16 on Saturday night. Jalen Brunson and the Knicks were never fazed.
Brunson scored 45 points, including 13 straight for New York in the fourth quarter. He set a Knicks record for points in a finals game.
Dylan Harper scored 25 for the Spurs, who got 19 points, 14 rebounds and five blocked shots from Victor Wembanyama.
The Knicks improved to 4-0 in closeout opportunities this season, winning them all on the road. It didn’t feel like the road, though — not with thousands of New York faithful having made the trip to Texas to see a moment 53 years in the making.
Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart — the other two parts of the “Nova Knicks” trio that also includes Brunson, three players who were NCAA champions at Villanova and teamed up in New York to try to do the same — combined to score 27 points. Bridges had 14, Hart 13.
Brunson won NCAA crowns twice with Villanova — both in Texas, the 2016 one in Houston and the 2018 one in San Antonio, just a few miles away from the arena that the Spurs call home.
New York got to the brink of this title by rallying from 29 points down in Game 4 to win 107-106 on OG Anunoby’s tip-in with 1.2 seconds left on Wednesday night. It was the largest comeback in NBA Finals history and the biggest comeback in any game this season, regular season or playoffs.
By comparison, then, a 16-point rally in this one seemed easy.
Four of the five games in this series were decided in the final two minutes of regulation, a first for the NBA Finals, dating back to 1971.
Associated Press sports writer Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.