So much was swirling above Madison Square Garden before game three of the NBA Finals Monday night that you half expected a dimensional portal to appear overhead, Ghostbusters-style. It was the first finals home game for the Knicks in 26 years, featuring the highest ticket prices in NBA history, and a President of the United States whose mere attendance disrupted everything within a 10-block radius. A city that knows both scale and lunacy better than any on the planet had never seen anything quite like this; it felt like an infinite number of decades-gestating plotlines converging at once. Whatever angle you looked at it from, it was overwhelming.
And yet there was Victor Wembanyama, the center of this maelstrom, the future of this league, just sitting in Gramercy Park a few hours before the game, jotting down a drawing of a statue in his notebook. Like thousands of tourists before him, as if nothing else was going on at all.
That’s probably what it takes. That’s probably what’s required to keep your head with the entire planet swirling around it, no matter how high in the air that head may reside.
Wembanyama was the coolest character in the building Wednesday. He scored 32 points, grabbed eight rebounds, dished out six assists, blocked three shots and, more than anything else, anchored a suffocating second-half defense in the Spurs’ 115-111 victory. He assured that, dreams of “my mayor is Muslim, my bagels are Jewish, my Chistian’s Dior, Knicks in four” aside, this series is settling in for the long haul. That’s the thing about the NBA Finals: People get so amped up for every game—they especially get amped up when none of this has happened since the ‘90s— that they sometimes forget you need to win four of them.
The Knicks were up seven at halftime despite not playing particularly well: they turned the ball over on three of their first four possessions, and those giveaways would remain an issue all night. Then Wemby took over in the second half, and a miserable start to the third quarter—the Knicks missed their first 10 three-pointers—put New York in a hole they weren’t able to dig out of. They did mount yet another stirring comeback bid, this time led by a torrid OG Anunoby, who was the best Knick on the court for most of game three. But the fact remains that the best team won Monday night. That the Knicks were as close as they were should, in fact, be rather encouraging: On an off night for basically everybody but Anunoby and out-of-nowhere sub Jordan Clarkson — Jalen Bunson turned the ball over five times and looked worn down by that Spurs defense by the end — they still had a legitimate chance to win down the stretch.
There was some frustration among Knicks fans about the refs, but the foul disparity ended up being pretty small — 23 fouls for the Knicks, 21 for the Spurs. And while that video of Wembanyama tossing a head shot at Brunson in the first half was everywhere online (Wemby probably should have been called for a flagrant foul), this didn’t stop the Knicks from accruing that halftime lead. They just got outplayed in the second half. Besides, the hardest foul of the night ended up being the one Knicks guard Jose Alvarado laid on former mayor Michael Bloomberg.
At least he’ll always have American Samoa.
There will be inevitable talk of a Trump curse after the president showed up and, as always, disrupted everybody’s lives, but, well, you can’t blame him for the second half either, especially considering he didn’t seem to be awake for it.
And the good news is that he won’t be back for game four. (Right? Please?)
Look, I know the vibes have been immaculate in New York City for the last week, and, really since April 25 — which was, until Monday night, the last day the Knicks had actually lost a game. And I know that if they had gone up 3-0 on Monday, game four on Wednesday night would have been a party the likes of which we have never seen, a coronation of this Knicks team as saints, perhaps the most beloved New York team of our lifetime.
But the thing is: Winning a championship is really, really hard. It’s particularly hard against a seven-foot-six monster who spends his offseason with monks and his gameday afternoons sketching in the park with his sister. It was never going to be as simple as just winning 14 straight games and casually cruising to the Canyon of Heroes. The Knicks are — and always were — going to have to earn this. They are going to have to crawl and scrap and scrape and claw their way to every point. That’s what it requires to win an NBA championship. A sweep was never realistic. It’s always hard. It’s supposed to be hard.
And the good news is: Crawling and scraping and scraping and clawing are exactly what this Knicks team has shown it does best. The Knicks still have every advantage in this series, and they’ve got five tries to win two games. Nothing that happened on Monday signaled that they can’t do that very thing: they just have to do it. I still think they will.
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