The New York Knicks are fighting history as well as the Spurs. On Wednesday night in San Antonio, they took a crucial step towards defeating both<\/p>\n
It is uncommon to begin counting down after the opening game of an NBA finals, but these are uncommon times in New York, and the Knicks have been counting since Richard Nixon was president, their coach, Mike Brown, was three years old, and their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs, played in the American Basketball Association. After the Knicks took Game 1 105-95<\/a>, the anticipation in New York rose to yet another level.<\/p>\n Game 1 was not a good game, but it was a great game. The first quarter was ragged. So was the second. Neither team could shoot from distance \u2013 the Knicks shot 31% from three, the Spurs 26%. The Spurs\u2019 Victor Wembanyama, the sport\u2019s heir apparent<\/a>, made his finals debut with six turnovers, 6-for-21 shooting from the field, defensively alive but never transcendent. Both Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson, the Knicks\u2019 superb, always underestimated engine, took nine three-pointers. Each made two.<\/p>\n Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.<\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Knicks are fighting history as well as the Spurs. On Wednesday night in San Antonio, they took a crucial step towards defeating both It is uncommon to begin counting down after the opening game of an NBA finals, but these are uncommon times in New York, and the Knicks have been counting … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}