The Knicks are back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999

The Knicks are back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.

Ian reacts to New York’s Eastern Conference Finals sweep over the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Game 4 blowout, and what this moment means for an entire generation of Knicks fans. From Jalen Brunson winning Eastern Conference Finals MVP with his father Rick Brunson standing behind him, to the Knicks clearing the bench with 7:47 left in a closeout game, this wasn’t just a win. It was a full-circle New York sports moment.

The Knicks didn’t sneak into the Finals. They swept Cleveland out of the building.

Episode 69 covers:

• Knicks 130, Cavaliers 93
• New York’s first NBA Finals appearance since 1999
• Jalen Brunson’s ECF MVP moment
• Rick and Jalen Brunson’s full-circle Knicks story
• Mike Brown’s first-year Finals run
• The Knicks winning every closeout game this postseason by 30+
• Why this team feels real, not lucky

The Knicks are four wins away from a championship.

Follow along: @RiceontheRadio

Transcript

The Knicks Are Finally Back

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I guess there's only one way to find out. Let's do it.

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Let's do it, do it tonight.

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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages. That's a WWE reference, if you didn't get it. The Knicks, the New York Knickerbockers, are back in the NBA finals for the first time since 1999. I was eight years old. Eight. The last time this happened, I was probably I was probably worrying about Pokemon cards, snack time, and whether or not I was allowed to stay up late enough to watch the game. Which I probably wasn't even watching. That's how long it's been. That's how much life has happened between the last time the Knicks were here and right now. The birth of the internet. You know, Katie Kurick saying what is an email? Cell phones, sidekicks, blackberries. You know. Oh boys. I'm gonna try to do my best to remain normal. I am. I promise you. But the Knicks are in the NBA finals, boys. I'm pounding my desk. The New York Knicks in the NBA Finals. Say it out loud. Let it sound weird for a second. Let your brain try to process it. The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. I watched this one out

A Sports Release In Real Time

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with other Knicks fans, and by the fourth quarter, I was high-fiving and hugging strangers at the bar. That's where we're at. Mike Brown was emptying the bench with almost eight minutes left in the Eastern Conference Finals closeout game. Everybody in the room is family at that point. I mean, do you ever have one of those sports moments where you're not even fully reacting to the game anymore? You're just you're reacting to all the years before it, all the bad teams, all the draft lottery nights, the fake saviors, the contracts that made you want to stare into the middle of the distance. All the years where the Knicks were less of a basketball team and more of a group therapy topic. You know, then all of a sudden, they're up 35 in Cleveland. The starters are checking out, and Knicks fans in Cleveland are chanting Knicks in four. That's not a normal sports night. That is a release. That is years of sports nonsense leaving the body all at once. I don't even know if I watched the last seven minutes as much as I floated through them. I mean, there's the scoreboard, there's the bench coming in, there's the crowd noise, there's my brain going, wait a minute, this is actually happening. The Knicks didn't just beat Cleveland, they swept Cleveland. They didn't just make the finals, they walked Cleveland out of the building, out of their own building. 130 to 93 in a closeout game on the road. That is not sneaking into the finals. That is not surviving. That is not, hey, you know, they cut a they caught a couple breaks, and you know, here we are now, and we're just happy to be here. No, that's grown man basketball. That's a grown team taking the moment, grabbing it by the collar and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is ours. This one belongs to us. What made it even better is Cleveland, they Cleveland came out early, like a team that knew that the season was on the line. Donovan Mitchell scores the first eight points for the Cavs. The building has a little bit of juice. Cleveland, you know, they get their they get the lead early. And for a few minutes, you know, you can talk yourself into, okay, this is going to be their best punch. You know, we've won 10 straight. If we're going to lose the game, this is probably it. Fine. Yeah, no. The Knicks took it, and then they started doing what they've done all series. They made Cleveland answer questions that I didn't have an answer for. Mitchell scores, okay. Who else? What else you got? Cleveland gets a little early momentum. Fine. Can you sustain it? The Cavs cut it to 30-26 late in the first quarter. And then the Knicks go on a 20-0 run over five minutes. 20-0 in a closeout game. That's not just a run. That's a statement from the basketball gods. Cleveland ends up going 0 for 9 during that stretch, four turnovers, missing threes, looking tight, looking struck, looking like a team that just could feel the series slipping away in real time in the first quarter. The Knicks, meanwhile, are just pouring it on. Hitting threes, moving the ball, getting the bench production that they needed. Everybody touching the game. Everybody with fingerprints on it. And I love it because that's this wasn't just a Brunson dragging everybody across the finish line kind of game. You know, yeah, Brunson is the star. Brunson is the face. Brunson is the reason this whole thing feels possible. But game four?

