Нью-Йорк Никс 53 жилийн дараа аваргаллаа

After 53 years of waiting, New York is finally a city of basketball champions again.

With a 94-90 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, the New York Knicks secured the franchise’s third NBA championship and first since 1973.

A team that knocked on the door several times before burst onto the game’s biggest stage and took full advantage of its time in the spotlight. A collection of players who, in many cases, were cast aside, overlooked, undervalued or deemed expendable, found a home in Manhattan.

And now ring measurements are in order.

You know most of the stats about the drought. More than five decades passed between Knicks title runs, but let’s look deeper.

Here are some facts beyond the box score about the Knicks’ 2026 NBA title.

Mike Brown

Legendary former San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich spent 29 years building one of the most influential coaching trees in NBA history. In the end, he had to watch his franchise fall at the hands of one of his own proteges.

Knicks coach Mike Brown became the fourth coach who either played for or coached under Popovich to win an NBA championship as a head coach.

Brown served as an assistant under Popovich in San Antonio from 2000 to 2003. During those three seasons, the Spurs averaged 58.6 wins, reached two Western Conference finals and captured the 2003 championship.

The other championship-winning coach connections to Popovich are Steve Kerr, Mike Budenholzer and, loosely speaking, Doc Rivers. Kerr played under Popovich from 1999 to 2001 and again from 2002 to 2003 before going on to coach the Golden State Warriors to four championships. Budenholzer spent 17 seasons as Popovich’s top assistant before leading the Milwaukee Bucks to the 2021 NBA title.

Rivers spent two seasons playing with the Spurs from 1994 to 1996 while Popovich served as the team’s general manager. Rivers later coached the Boston Celtics to the 2008 championship.

Jalen Brunson

New York’s captain was originally selected with the No. 33 pick in the second round of the 2018 NBA Draft by the Dallas Mavericks. Now, Brunson has become the fourth second-round pick in NBA history to be named NBA Finals MVP after averaging 32.6 points and 4.6 assists while leading New York to a 4-1 series victory.

The first player to accomplish the feat donned the same fabled blue and orange as Brunson. Knicks center Willis Reed was selected with the eighth overall pick in 1964, which was the first pick of the second round. He was named NBA Finals MVP in 1970 and 1973, the previous two times the Knicks won the championship.

In 1976, Pepperdine guard Dennis Johnson was selected in the second round at No. 29 by the Seattle SuperSonics. In 1979, Johnson averaged 22.6 points, six rebounds and six assists in a 4-1 NBA Finals series victory over the Washington Bullets. He took home finals MVP honors for his efforts. Moses Malone won NBA Finals honors in 1983 after being a third-round pick in the 1974 ABA Draft.

Arguably the most dominant second-round pick in NBA history was famously selected during a Taco Bell commercial. Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić was selected No. 41 in the 2014 NBA Draft and has since become a three-time league MVP. He won NBA Finals MVP in 2023 after averaging 30.2 points, 14 rebounds and 7.2 assists in a five-game series victory over the Miami Heat.

Villanova boys

Brunson and Mikal Bridges became the fourth pair of teammates to win multiple NCAA championships and at least one NBA Finals on the same team. Fellow Knicks teammate Josh Hart was only on the 2016 Villanova championship team and not the 2018 championship-winning team.

The other three title-heavy teammates were:

• Bill Russell and K.C. Jones: (San Francisco – 1955, 1956; Boston Celtics -1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966)
• Kareem-Abdul Jabbar and Lucius Allen (UCLA – 1967, 1968; Milwaukee Bucks – 1971)
• Gail Goodrich and Keith Erickson (UCLA – 1964, 1965; Los Angeles Lakers – 1972)

The pair also became the 13th and 14th players in history to win multiple NCAA championships and at least one NBA championship.

Bill Russell and K.C. Jones were the first, winning back-to-back NCAA titles at San Francisco before launching a decade of dominance with the Boston Celtics. A host of John Wooden’s UCLA alumni also joined the list, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, Keith Erickson, Henry Bibby, Jamaal Wilkes and Bill Walton.

Nazr Mohammed won two national championships with Kentucky in the mid-1990s before capturing an NBA title under Popovich with the 2005 Spurs. A pair of Florida teammates, Al Horford and Corey Brewer, helped lead the Gators to back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007 before later winning NBA titles.

