After Game 4 miracle, Knicks return to ‘0-0 mindset’ on verge of winning historic NBA Finals

SAN ANTONIO — Surely, Jalen Brunson has imagined this.

He told reporters during a Zoom conference call before Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals that he’d been envisioning leading the New York Knicks to the NBA Finals ever since he signed with the franchise in free agency in the summer of 2022. And if he’s thought about going to the Finals for the last four years, it seems reasonable to conclude that he’s thought about winning them — about hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, about adding an NBA title to the two NCAA national championships he won at Villanova — for at least that long. And, honestly, probably a hell of a lot longer.

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Now that he’s here, though, with the Knicks holding a 3-1 lead over the San Antonio Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals, Brunson’s response to a question before the Knicks’ Friday practice — a practice session whose beginning was soundtracked, appropriately enough, by the Wu-Tang Clan — about how it feels to be just one win away from the top of the mountain consisted of a grand total of two numbers:

“Zero-zero.”

It’s not surprising that New York’s captain would return to emphasizing the importance of taking a 0-0 mindset into Saturday’s Game 5. After all, the Knicks have managed to maintain a remarkable level of message discipline on that matter — a steady stream of references to resetting to 0-0 after every game, to staying desperate even when holding a lead in a game or series — for weeks now.

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“Until it’s said and done, that’s got to be our mindset going into everything,” Knicks center Mitchell Robinson said.

The ability to put the past behind them, move on and focus solely on what’s in front of them has clearly served the Knicks well to this point. That’s the thing, though: How the heck do you just move on from pulling off the greatest comeback in NBA history, capped by arguably the greatest play in franchise history? How do you just reset to zero after that?

“It is hard,” Knicks head coach Mike Brown said. “We’re all human. It was hard even in the series that we swept — you win two, three, four, five games in a row, there’s a tendency…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/after-game-4-miracle-knicks-return-to-0-0-mindset-on-verge-of-winning-historic-nba-finals-233132029.html

Author : Dan Devine

Publish date : 2026-06-12 23:31:00

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