NBA Finals: 'Things aren't going to be pretty' — Knicks dig deep to survive Game 2 brawl and extend playoff win streak to 13
SAN ANTONIO — The physicality began about an hour and a half before Friday’s opening tip.
That’s when Mike Brown started flicking himself in the head.
“One of the things that we preach is being present,” the head coach of the New York Knicks explained to reporters during his press conference before Game 2 of the 2026 NBA Finals. “In order to be present, you can't think about the past, you can't think about the future. For all of us as humans, that's hard as heck to do.”
Sometimes, it requires a reminder.
“I constantly — boom — flick myself in the head,” Brown said, demonstrating. “Tell myself: be present, be present, be present. I obviously mention it to the group, too. With those guys being who they are, they've really embraced it, and they're really trying to live it every single moment during this run.”
Brown’s Knicks couldn’t think about the past. About the 12 straight games they’d won coming into Friday, one of the most remarkable runs in NBA playoff history. About the 12-point hole they’d dug early on in Game 2 against a San Antonio Spurs squad fighting for its season. About the incredible work they’d done in the second and third quarters to climb out of it, taking a 14-point lead of their own on a two-hand OG Anunoby dunk directly in front of Victor Wembanyama midway through the fourth quarter.
Boom. Flick. Be present.
They couldn’t think about the future. About the sound of the final buzzer, just six minutes away, that would signal that they were halfway home. About extending this miraculous stretch into a seventh week, into a city in the grip of a collective paroxysm of unbridled joy. About the career-defining achievement on the other end of that joy — the proverbial brass ring, the literal golden trophy, just beyond their reach.
Boom. Flick. Be present.
They had more pressing matters to attend to — namely, the final minute of Game 2, which had gone from coronation to coronary for New York in the blink of an eye.
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Facing the nearly existential crisis of a 2-0 deficit, the Spurs rose from the mat and charged the Knicks with everything they had, ripping off a 21-5 run capped by a Wembanyama and-1 to give the Spurs a 104-102 lead with 57.3 seconds to go. Suddenly, those visions of a parade down the Canyon of Heroes began to dissipate; suddenly, the Knicks were the team that couldn’t buy a bucket or string together consecutive steady possessions. Couldn’t go back to where they were; couldn’t just teleport to where they wanted to be.
The good news? They’d been preparing for this.
Boom. Flick. Be present.
The message Brown delivered during that 21-5 run? “Stay composed.”
“We could have folded a few times,” he said. “But our guys just kept fighting. They kept fighting, and the one thing I told them that, you know — you work on connectivity throughout the course of the year for moments like these. And no matter what run they went on, no matter what time of the game, our guys just kept uplifting one another.”
Brunson, mired in a 6-for-23 shooting night, attacked Spurs forward Julian Champagnie, got two feet in the paint, bumped the larger defender off, stepped back and drained a tough-as-hell one-legged fadeaway jumper to knot the game at 104 with 39.3 seconds remaining. Two possessions later, he’d drain a clutch free throw to put the Knicks back in front.
“For J.B., you call it rough shooting nights — I see him hitting the free throw to give us the game [...] the last game, he hit some of the craziest shots I've seen to give us the game,” Knicks big man Karl-Anthony Towns said. “So I don't know if … you say a rough shooting night, I see Captain Clutch doing what he's always been doing since I got here. When it comes down to the actual game? To winning the game? Number 11 can't be messed with.”
But with the Spurs dogging him all night long, blitzing and trapping and bumping and harassing him the full 94-by-50, No. 11 needed help. He’d gotten plenty earlier in the game from Towns (21 points, 13 rebounds, 4 assists), who continues to look like the best player in the series and has roundly outplayed Wembanyama through two games. He’d gotten more from Mikal Bridges (20 points, 6 rebounds, 6 assists), who made some huge shots and huge plays in the pick-and-roll to help the Knicks withstand a stretch with both Brunson and a foul-trouble-plagued Towns on the bench in the third quarter.
In that final minute, though, Brunson got it from Mitchell Robinson, whose status for this series was in question as recently as three days ago after undergoing surgery to repair a broken bone in his right hand, but who was on the floor for two critical possessions in the final minute of a tied Finals game. Because somebody needed to guard that giant French dude, and Mitch damn sure wasn’t going to miss that opportunity.
“I know we needed stops, and I had picked up a few fouls on him — like, I think, what, three early on?” Robinson said after the game. “So, in my mind, I was just like, defend without fouling. So that was kind of like how it went. Just, great contest.”
Two of them, actually:
“Just a heck of a job by Mitch guarding the most iconic player in the world on two possessions to possibly win the game,” Brown said. “Phenomenal.”
