The New York Knicks reached their first NBA Finals in 27 years by overwhelming opponents with size and physicality. To win it, they will have to solve a problem no team found a lasting answer for all spring: Victor Wembanyama.
On CBS Sports, analyst Noah Buono laid out how he expects New York to attack the assignment — and it starts with a name most defenses would not volunteer for the job. Rather than hide a smaller wing on the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, Buono expects the Knicks to open with Karl-Anthony Towns as Wembanyama's primary defender and lean on OG Anunoby as the switch.
There is recent evidence for the approach. When the Knicks blew the Spurs out by roughly 30 points on March 1, they put Towns on Wembanyama, swarmed his drives with help and forced 22 San Antonio turnovers — seven of them from Wembanyama himself. The cautionary tale came on December 31, when Wembanyama poured in 31 points on 10-of-12 shooting in a game where Anunoby drew the primary assignment and San Antonio generated far more at the rim.
Buono's read is that the pairing works because the two defenders stress Wembanyama in different ways. Towns offers the size to bother him at the rim, while Anunoby — "a sneaky 6'9", 6'10"," in Buono's description — has the strength and athleticism to push the 7-foot-4 star off his spots. Mitchell Robinson, playing through a broken pinky, is expected to add 10 to 14 minutes of length and rim protection. A broken pinky, Buono noted, "is not a broken leg," and he predicted Robinson will be both available and impactful.
Not everyone is convinced New York has enough size to survive a seven-game series. On ESPN's First Take, the counterargument was blunt: at his peak, Wembanyama effectively counts as two big men, and the Knicks do not have two seven-footers to throw at him. The panel pointed to what he did to Isaiah Hartenstein and to Chet Holmgren — an All-Star and an All-Defensive-caliber center — in the Western Conference finals, making both look ordinary at times. By that logic, the Knicks' thin frontcourt depth, not Wembanyama's fatigue after a grueling run, is the real swing factor in the series.
That is where Robinson's health becomes pivotal. The argument on First Take was that, of all the Knicks' bigs, Robinson is the one most able to play through a hand injury, because his value — elite offensive rebounding and a body that disrupts shooters — does not depend on catching and finishing cleanly. If he can simply hold the ball and bang, New York has another credible body to spend on Wembanyama.
The Knicks beat the Spurs in both regular-season meetings and lifted an NBA Cup along the way, so the blueprint is not purely theoretical. But the Finals are a different test. As Buono put it, the front-court bodies are there to throw at Wembanyama — which means it will not be an easy series for the Spurs star, even if no one in New York pretends they have an answer that lasts four wins.
