NBA Finals: ‘Drive, kick, make the right reads’: The Knicks vs. Victor Wembanyama, summed up in one play

SAN ANTONIO — The New York Knicks entered the 2026 NBA Finals with basketball’s hottest, most overwhelming offense, averaging a scorching 126.7 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions — a rate of offensive efficiency that would’ve led the NBA in every season of the league’s existence.

Through two games against the San Antonio Spurs, though, the Knicks are averaging 108.8 points-per-100 — a rate that would’ve ranked just below league-average during the regular season.

Advertisement

This is what it is to play the Spurs: a smothering, suffocating phalanx of positional size and applied physicality. Long arms, quick feet and active communication everywhere you look, all geared toward rudely dispossessing you of the basketball — or, failing that, sending you hurtling into the 7-foot-4 event horizon stationed in front of the rim.

Victor Wembanyama, to put it mildly, is a massive defensive issue for the Knicks to address, both literally and figuratively, in this series. But one of the defining characteristics of Mike Brown’s team has been its ability to find creative solutions.

Led by Jalen Brunson (left) and Karl-Anthony Towns, the New York Knicks’ offense has an awful lot of ways to solve the problems that defenses cause. (Wu Xiaoling/Xinhua via Getty Images) (Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images)

“We’ve got a group that, we just — you know, whatever circumstances are looking at us, facing us, we just try to make it work,” Knicks swingman Landry Shamet said. “Try to solve problems.”

Advertisement

That’s exactly what they did late in the second quarter of Friday’s thrilling 105-104 Game 2 win, on a possession that highlighted just how much effort and energy it takes to generate good looks against this Wembanyama-led Spurs defense. It also represented something close to the ideal operation of this Knicks offensive approach — one that, as Brown has described, is predicated less on proscribed play calls and more on adherence to certain offensive principles and concepts.

“Everybody grows in their journey, and being an assistant in Golden State helped out a lot — almost everything they do is conceptual,” Brown…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/nba-finals-drive-kick-make-the-right-reads-the-knicks-vs-victor-wembanyama-summed-up-in-one-play-210427894.html

Author : Dan Devine

Publish date : 2026-06-06 21:04:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.