Brunson’s late-game buckets and Robinson’s late-game stops, combined with a catastrophic San Antonio turnover with 10.5 seconds to go, got the Knicks over the finish line in a 105-104 thriller to take a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven set, as the scene now shifts to New York for Monday’s Game 3. Madison Square Garden promises to be an absolute madhouse, for multiple reasons; then again, damn near everywhere these Knicks go turns into a madhouse nowadays.
You could hear it in the stands at Frost Bank Center, where another batch of loud and proud Knicks fans packed another road arena, dueling their hosts with “Let’s go, Knicks” chants early and celebrating throughout the concourse late. You could see it in the bowels of the arena after the game, where Ben Stiller and Fat Joe traded observations with reporters about the Knicks’ ability to keep taking punches and delivering counters, and where an enraptured Timothée Chalamet hugged friends, a Cheshire Cat grin spread across his face.
Karl Towns Sr., having just watched his son once again roundly outplay the anointed future face of the sport, jovially chatted with Stephen A. Smith before heading for the exit, saying, “Two more, two more,” as he walked off. And Hall of Fame legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier, the franchise point guard of the Knicks’ 1970 and 1973 championship teams, held court in front of a gigantic replica of the Larry O’Brien Trophy, offering a sharp appraisal of Wembanyama’s costly final half-minute.
“I saw [the last jumper was off,” Frazier told Yahoo Sports. “I could look at his face. He wasn’t shooting with confidence. He's fatigued. He doesn't know how to pace himself. That turnover? He was exhausted. Come on, that was egregious. [And then the] foul? Come on, man, you just lost the ball. Why are you fouling? You see, when you get tired mentally, you’re losing … a little calamity. And it cost them the game.”
And maybe more than that. The Knicks have now won 13 consecutive games and haven’t lost in 45 days; the Spurs now need to beat them four times in five games in the next two weeks. The odds are firmly against them: This is the 47th time in NBA history that a team has gone up 2-0 on the road in a seven-game playoff series, according to WhoWins.com, and 41 of the first 46 teams to do so went on to win the series.
“It was going to take everything to win the series anyway,” said Spurs guard Stephon Castle. “Putting ourselves in this type of predicament is going to be tough, but I don’t think it’s anything we can’t handle.”
“We just got to try to make history not repeat itself,” said backcourt mate De’Aaron Fox.
It’s not just the weight of all of NBA history on the Spurs, though; it’s the specific challenge of the recent history of their opponent.
The Hawks made the Knicks taste their own blood in Round 1; the Knicks responded by rattling off three straight wins by a combined 96 points. The 76ers bounced back from a brutal Game 1 beatdown to put a scare into the Knicks in a six-point Game 2 loss; the Knicks responded by winning two games in Philadelphia by a combined 44 points. The Cavaliers put the Knicks in a 22-point hole in Game 1; the Knicks responded by outscoring them by 99 points over the remainder of the series.
These Knicks don’t squander their opportunities. They exploit them, ruthlessly, often to the tune of overwhelming blowouts. Maybe that won’t happen against a Spurs team that is capable of throwing haymakers of its own — again, San Antonio has taken double-digit leads on New York in both of the first two games in this series — and that has shown what Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson calls “competitive response” to come back in each of its previous three playoff series.
“We don't feel like we played well or up to our standard at least in the last two games. New York has played very well, and they're a part of that,” Johnson said after the game. “But we're going to go into Game 3, and if we play our brand of basketball up to our standard, we'll be just fine.”
That’s the thing, though: If the Spurs do play up to that standard, and drag the Knicks back down into the mud, the Knicks have now proven comfortable with playing that kind of game, and eminently capable of winning it.
“At this stage of the season, things aren't going to be pretty,” Brunson said. “It's going to be ugly. It's going to be grind-it-out. It's simple as that.”
If it stays that simple — if the Knicks come out for Game 3 against the Spurs with the same mentality, poise, attention to detail and competitive fire they displayed against Atlanta, Philadelphia and Cleveland — then this series might not be coming back to San Antonio.
“I don't think so,” Frazier told Yahoo Sports. “I think it's our destiny now, the way things have unfolded for the Knicks. Every game — the grit, the resiliency, the resourcefulness. I don't see it ending, because we've got 10 guys that are thriving. So, like tonight, Jalen was mediocre, and somebody steps up. And it’s been that way.”
That kind of collective effort, will and spirit is vanishingly rare. Brown, a veteran of more than three decades on NBA benches, knows that all too well; he’s seen it in the championship teams on which he’s served as an assistant. Now that he sits two wins away from reaching the mountaintop as a head coach, he doesn’t need a head-flick reminder to appreciate it, to not take it for granted.
“It's an amazing feeling as a coach to know how mentally tough your team is, no matter what the situation is in front of them — to see them continue to fight and fight and fight and fight, no matter what the score is, no matter how much time is on the clock, it's just a fantastic feeling,” Brown said. “The NBA is tough. You don't experience what I'm experiencing with this group a ton. And it is a freaking joy to be around.”