The Run That Broke Cleveland

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Game four was the full roster standing up and saying, Yeah, we got this. Big Cat gives you 19 and 14. That's exactly the kind of grown man playoff game that you need from him. That's what we've been looking for. No chaos, no nonsense, just size, skill, rebounding, spacing, and composure. You know, Kat didn't have to do too much tonight, and that's the kind of the beauty of it. He played within the machine, and the machine looked like it was built for June. OG gives you another 17. OG is one of those guys where you know the box score never fully explains the experience of watching him. You know, he's not always loud. He's not always flashy. Sometimes he is, but he is just consistently in the right place at the right time, cutting, defending, disrupting, name it, whatever you want. OG is like basketball weather, you know, you just feel him over the entire game. Bridges, who everybody wanted to kill, and I'll be the first to admit, I was maybe a little down on him at the last couple games of the season, last week or two of the season. Bridges gives you 15. The shot wasn't perfect, or at least as perfect as it has been, but he's steady. 15 from Bridges is enough to win a game. Gives you length, gives you the defense, nice calm demeanor. That's the stuff that adds up when a team is trying to close a series. Josh Hart, Josh Hart was on triple double watch for a little bit. He had six points, 11 rebounds, six assists, and two steals, I should add. And again, this is the most Josh Hart stat line possible, right? Like six points and somehow he's everywhere. Has his fingerprint all over the game, rebounding like he pays rent in the paint. If he's on your team, you love him. If he's against you, you want to throw a remote through the wall. You can't stand him. Mitchell Robinson gave you eight and ten off the bench. Landry Shamit scores 16, the sham god. Shamit, by the way, needs his own little paragraph here. He needs his own little uh sentence or two. I mean, the man was 11 for 12 from three in this series. 11 for 12 from three in this series. It's not a fever dream, it's not a typo. Landry Shamut turned into a controlled burn from the three-point line in the Easter Conference Finals. There's something hilarious and beautiful about that. I mean, Cleveland spent the entire series trying to decide who they should live with. They tried to load up on Brunson. They dared Josh Hart. They tried to recover late. They tried to win with math. You know, and then enter Landry Shamut. He starts shooting like he was found, like he found the cheat code, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A B, A, B start. That's when the defense starts looking around and goes, who said this was okay for this man? So you load up on Brunson, hard punishes you. You forgot about Shamit, he turns into a flamethrower. You help off OG, he cuts your defense in half. You go small, big cat eats. You go big, the Knicks run fast. Deuce. Deuce hitting those threes. Cleveland just never found the button to press. Every adjustment opened another door for the Knicks. That's why this sweep feels real. It wasn't one weird shooting night. It wasn't one hot player, although Brunson aside. It was four games of Cleveland trying to solve a problem that just kept changing. Game one was Brunson ripping their souls out. Game two was Cleveland saying, alright, fine, we'll double Brunson and we'll ask for help. And then here comes Josh Hart. Game three, that was the Knicks putting the series in a chokehold. And game four was the part of the movie where the villain realizes nobody is coming to save him. The Cavs kept saying that they were, they they've been here before. They came back from 0-2 against Detroit. You know, they've been through adversity. Donovan Mitchell, you know, said all the right things. Evan Mobley

Everyone Leaves Fingerprints On It

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said that they knew what it took to get where they want to go. Jared Allen talking about keeping things interesting. Yeah, that's that's cool. Respectively, this isn't Detroit, baby. Cleveland kept saying, yeah, we've been here before. Yeah, the Knicks answered, not with us. Okay. That's the difference. Detroit let them breathe and they're young and they don't know how to close out a series. The Knicks, that ain't happening here. The Knicks know how to close. They never gave Cleveland room to turn it into a long series in the first place. They didn't give them the comfort of just, oh, just protect home court. They didn't give them one of those game fours where the favorite relaxes and the desperate team steals one. No, no, no, no. They walked into Cleveland and made the final game the least competitive one of the entire series. That's cold. Donovan Mitchell deserves some respect. I'm not doing the whole Mitchell's a loser thing. I mean, he's a hell of a player. The guy had 31 in game four, came out trying to carry them. He gave Cleveland the first eight points. You know, he was clearly trying to drag the Cavs into a fight. But New York just had every answer possible, man. At some point, one guy trying to make the lights stay on doesn't really matter when the other team is already backing the moving truck into the driveway. Cleveland shot 11 for 40 from three. 22 turnovers. Their season is on the line and they're coughing it up, missing from deep, and watching the Knicks run right by them. That's not bad luck. That's pressure. That's fatigue. That's scheme. That's a team getting squeezed until it cracks. So, you know, for all the talk about Cleveland's process, by game four, the process looked like it needed a wellness check. Now, here's another receipt for you. The Knicks didn't just win their closeout games. They turned them into public service announcements for the rest of the league. They beat Atlanta by 51 to close that series. They beat Philly by 30 to close that series. And they beat Cleveland by 37 to close this series. That makes them the first team in NBA history to win three closeout games by 20 plus points in the same postseason. And the funny part is 20 plus almost undersells it. They won all three by 30 or more. You know, that tells you something about this team. When they smell blood, they don't play with their food. They don't bat the bunny around. They don't let the other team hang around long enough to start lying to themselves, like, okay, maybe we're in it. You know, a lot of teams win series. This team has been closing series like it wants the opponent to remember the exact time that they lost their soul. That's an identity. That's not just talent, that's not just shooting, that's not just Brunson being special. That's a team with a killer instinct. You know, if you want to know why the Knicks fans are losing their minds right now, it's not just because they're in the finals. It's how they got there. They didn't stumble in. They slammed the door three times and left Dents in the frame. Now for Brunson, well, this is where the night goes from great sports moment to full circle history. Jalen Brunson, our captain, wins Eastern Conference Finals MVP with his father standing right behind him. Needs a second on its own there. And it's not just because he won the award. I mean, he deserved it 100%. The game one comeback, he was the calmest in the series, the biggest moments in the series, the whole worst, right? But the image here is what gets you. Rick Brunson was on that last Knicks team that went to the finals. Jalen Brunson was a baby running

