SAN ANTONIO (AP) \u2014 Jalen Brunson was the star of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, willing the New York Knicks to a series-opening win. Victor Wembanyama, even while struggling from the field, put up big numbers for the San Antonio Spurs in his finals debut as well.<\/p>\n
The stars were stars.<\/p>\n
The finals, though, tends to get won by the sum of the other parts.<\/p>\n
Game 2 of the title series is Friday night in San Antonio, with the Spurs hoping to pull into a tie before the series heads to New York \u2014 and the Knicks aiming at becoming the first team since Houston in 1995 to start the NBA Finals with two road wins.<\/p>\n
Tipoff is at 8:42 p.m. EDT and the game will be aired on ABC. The Spurs are 6.5-point favorites.<\/p>\n
New York got 30 points from Brunson in the Game 1 win, in which the Knicks rallied from 14 points down in the third quarter and closed the game on an 11-0 run. And while Brunson got tons of credit, the Knicks pointed to other efforts, like the one from Josh Hart.<\/p>\n
He had three points. That\u2019s not what mattered. It was everything else \u2014 15 rebounds, six assists and four steals. The only other player to have that many rebounds, assists and steals in a finals game since all those stats began being tracked was Larry Bird in 1986.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis energy is just relentless. It doesn\u2019t stop,\u201d Brunson said of Hart, his former Villanova teammate. \u201cI mean, he eats candy all the time. That tells you who he is. He\u2019s a big kid with an absurd amount of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Knicks are trying to win their 13th consecutive playoff game, which would be the second-longest single-season streak in NBA history. Golden State won 15 consecutive playoff games in 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know it\u2019s a long series,\u201d Spurs guard De\u2019Aaron Fox said. \u201cObviously you want to win every game that you have on your home court, but it\u2019s not the way it happens every day. We try to go in and fix the things we need to fix. Obviously, we want a different outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SAN ANTONIO (AP) \u2014 Jalen Brunson was the star of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, willing the New York Knicks to a series-opening win. Victor Wembanyama, even while struggling from the field, put up big numbers for the San Antonio Spurs in his finals debut as well. The stars were stars. The finals, though, … Continue reading Game 2: Knicks looking to take command of NBA Finals, Spurs hoping to tie the title series<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1452],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1512832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":true,"date":"2026-06-07 12:53:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[0],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1512832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1512833,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512832\/revisions\/1512833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1512832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1512832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1512832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}