I still cannot believe that the following sentence is reality.
We are two days away from the New York Knicks playing in the NBA Finals.
Despite how dominant they’ve been in the postseason, the Knicks are considerable underdogs to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs, but this isn’t some David vs. Goliath story despite the very clear similarities with the statures of the two stars.
There is a clear path to the Knicks pulling off the upset and ending their 53-year title drought, but there’s also
a lot that can go wrong. Here are five keys to the Knicks shocking the NBA world and becoming champions:
Defend the Perimeter
The biggest thing that can swing an NBA game in 2026 is three-point shooting. It’s extremely hard to overcome any big shooting disparity from the perimeter, and no lead is safe when one team gets red hot from outside.
The Knicks learned that the hard way on New Year’s Eve, when Julian Champagnie buried 11 triples to pull the Spurs back from a 17-point deficit in a game where Wembanyama left with an injury. If you leave a shooter open, he will make you pay.
The Spurs aren’t the best shooting team, but they have the ability to get hot and come in clutch. We saw guys like Devin Vassell, Keldon Johnson, and Dylan Harper hit some massive shots in Game 7 to quiet a lively OKC crowd, so it wouldn’t be wise to give these guys space.
At their worst, the Knicks have overhelped and been vulnerable to the drive-and-kick. At their best, they’ve done their best to disrupt guys like Sam Merrill and Max Strus by keeping them out of true catch-and-shoot scenarios and running them off the line. With no true alpha guard in this series like Tyrese Maxey and Donovan Mitchell, it should be easier to stay disciplined on shooters.
Josh Hart’s aggressiveness
The most likely defensive scheme that Mitch Johnson will employ to begin the series on Wednesday will have unanimous Defensive Player of the Year Victor Wembanyama “guarding” Josh Hart.
This move makes sense for multiple reasons. You wouldn’t want Wembanyama forced out of the paint with the way that Karl-Anthony Towns plays, and Hart’s relative passivity when he has the ball on the perimeter allows Wemby to sag off and effectively play zone in the paint, where he can disrupt the entire Knicks’ offense. Couple that with the fact you won’t see much of the “pump fake and hard drive” when there’s a 7’5” alien protecting the rim, and it seems to work perfectly for San Antonio.
There is no other way. Hart has to be willing to shoot early and often. If he’s hesitating or misfiring, the offense will grind to a halt, and the Spurs will have their way with the Knicks. We saw what happens when Hart’s able to beat the ghost coverage in Game 2 against Cleveland. It forces the defense to respect him and opens everything up.
If he can drag Wemby out of the paint, or force a complete switch in defensive coverage, he will have done his job in the series regardless of what else he does.
Dominate the non-Wemby minutes
The Spurs have a lot of quality players, but they all revolve around Wemby. When he’s on the bench, they suffer. After all, he’s only been a negative plus-minus four times since February 1, and only three in games that he actually finished. One of those games was against the Knicks on March 1, but we can’t rely on doing that four times in a row.
Here’s how the Knicks played in Wemby and non-Wemby minutes in the three meetings this year:
Wemby on the court: +16 in 83 minutes
Wemby off the court: +18 in 61 minutes
The only one of the three meetings where Wemby won his minutes was on New Year’s Eve, and the team still trailed by double digits when he left with an injury in the fourth quarter. The lineups without him are a lot easier to score on, as, despite his best LeBron impression in Game 7, Luke Kornet is a whole tier down defensively.
One of Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns will always be on the court. It’s most likely that those KAT+Bench lineups will be playing the non-Wemby minutes, so it’s all on the likes of Jose Alvarado, Jordan Clarkson, Landry Shamet, and Deuce McBride to go to work.
These minutes will be, by far, the team’s best opportunity to continue dominating in the paint. Over their last 11 games, the Knicks are shooting a blisteringly 62% from 2.
Steal one of the first two in San Antonio
The Knicks have only played two playoff series without home-court advantage in the last 12 years. They’ve won both of them.
What was the key? They got on the offensive and stole Game 1 on the road. They outexecuted the 2023 Cavaliers and 2025 Celtics in the fourth quarter and came out victorious to set the tone. While the Cavs punched back in Game 2 in 2023, they were on the back foot from there after the Knicks dominated at MSG. Boston never recovered after choking two 20-point leads at home.
Beating the Spurs on the road isn’t easy, but it’s also not impossible. They lost games to Portland*, Minnesota, and Oklahoma City inside the Frost Bank Center, and the Knicks are 6-1 on the road in the postseason thus far and 13-3 over the last three postseasons outside of Indiana (where they’re 1-5).
*Portland won Game 2 in San Antonio after Wembanyama left with a concussion in the second quarter.
This team knows how to win on the road, and in a series where you only get to play three games at most at the World’s Most Famous Arena, you need at least one to come out on top.
Embrace adversity
By the time Game 1 starts on Wednesday night, the Knicks will have not lost a basketball game in six weeks.
April 23 against Atlanta in Game 3 of the first round was the last time the Knicks felt true adversity. Since then, they’ve won 11 consecutive games, won multiple games by TKO, and have only played in two close games. The closest thing that they’ve felt to adversity since was the 22-point deficit in Game 1 against Cleveland, but they finished the game on a 44-11 run to prevail.
Does that give the team plenty of confidence going forward? Absolutely, but the odds they can keep this ridiculous winning streak going all the way to lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy on June 10 are extremely small for multiple reasons. At some point, they will lose a game.
They let Game 2’s loss against Atlanta bleed into Game 3, which required a monumental effort to get back into it before falling short. Not all losses are created equal, but they’ll eventually have a game where not everything goes right and their opponents can properly exploit one or two weaknesses that the team will need to seriously adjust on.
Have they encountered enough adversity in this postseason, or has the smooth sailing made them vulnerable to potentially unraveling if they lose a game or two early in the series? How they respond to their first loss, whenever it occurs, will be potentially the biggest key to truly finding out just how formidable this team is.