Closeout Blowouts As An Identity

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around on the court in diapers. Now, Jalen is standing there as the Eastern Conference Finals MVP with his father right behind him after leading the Knicks back to the finals for the first time since 1999. If that's not full circle, I don't know what the definition of full circle is. And look, I look, I don't want to get into the movie trailer theme with it, but sometimes, man, sometimes sports hands you the script and you gotta just read it and just admire it. Rick Brunson was there the last time. Jalen Brunson is the reason that they're back now. That's the kind of thing you can't manufacture. You can't workshop that in a brand meeting. You can't fake the emotion of that. It's family, it's franchise history, New York sports paying history, and payoff all standing in the same frame. And again, Brunson didn't need to score 40 in game four. He actually had 15 and five assists, zero turnovers. That's where that's where it is. That's what it needs. The Knicks were so complete in the closeout game that Brunson didn't even have to turn into Superman. He just had to be the head of the snake. Get everybody organized, pick your spots, keep the thing moving, let the team breathe. That's when you know it's real. You know, stars win you games. Teams win you series. Brunson already gave you the star performance in game one. He's the killer. No doubt about it. That fourth quarter, overtime, the whole thing, he's the guy that makes Cleveland feel like the walls were closing in. Game two? Well, game two, they tried to take the ball out of his hands. He gives you 14 assists. He doesn't fight the game. He reads it. He trusts the pass. He trusts his teammates. He lets Hart step into the space that Cleveland is going to give him and then encourages him to shoot when he misses his first his first four threes. That's grown-up superstar stuff. There are players who only know how to dominate one way. Brunson is not that player. Brunson can beat you with the shot. He can beat you with the piss. He can beat you with tempo, beat you with patience, beat you by making your defense admit that they're scared of him. That's not just scoring, that's control. And then by game four, you know, Cleveland is Cleveland's out of counters at this point. And Brunson is standing there as the Eastern Conference MVP final. If you're a Knicks fan, this is the guy you've been waiting for without even knowing his name, before even knowing who he was running on the court in diapers. You wanted the franchise saver to look like a certain way for years. Maybe it was the number one pick, maybe it was the big trade, maybe it was the superstar who chooses New York in free agency, which never happens. Instead, it's second round pick, Jalen Brunson, two-time national championship winner in Villanova, and a legacy player from Rick Brunson. New York has had louder names. But I'll tell you what it hasn't had. It hasn't had many better leaders than Jalen Brunson. Some players become stars because the numbers force you to acknowledge them. Brunson became a star because the whole city started breathing differently when the ball was in his hands. That's the difference. I gotta give a little love to Mike Brown here, too. Mike Brown deserves a little piece of this. Are they gonna lose the toughness? The grit that Thibodeau made them play with. All fair questions. Well, turns out they didn't lose the identity. They upgraded the software. The toughness is 100% still there. Hart is still flying into everything. OG is still making life miserable for wing players. Mitch is still giving them physical

