At least the Knicks have the good grace not to raise a banner now after winning the Emirates Adam Silver NBA Cup the other night in Vegas. Because if they’d actually considered a banner, it would have been about as meaningful at Madison Square Garden as the one for Harry Styles.
If you happened to see the following headline on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday morning — “Knicks End 52-year Drought with NBA Cup Final Win Over Spurs” – some of you were probably with me and assumed it was from some parody account. Or The Onion. No kidding, raising a banner because of that win in Vegas would also have been a form of parody, whether the Lakers were cheesy enough to have raised one of their own a couple of years ago or not.
It would just have been unintended self-parody, in this case.
Hey, it was a very nice win over the Spurs on Tuesday night, at the end of a tournament created by Silver to somehow make the early innings of the season a little saltier. Silver has managed to make his players care about this tournament – despite being played on courts that look like a high school science experiment gone horribly wrong – more than they do the All-Star Game. So give the commish that.
But what matter mattered on Tuesday night, at least around here – and even though the night would have mattered exponentially more if it had been against the Thunder – was how the Knicks looked winning this game, especially in the fourth quarter when they took the game from Victor Wembanyama and refused to give it back. On a night when Wembanyama was playing through the grief of having lost his grandmother, the Knicks still went as hard at the Spurs as the Spurs had gone at the Thunder in the semifinals, giving the Thunder just their second loss of the season in the process.
The Knicks on this night looked exactly like a team that really could finally make it back to the NBA Finals, after having come two wins short against the Pacers last spring. Of course the post-game pageantry, including the confetti, was as silly as Celebrity Row. But the way the Knicks balled, in a game they clearly treated as more than just another mid-December game, that looked quite real, even against a young Spurs team that did not look ready for prime time when it was crunch time at T-Mobile Arena.
The core of the Knicks remains the same from last season to this, you bet. They are still Jalen Brunson and the other ‘Nova Knicks and OG and KAT and the version of Mitchell Robinson that we all saw on Tuesday night when he went toe-to-toe with Wembanyama when the game was on the line. And the 2025-26 Knicks do look deeper than they did last season. You saw it against the Spurs with the big minutes Tyler Kolek and Jordan Clarkson gave Mike Brown, all the way into the fourth quarter.
But more than anything, and for all the contributions Brown got from just about everybody, what we really saw – in full– is how important OG Anunoby is to his team’s lofty ambitions for this season. As much as any of them. He has to stay healthy for them to end up being one of the league’s elite teams next spring. He is that good. And looked great against the Spurs.
He isn’t the only member of Brown’s team that plays with old-Knick values and old-Knick unselfishness. But he sure is all that, making his minutes and his presence matter and his cool grace on the court matter just as much. It’s still Brunson’s ball and Brunson’s team. But at a time when we routinely discuss Karl-Anthony Towns as being the second most important guy on the team, maybe the big picture take ought to be that OG is.
Here is something he said once that defines and describes who he is and the way he plays the game as well as anything:
“Just competing, whatever the task is, I’m just going to have to chase people all over the court. Sometimes I’m going to have to be in the paint, some games I’m going to have to score more, spot up, shoot, cut. Just whatever the game presents itself, like whatever I have to do. Just doing that.”
It really is the way the old Knicks played the game, and that means Clyde and Earl the Pearl and DeBusschere and Bradley and Capt. Willis Reed. Whatever and however the game presented itself. What they had to do on a given night. Brunson did it again on Tuesday night. But even with Brunson being Brunson and walking away being called the MVP, I thought that Anunoby was the Knicks best player: Twenty-eight points, nine rebounds, four of them offensive. It was clear all over again how much they lost two years ago in the playoffs when he got hurt.
“We’re battle-tested,” Anunoby said when the game was over Tuesday night, “and proved that we could come here and win.”
He had as much to do with the winning as anybody. In a league where wings become more and more of an essential by the year, Anunoby – at his best – gives a master class on how wing guys should play their position. Both ends.
Again and again: It wasn’t the truly great game we saw from the Spurs when they beat the Thunder. And it would have been far more for significant for the Knicks to win Adam Silver’s loving cup against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and them. Still: It was a very good win against a Spurs team that might actually turn out to be another great team in San Antonio. The Knicks showed us in December who they want to be in June. For now, that’s enough. Raise a glass to that. Not a banner.