Finally, fellow Villanova Wildcat Donte DiVincenzo — previously a Knick teammate with Hart and Brunson — won an NBA championship with the Bucks in 2021.

Karl-Anthony Towns

The Knicks’ star center became the first No. 1 draft pick to win the finals since his former Minnesota Timberwolves teammate Andrew Wiggins did it with Golden State in 2022.

Towns was an All-American at Kentucky and the centerpiece of a 38-1 Wildcats team before Minnesota selected him first in the 2015 NBA Draft. He averaged 18.3 points and 10.5 rebounds in his first season and won Rookie of the Year in 2016.

He spent the first nine years of his career in the Twin Cities, becoming a four-time All-Star. In October 2024, Towns was traded to the Knicks as part of a three-team blockbuster deal in exchange for Julius Randle, DiVincenzo, Keita Bates-Diop and a future first-round pick.

Wiggins was drafted No. 1 out of Kansas in 2014 and averaged 16.9 points while winning Rookie of the Year in 2015, one year before Towns entered the league. In 2020, he was traded to the Golden State Warriors along with draft picks and eventually became an NBA champion as a key role player in 2022.

OG Anunoby

The ultimate role player.

The 28-year-old forward averaged 21.2 points and 4.8 rebounds for the Knicks in the finals.

Anunoby authored what coach Mike Brown called “the greatest play in New York Knicks history” with his last-second game-winning tip-in in Game 4, securing a 107-106 victory and completing a record 29-point comeback for New York.

In 2024, the Knicks signed Anunoby to a five-year, $212.5 million contract. Many questioned the steep, nearly $40 million-per-year salary for a player who had never made an All-Star team.

Jose Alvarado

Alvarado is the only New York native on the Knicks roster. He was born and raised in Brooklyn by his Puerto Rican parents, Odilia Martinez and Jose Alvarado Sr., before his family later moved to the Pomonok Houses in Queens, where he attended Christ the King Regional High School.

Alvarado, 28, has been very public about the Knicks fandom he grew up with, giving him an understanding of the many years of local strife he just helped assuage during the Knicks’ finals triumph.

Alvarado spent the first four-plus seasons of his career with the New Orleans Pelicans before being traded to his hometown Knicks in February 2026. (Photo by Al Bello / Getty Images)

Jeremy Sochan

Though it didn’t happen in the NBA’s first 69 years of existence, Knicks forward Jeremy Sochan is just the fourth player in the last 11 years to play for both finals teams in the same season and be eligible for a championship ring either way.

It’s at each team’s discretion who receives championship rings, so Sochan ultimately avoided the awkward waiting game of seeing whether San Antonio would award him one as his Knicks won the title on their own.

Here are the other three such instances:

Anderson Varejão (2016 Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors)

Varejão played for the Cavaliers and Warriors in the mid-2010s and somehow emerged without a championship ring. He lost to the Warriors with the Cavaliers in 2015 before finding himself on Golden State’s roster by the close of the 2015-16 season. He was a rotational center on a Warriors team that helped build a 3-1 finals lead.

Then, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving happened.

Varejão found himself on the losing side as the Warriors became the first team to squander such an advantage in the finals. He was waived by Golden State midway through the following season as the Warriors, thanks to a historic spike in salary-cap room in 2016, added Kevin Durant and went on to win the next two championships over Varejão’s former Cavaliers.

Dion Waiters (2020 Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers)

Waiters was suspended for three separate incidents to begin the 2019-20 season in Miami. He played just three games for the Heat before the franchise ended his three-and-a-half-year tenure and traded him to Memphis that February. Memphis waived him, and he signed with the Lakers before entering the COVID-19 bubble playoffs.

Waiters played in seven regular-season games, averaging 11.9 points, and appeared in five playoff games for Los Angeles on its way to a finals matchup against his former Heat, which the Lakers won to notch their 17th championship.

Torrey Craig (2021 Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns)

Craig played in just 18 games for the Bucks to begin the 2020-21 season before being traded to the Suns for cash considerations about a week before the 2021 trade deadline.

By the finals, Craig was a contributor on a Suns team that built a 2-0 series lead over his former Bucks. However, Giannis Antetokounmpo powered Milwaukee to four straight victories as the Bucks defeated the Suns in six games.