It’s been nearly a week since Game 5, and I’m still flabbergasted by how much fun the NBA Finals were, how cinematic it all became, and how many 50/50 calls went against the Knicks—none of which mattered in the end!
It was a tremendous ride, but you knew that already. All five games were contested until literally the final minute, the ratings were the highest they’ve been in 28 years, and more than just competitive, this series felt like something that sports fans will remember for a really long time. That part was new, relative to most of what we’ve seen from the NBA this decade. For example, I can’t remember a single Thunder, Celtics or Nuggets highlight from the previous three Finals matchups, whereas O.G. Anunoby’s game-winning tip-in will be part of every Finals montage for the next 50 years.
Every now and then sports are just perfect. That’s where we were watching two weeks of Knicks-Spurs and an eventual Knicks title. To celebrate the occasion, I’m here today with three takes on what I loved, and what I’ll be amazed by forever.
Let’s start with Wemby.
1. Wemby Was a Wonderful Villain
To review: Victor Wembanyama entered the Finals having just won hearts and minds as he took down a wildly unpopular Thunder team. He delivered one of the single greatest playoff performances in recent memory to win Game 1 of the West Finals on the road, in overtime, and then anchored a thrilling win in Game 7, again on the road in OKC. At 22 years old, he looked like the best player on earth, poised to become the best player the league has seen since prime LeBron. On the way into this series, I admitted on GOAT that this was the first time in my life I’d seriously indulged the possibility that someone other than Michael Jordan could be remembered as the greatest player of all time.
So that’s where we were, collectively, as a basketball community. And I should emphasize here that Wemby’s presence over the past few weeks—both his legendary potential and the MVP impact he’s already making—added spectacle and historical weight to the Finals that simply wouldn’t have been there without him. Sure the Knicks are a big market team with a giant fan base and a legendary stadium, but if it had been Knicks-Thunder, all of this would have felt considerably smaller. Instead, everyone outside of New York who tuned in for Game 1 was watching in large part to see how one of the most promising young players of all time would respond to being thrust onto the biggest stage in basketball.
What came next is still fairly incredible, even several days after the final buzzer. Not since LeBron’s Decision in 2010 have we seen an NBA superstar so comprehensively lose the room and forfeit the benefit of the doubt among fans, and not since LeBron in 2011 have we seen a superstar fail on the court quite as comprehensively as Wemby did during crunch time against the Knicks. To be clear, it wasn’t quite as extreme as either LeBron case, but those are the only parallels. Instead of winning over America, Wemby became a wonderful foil as the entire country fell in love with the Knicks.
On the court, the latter LeBron comp was really the story for the Spurs. This loss wasn’t about De’Aaron Fox shot selection, Steph Castle’s struggles, or Mitch Johnson not putting the ball in Dylan Harper’s hands often enough. All those problems were real and part of the story, of course, but going back to the final minutes of Game 1, Wemby consistently came up empty when the Spurs were searching for answers. He didn’t know what he wanted to do on offense, he turned the ball over on crucial possessions in each of the first two games, he missed two shots in the final 30 seconds of Game 2 and two massive free throws in Game 4, he scored just 3 points in the fourth quarter Saturday night, and he got beat by Mitchell Robinson on a free throw rebound as the Knicks sealed Game 5. On the other end, his defense was good but faded in second halves, and he committed multiple flagrant fouls that may well have left him suspended for Game 6 even if the Spurs had survived Game 5.
Wemby’s numbers for the series were fine—26 points-per-game, 11 rebounds per-game, 3 blocks-per-game, on 42% shooting—but also fairly misleading. When the Spurs needed a superstar in the fourth quarter of five games that were all close, Wemby shot 34% from the field and San Antonio was 20 points worse with him on the court. He hasn’t yet developed a face-up midrange jumper and he wasn’t physical enough to go inside consistently, and those holes became painful. The refs gave the Spurs every conceivable chance to win Game 2 and Game 5, in particular, but Wemby couldn’t close. The weaknesses of Fox, Castle and Harper became acute because San Antonio was repeatedly forced to rely on players other than the best player in the world to have any shot at responding to a Knicks team that refused to disappear.
As for Wemby’s reputational whiplash, we can start with Adam Silver. “I’m amazed at Victor,” Silver said before Game 1. “Not just his play on the floor, but he’s such a curious young man. He’s a pleasure to talk to. He’s very worldly. He’s got amazing interests off the floor. He’s really dedicated to his craft. And he’s got such a bright future ahead of him.”
That’s how Wemby has been discussed in official channels for the past three years, and certainly the past three months. At the grassroots level, all I can say is that GOAT received an email halfway through the series denouncing Wembanyama’s “totally see-through vapid bullshit” and I had plenty of friends expressing similar sentiments over the past few weeks. Not everyone loved the breathless coverage of Wemby walking barefoot through Madison Square Garden (“so he can really feel the ground”), sketching statues in Gramercy Park (“As he sat there, sketching Hamlet, he saw his perspective on a tragic figure.”), or turning down endorsement deals for soda (Wemby’s agent: “Victor will never sell soda. Because he doesn’t want to kill the kids.”). To the latter point, my friend Kirk Henderson pointed out that Wembanyama’s agent just implied LeBron has been killing kids with Sprite for the past 25 years.
