Team of destiny: How the Knicks came together to complete championship run for the ages

Destiny. Guess you don’t really believe in it until you see it unfold on a basketball stage.

Until Jalen Brunson, a 6-foot-2 point guard — the same one Becky Hammon said could never lead a team to a championship as its best player — scores 45 points in a closeout victory of the 2026 NBA Finals, leading the Knicks to the franchise’s first title in 53 years.

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“Words can’t describe it,” said Brunson, the 2026 NBA Finals MVP, a newly crowned king in New York, “but I’ll say I put a lot of time and effort into trying to be the best player I can be to try and help a team win. Just really thankful to have an organization, a coaching staff, my teammates, to have my back every single day. I think that means the most to me.

“And my family.”

In the aftermath of Saturday’s 94-90, series-clinching win, Brunson embraced his father, Rick, an assistant coach in New York and a member of the Knicks in 1999, when last they seriously attempted to end this championship drought. They have been a laughingstock of the league for much of the past quarter century, until Leon Rose, Brunson’s godfather and the lead executive in New York, recruited Brunson to the Knicks in 2022 free agency.

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“I could never envision this,” conceded the elder Brunson.

On the podium, as he accepted his NBA Finals MVP award, Jalen was also surrounded by two of his best friends, Knicks teammates Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges. Together they delivered national championships to nearby Villanova, too. This is the stuff of storybooks.

“Man, those are my brothers for life,” Hart said of Brunson and Bridges. “We have a bond for life. We obviously won the [national] championship, but this one takes the cake. But those are my brothers. I wouldn’t want to go into a game with anyone else besides them at my back. I love those guys, and we are going to be friends and brothers for a lifetime.”

Along the line — in 2024, when he was traded to New York, or earlier in these playoffs, when he embraced this championship brand of Knicks basketball — Karl-Anthony Towns, a New Jersey native, a Kentucky alum, was adopted by the ‘Nova Knicks to his hometown…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/team-of-destiny-how-the-knicks-came-together-to-complete-championship-run-for-the-ages-065644518.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-06-14 06:56:00

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