The Knicks are home for the first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden in 27 years, up 2-0, with a sitting president expected in the building. Jalen Brunson made sure his team heard the opposite of a celebration.
Speaking before Game 3, Brunson said it is “really cool, 27 years since the last Finals here in this building,” then pivoted hard: “as a team, us inside the locker room, we have more work to do.” He added that he is “so thankful, so honored to be able to put ‘New York’ across my chest.”
The leader setting the tone
A 2-0 lead with two home games next is the kind of position that invites a team to exhale. Brunson refusing to bask, publicly resetting the mindset to “0-0 again,” is the behavior of a player who watched Mikal Bridges live through a 2-0 lead evaporating into four straight losses with the Suns, a cautionary tale now sitting in his own locker room.
Teams up 2-0 in the Finals win the series 32 of 37 times, but the lone collapse, the 2016 Warriors, is exactly the ghost a favorite cannot ignore.
The spectacle around the game
President Donald Trump is expected at Game 3 after a personal invitation from Knicks owner James Dolan, which would make him the first sitting president to attend a Finals game in the building. The atmosphere will be enormous regardless.
Karl-Anthony Towns turned a question about the president’s presence into a broader message about New York, and the celebrity rows will be full. None of it changes the basketball, which is the entire point Brunson is hammering.
Why the discipline is the story
The Knicks have won close games and blowouts, on the road, with Brunson shooting poorly in Game 2 and still finding ways to win. A team this locked in, refusing to treat a historic homecoming as a coronation, is the hardest kind to derail. The noise at Madison Square Garden will be deafening. Brunson is trying to make sure his team plays like the score is still tied.
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