I think Wemby is genuinely very intelligent, but as I wrote in December, he’s also very invested in seeming smart. Like Nikola Jokic mocking him at the All-Star Game, fans can and do see through it. So yes, his Spurs massively outperformed what I expected them to do back before Christmas, and all things considered, this was still a phenomenal run for a 22-year-old who was playing the first playoff game of his life two-and-a-half months ago. Had he lost to OKC in seven games, that’s where the conversation would still be. The issue, though, is that as soon as Wemby was universally recognized as the new face of the league, he sort of faceplanted. It’s not life or death, but we can be honest about what happened and how it was received.
In addition to his three week turn as Sacha Baron Cohen’s character in Talladega Nights, there were multiple cheap shots and flagrant fouls, some of which went uncalled because the league couldn’t risk having him suspended, fueling mainstream resentment. He taunted Mitchell Robinson halfway through Game 4 and, as Draymond Green pointed out afterward, failed to take any individual responsibility after the historic collapse. He then said of a comeback from 3-1, on the way into Game 5, that “everyone [on the Spurs] knows we are going to do it.” When they didn’t do it, he walked off the floor without shaking hands with the Knicks. In comments afterward, he never credited the Knicks as a team, but did offer one compliment to Jalen Brunson (in French), and then signed off by telling media, “Appreciate y’all” (great) before muttering “see y’all never” (weird energy).
All told, if casual fans left the Finals feeling like Wemby is a child prodigy who’s overrated, occasionally dirty, coddled by broadcasters and the league, and petulant in the face of adversity and defeat… aren’t the facts mostly on their side? Again, no one is damning him for eternity, but he’s got plenty of room to grow. And the key here—as well as the reason to be honest and unsparing about the failures—is that all of that will only make him more compelling, and more magnetic, as soon as next season begins. People who learned to root against Wemby in June will love doing it again next year; everyone else will be watching to see whether the greatest player of the next generation can come back and make every critic look like a fool.
What’s certain for now is that Wemby missed just about every big shot he took against the Knicks, and for all the time he’s invested in mindfulness, he snapped and faltered, mentally, over and over in these games. Someone tweeted that he “tried Aura gambling all Finals, went 0/5, and he can’t lose with grace.” That feels about right for Wembanyama’s first trip to the biggest stage in basketball. We’ll see what happens from here.
Now, if it’s aura you’re looking for, let’s talk Knicks.
2. I Was Wrong About the Knicks
One of my favorite artifacts from the past 15 years of NBA Twitter was the Carmelo Anthony Apology Form:
I don’t have my own apology form to complete and sign today, but I do have to formally repent: I was wrong about the 2026 Knicks. In the end, it was a 53-win team that delivered New York from a 53-year title drought, and while I did pick them to win this series, I doubted this group on podcasts for basically two years straight. At one point this winter I think I guaranteed they would disappoint everyone in May. Two months ago, in an article highlighting title alternatives to the Thunder, I wrote: “I feel obligated to at least mention the Knicks, a team I do not believe in at all that could nevertheless run the table and shock the world (or at least me).”
In short, I didn’t watch the actual games. I don’t know basketball. I was jealous of the Knicks. Mercury was in retrograde.
Now here we are.
Every player in the Knicks rotation is now a New York City legend forever, so just for fun, let me be more specific on some of the assumptions I made that led me astray.
For one, I never thought that Karl-Anthony Towns and Brunson could hold up defensively across four playoff rounds. They did. I thought Mikal Bridges was overrated on both ends of the floor and O.G. Anunoby was too inconsistent and injury prone to count on. Bridges was a solid B for the Knicks, while Anunoby stayed healthy and looked like an A+ more often than not.
I didn’t think Mike Brown was a particularly inspired choice to replace Tom Thibodeau, who I thought the Knicks fired in large part because they couldn’t change anything else about a clunky, expensive team that had just collapsed as favorites against the Pacers. Brown, though, pushed all the right buttons—great challenges, great tweaks to defend Wemby lobs, and the team was relaxed and clearly loved him. Brown trusted the bench more than Thibs ever would have, and guys like Jose Alvarado, Landry Shamet, and Mitchell Robinson alternated big games and were better than any role players San Antonio was counting on. To that end, I’m not going to apologize for not foreseeing Shamet as an invaluable playoff role player, but fine, if we’re being technical, that’s yet another thing I was wrong about.
In general, and in all seriousness, I failed to account for the raw talent at the top of this roster, and to properly respect the game and leave room for the possibility that basketball is mysterious. You never know when it will all fall into place for teams, but as long as there’s talent, there’s always a chance. Anunoby averaged 16.3 points-per-game on 41.7% shooting and 33.9% from three in last year’s playoffs; this year he averaged 20.1 points-per-game on 56.1% from the field, and 48.9% from three. He was effectively a third superstar, and on nights when KAT didn’t have it, like in Game 4, O.G. usually did. He finished that game with 33 points, capped by the tip-in that made him a legend forever and saved Josh Hart from a lifetime of infamy.
