As the New York Knicks prepare for their first NBA Finals appearance in nearly three decades, they can thank a pair of New Jersey natives for leading them this far.
That would be New Brunswick’s Jalen Brunson and Edison’s Karl-Anthony Towns, the Knicks’ top two scorers during the regular season. Brunson has also been the Knicks’ leading scorer in the playoffs, while Towns has ranked third throughout a postseason run that has seen the team win an astounding 11 straight games.
“It’s a magical thing. It’s a historical thing,” Towns said after the Knicks swept Cleveland in the Eastern Conference Finals. “It’s something that New York has been dying for for a long, long time.”
With some Garden State stars doing a lot of the heavy lifting—team president Leon Rose was born in Cherry Hill, by the way—the Knicks outscored their opponents by 262 points over their 11-game winning streak. That is the best point differential across 11 games in NBA history, regardless of whether we’re talking about regular season or postseason play, per ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
But with the Hawks, 76ers and Cavaliers vanquished, the Knicks must now take down the San Antonio Spurs. That won’t be easy against top-three MVP candidate Victor Wembanyama and company—which includes Franklin Lakes native and former Rutgers standout Dylan Harper—but New Jerseyans love a challenge.
Brunson was actually a toddler hanging around the Knicks the last time they were in the Finals in 1999, as his dad, Rick, was a backup on that squad, which lost to the Spurs. The journeyman guard and longtime coach, now an assistant on Mike Brown’s Knicks staff, eventually moved his son to the Chicago area. The younger Brunson went on to win two NCAA championships and played alongside fellow Knicks teammates Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges at Villanova, a Philadelphia-area Big East school, and began his pro career in Dallas. However, the point guard has made it known that he identifies as a New Jersey hooper.
Now Brunson is a ring away from becoming the king of New York City’s sports scene.
“That’s a question I’d love to answer… later,” Brunson, taking a quick pause, said last week when asked what a Knicks championship would mean to his family.
Towns, meanwhile, was raised in Piscataway and shined at St. Joseph High School in Metuchen before spending a season at Kentucky. In 2015, the Timberwolves made him the first overall pick in the NBA Draft. The big man spent the first nine years of his career in Minnesota before being traded to New York in a three-team deal that also included the Hornets.
Two years into his Knicks tenure—and after three consecutive Conference Finals appearances—Towns has a chance to restore glory to a franchise that went through some dark times while he was growing up close to Madison Square Garden.
“I grew up a Knicks fan, as documented. And I think what’s more of an honor is, growing up in the area, I feel like the word ‘hope’ has been gone from the New York Knicks name for a long time,” Towns said. “It’s one of those things when I was growing up watching the Knicks, I was just hoping one day you could just put the jersey on. I never knew I would be in this position at this mic, talking about us going to the Finals, and the city believing in us. And that speaks a lot to the camaraderie of this team, the character of this team, the willingness, the sacrifice everyone’s been willing to put forward for the betterment of the team.
“There’s nowhere better in the world when the Garden has hope.”