Brunson’s MVP And Full Circle

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minutes. Brunson is Brunson, and the Knicks still have that street fight mentality. But now there's even more flexibility, more pace when they need it, more trust in the bench, more willingness to ride the hot hand, make room for heart to be heart without every mistake, feeling like a federal case. There's more ways to win when Brunson isn't dropping 35. You know, Mike Brown didn't take the dog out of this team. He taught it a few new tricks. He's in the finals in his first year with the Knicks, second final strip as a head coach, and the first one was with Cleveland back in 2007. So there's another whole little uh sports gods pulling the strings layer to this, you know. He now goes through Cleveland to get New York back to the finals. The father was on the last Knicks finals team, the son wins the MVP to bring them back, the coach's last final strip was with the team he just swept. I mean, how how could you not be romantic about sports? You know, if you wrote it, someone would tell you to tone it down a little bit. It's getting a little crazy, it's not really making sense. It sounds too storybook. Now, if you zoom out for a second, for a whole generation of Knicks fans, the finals were something other teams played in. That was for the Lakers, the Spurs, the Warriors, the Heat, the Celtics, the teams that always seemed to have the plan, the star, the timing, the great front office, the coach, even the luck. Knicks fans fans had memories. They had old highlights 94, 99, Ewing, Houston, Spreewell, Van Gundy hanging off the legs, grainy clips, old garden noise. Stories from people who were there but are now way older. For younger Knicks fans, the finals, the finals might as well be mythology. You know, you heard about it, you didn't live it. Well, guess what, boys and girls? Now it's here. Madison Square Garden is going to host NBA finals basketball. That sentence alone, if you're a real Knicks fan, should give you some goosebumps. The Garden is going to host finals games in 2026, with Jalen Brunson leading the Knicks with this team, with this city, with this fan base that has been waiting forever to stop being the butt of the jokes. This team didn't ask Knicks fans to pretend. It gave them proof. That's why this season feels different. Knicks fans are emotional. Sure. We're crazy, sure. We know that. Knicks fans can talk themselves into

Mike Brown Upgrades The System

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anything. Every fan base does it. But New York, New York fans, especially Knicks fans, they do it, they do it to a broadway level production value. But this one isn't delusion. This isn't orange and blue skies clouding the vision. They're in the finals. They swept Philly. They swept the Cavs. They won game four by 37. They pulled the starters with half a quarter left. They closed every series with a blowout. Those are not vibes. Those are receipts. So now the finals matchup is waiting. Oklahoma City or San Antonio. And we'll get into that. We we will absolutely get into that in the future. Look, if it's the Thunder, you're talking about the defending champions, shy, you got depth, physicality, shy making, Caruso doing all the annoying winning player stuff, all the team that knows exactly what the stage is like because they've been there. Would be nice to stick it to Hart and Sign a little bit. And if it's the Spurs, well, you know, you're talking about Wemby. You're talking about Fox, you're talking about seven foot five going against a six foot one, Jalen Brunson, a little bit of chaos, but also a little bit of youth. And you gotta win, you gotta lose to Win. You know? Are all those young players ready for it? And they match up good against Spurs. Whatever. Either way, I don't care. Either way, the Knicks team is gonna be a monster. The opponent will have home court, the finals start June 3rd, whatever. There's plenty of time to break down matchups, rotations, who guards who, what the Knicks can hunt. Tonight's not about that. Tonight is not that episode. Tonight is not about a spreadsheet. It's not about panicking over the next mountain before you appreciate the one you just climbed. Tonight is about the Knicks, the New York Knicks going to the NBA finals. And I know as a fan, we always want to skip ahead. What did the matchup with? What do they what can they do better? How can they go? Whatever, whatever. We'll get there. For one night, let it be simple. The Knicks are back. The franchise that spent years as a punchline to everybody else are four wins away from a championship. The fan base that had to talk itself into hope over and over and over again with this draft pick, with that draft pick, with Phil Jackson, with Porzingis, with this, that, and the other. The kid who was in diapers the last time this Knicks team made the finals just won Conference Finals MVP. I was eight years old the last time this happened. Now I'm sitting here trying to talk to a microphone like a normal person after high-fiving and hugging random strangers in the bar, watching the Knicks empty the bench in a closeout game. Yeah, good luck being normal after that. There's something kind of beautiful about the way sports measures time. You don't always realize how much life has actually gone by until a team finally gets you back to a place it hasn't been

Finals Await And A Night To Savor

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in decades. 1999 to now. Childhood to adulthood. Hell, back in the back though, back then, the computer stayed in one room. It didn't go in your pocket with you everywhere you went. All the years where this felt impossible, and now suddenly here it is. Finals. Four wins away. That's why we watch. That's why we care. That's why we let these teams drive us insane. Because every once in a while, after all the nonsense, sports gives you a night that just makes the whole timeline feel connected. Let it sound weird, man. Let it soak in. Let it feel good. Go, New York, go, New York, go. Alright. I've said enough. I've said my piece. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening. That's the end of this episode. As always, follow along on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, all the uh all the socials you want. It's at Rice on the Radio. The uh the MLB episode is coming up next, and once the West settles, we'll be back here for the real finals preview. But for now, the Knicks are going to the NBA finals. Spread some good energy, be good nice people, tell someone you love them. Let's do it to it.