And of course there was also Game 5, when none of the Knicks had anything going and Brunson carried them anyway. That had always been the Knicks formula, and because of his size, I didn’t think Brunson’s ball-dominant Hercules routine could ever scale to a championship level. Becky Hammon was right, as far as I was concerned. And sure, the Knicks added some variety under Mike Brown and Brunson was more of a mixed bag through the first four games, but when it mattered, I was dead wrong. In addition to 45 points and one of the greatest closeout performances of all time, Brunson was consistently great in crunch time—in the final two minutes of these games, Wemby had 4 points on 1 of 7 shooting, with two turnovers. Brunson: 17 points, 7 of 13 shooting, zero turnovers.
I don’t want to keep picking on Wemby (or do I?), but he was asked after the series about what he’d learned from a Knicks team that “kept coming up with answers,” and Wembanyama said the following: “I learned one of many things, the margin of error is very, very thin. Our domination stints are absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series. But our errors, our mistakes, are punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this.”
Rather than take the opportunity to compliment a deserving champion, Wemby was not just ungracious, but flatly incorrect. The Spurs dominated for some of the series, but the Knicks dominated more.
New York was clearly the better team in Games 1 and 2, and the latter was only close at the end because of some of the most one-sided playoff officiating we’ve seen this decade. In Game 4, the Knicks owned the second half (obviously), and in Game 5, they out-executed the Spurs over and over again down the stretch. By that point we’d seen those dynamics play out so often that the eventual 10-point fourth quarter comeback wasn’t even mildly surprising.
What I came to love about this group was how many different ways they could win. At the beginning of the Finals, KAT was the hero who outplayed Wemby. Last Saturday, it was Brunson. In Game 4, down 27 at halftime, it had to be everyone, but it was especially Anunoby, Brunson, Hart, and Alvarado, who shared the fourth quarter ballhanding load and hit two massive threes down the stretch. All these players clearly trusted each other and especially trusted Brunson, and each of them had been doubted by many more people than just me. Together they finished the playoffs with a 16-3 record and a playoff net rating that can be seen from outer space. They dominated the teams they were supposed to beat, and then, in crunch time, repeatedly humiliated the team that was supposed to beat them.
I’m not at all mad that my skepticism now looks idiotic. Some of the most delightful stories in the history of sports came when teams banded together to make conventional wisdom look ridiculous. This was one of those moments, and I loved every second of it.
3. The NBA Mattered Again
One final thing that I enjoyed about this series was how many normal, non-online friends reached out to talk basketball with me for the first time in about 10 years. It felt like the whole world was paying attention, and then the games met that hype and exceeded it. My favorite reaction to the 29-point comeback came from MSG Networks analyst Steve Novak on the Ryen Russillo Show. “People just paid $100,000 for tickets,” Novak said last week, “and they actually got their money’s worth.”
That checks out. Listeners of the GOAT will be familiar with this story, but a lifelong Knicks fan named Cameron emailed us in early May saying he wanted to fly from Sydney, Australia to New York City to watch the Knicks in the Finals, asking us whether that was crazy. We told him to do it and he ultimately did, but he decided not to go to Game 3 and put all his money toward being in the building for Game 4. I hope to live several more decades, but I can’t imagine I’ll ever make a better sequence of decisions than Cameron from Sydney over the past two months.
I also loved the photo of the plane where every single seat was watching the Knicks game except for one guy watching Avatar. That’s what the past few weeks became, and again, that’s not how the past few years have felt. Last year’s Thunder-Pacers Finals arrived with a regular season atmosphere at the outset, the NBA was pilloried for removing the giant Larry O’Brien trophy from the court (which had actually happened years earlier), and then, halfway through series, the league rushed to add a digital trophy that was tiny, glitchy and embarrassing. To be clear, the games in that series were occasionally great (especially Game 1 and Game 4), but none of it felt elevated or culturally important. By contrast, this series had the highest ratings the Finals have seen since Michael Jordan retired.
Zooming out, the NBA has looked broken in all sorts of ways over the past decade, but more than that, there have been times when it’s begun to feel like a niche community that was mostly online (and too online) while its cultural influence quietly eroded. Regular season games were being out-rated by women’s college basketball, fans who used to watch games now followed by listening to podcasts, and a league that used to produce the biggest stars in American sports was searching around in vain for any bankable name under 35 years old.
None of that made a difference over the past few weeks, and for all the signs the league is adrift, the Finals were a lesson that certain formulas will work forever. Big market teams, with courtside celebrities and tens of millions of fans watching all over the country, do in fact add to the cultural spectacle. Wemby is a certified star who moves people 100 times more than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander ever could, and those players have always been the ones who sell the league—even when they’re failing and driving people crazy, and sometimes especially then. I should also add that fans don’t like flopping, and when refs don’t reward it, players like Brunson and Wemby stop doing it. That was a win too.
All of it was a nice reminder that millions of casual sports fans can still love basketball, and when basketball works, there’s nothing better. And with that, we’re done until next year. Congrats to the Knicks and to Knicks fans everywhere. I hope they all drink an extra soda for Wemby this summer, and enjoy it for a lifetime.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.