21 Play Salute
We take a look back at the 21 plays that defined the best half of New York's championship run.
Good morning! Apologies…I JUST now realized this did not get sent out at 5am. Blame my lack of sleep, which I’ll hopefully catch up on in the coming days and weeks.
In any case, happy Tuesday everyone.
21 Play Salute
I’m getting there.
Two days removed from the greatest day of our sporting lives, I feel like the reality has set in about a third of the way. My guess that I’ll keep making incremental progress over the next 48 hours until Thursday, when I’ll join approximately 11 billion Knicks fans in downtown Manhattan for what promises to be a celebration for the ages.
If it doesn’t sink in by then, maybe ring night will do the trick.
Honestly, I’m in no rush.
In the meantime, yesterday I finally got a chance to rewatch the second half of Game 5. I must say, it was much more enjoyable knowing the result, although with every Spurs basket in the fourth quarter, my stomach still dropped ever so slightly.
My biggest takeaway from that rewatch: considering the stage, this was as impressive a half of basketball as this group has ever had, and that includes the 29-point comeback three days earlier.
My justification is simple. Karl-Anthony Towns came into Game 5 with a +262 plus/minus for the playoffs, on pace to break Steph Curry’s all time record for a single postseason. He was also +48 in the Finals, including a +28 in 18 second half minutes in Game 4. Going into Saturday night, no Knick had a bigger on/off discrepancy in offensive rating for the postseason, and here was New York starting the second half of Game 5 with 37 points on their ledger. They needed KAT more than ever.
So when Towns committed his fourth foul a mere 15 seconds into the third quarter, we had every right to go to bed. With the offensive issues New York was already having, no KAT meant an even tougher time scoring on a San Antonio defense showing little weakness.
In that sense, given the Knicks scored 57 second half points, including 39 points in the final 14 minutes after putting up just 55 in the first 34, the offense was arguably the more impressive of the two units.
At the same time, Game 5 was just the latest masterpiece from a defense that showed zero signs of weakness throughout the entirety of this postseason run.
Need proof? How about this: the Knicks finished the playoffs with a 104.5 defensive rating, which is the lowest by any team that made it past teh second round since 2019, when the NBA champion Raptors had a defensive rating of 104.2.
Better yet, New York’s defense aged like a fine wine, both as the game and the playoffs went on. The Knicks finished the postseason with a 98.0 fourth quarter defensive rating, which is the lowest by an NBA champion since the 2017 Warriors. In the Finals, their fourth quarter defensive rating got even stingier, holding San Antonio to 90.5 points per 100 possessions. That’s the lowest of any champ since the 2006 Miami Heat, with the 1998 Bulls being the only other team in the last 30 years to post a better number.
For all these reasons, I found this play to be the most fitting of the title-clinching victory:
Brunson closes hard, OG digs and dislodges, KAT swipes it away, Mikal falls on it, Brunson dives on it, and Josh Hart comes away with it.
This one play gave us contributions from all five members of a starting unit that we once thought could never approach championship level defense. Recall that a little more than a year ago, they had a 118.2 defensive rating in the conference finals against Indiana. Imagine telling someone then that this is how things would wind up.
Well, we no longer have to imagine, thanks to a second half in which every player who touched the court fully embraced James Dolan’s challenge and gave it everything they had.
On that note, here are 20 more plays that may get lost to time but were vital in securing the franchise’s first NBA Championship in 53 years:
