Two NBA Finals games in San Antonio, two losses. The New York Knicks have a 2-0 stranglehold on the series after winning both games on the road, and the San Antonio Spurs now head to Madison Square Garden for Game 3 on Monday needing to win or watch their season slip away. It will be the first NBA Finals game at the Garden since 1999.
Game 2 was tied at 104 inside the final minute before the Knicks closed it out. The lasting images were two Victor Wembanyama jumpers that did not fall and a turnover in the closing seconds, and they have framed the entire post-game conversation.
On CBS Sports HQ, the studio panel kept circling one question: whether a 7-foot-4 player should be settling for pull-up jumpers with the game on the line. The analysts noted that Wembanyama went 4-of-10 on jump shots while finishing 11-of-21 overall for nearly a 29-point double-double, and argued that a single dribble would likely have put him at the rim or the foul line. They described the late looks as the "analytical dead zone" — contested mid-range shots that even Wembanyama, for all his range, has not turned into a reliable weapon.
Former Knick Jeremy Lin, speaking on ESPN, traced the collapse to youth rather than shot selection. "The Spurs have so much heart [...] but the last 30 seconds, just so much inexperience," Lin said. "Whether you want to call it youth, whether you want to call it fatigue, it just wasn't it." He would have stopped the clock before the deciding possession. "I personally would have called a timeout, and I think that was the move to make," he said.
Tim Legler, alongside Lin on ESPN, pushed back on the idea that Wembanyama made the wrong play. "You can't ask for a better look from a guy that size," Legler said. "He had a clean look over Mitchell Robinson." In his reading it was simply a make-or-miss moment: the Spurs got their best player a clean attempt to tie, and it rimmed out.
Where the analysts agreed was on what New York is doing right. Legler credited Knicks coach Mike Brown for leaning on his reserves when Karl-Anthony Towns sat in foul trouble and Jalen Brunson needed rest, with Miles McBride hitting big shots down the stretch. "Every button he pushed was the right one in terms of his rotation," Legler said. Lin pointed to the same trust, noting that bench pieces such as Landry Shamet — near the end of his career on a veteran's minimum — are playing free because Brown has empowered them.
The bigger question is whether San Antonio can still make a series of it. Jason Timpf of Hoops Tonight was blunt about the math. "The series isn't over, but it's as close to over as over can get without actually being over," he said, pointing out that the Spurs would have to win the next several games, most of them in a Garden where, as he put it, everybody's "hair on fire."
The blueprint, per the CBS panel, starts with Wembanyama arriving early. He took just four shots in the first half of Game 2 and was, in their words, "invisible" before turning it on in the third quarter. De'Aaron Fox, criticized after Game 1, answered with 20 points on 8-of-12 shooting, and the Spurs will need that version of their backcourt from the opening tip.
For now the noise belongs to New York. The Knicks are halfway to their first championship since 1973 and will try to push to 3-0 in a building that has not hosted a Finals game in 27 years. Lin, who lived "Linsanity" in that arena, expects bedlam. "I think it's going to be the most insane environment," he said. Whether that energy lifts the Knicks or, as Lin allowed, becomes "almost too much" will shape a series the Spurs are still trying to keep alive.
