Good morning, good evening from San Antonio.

I'm Dave DeFore, here with Jared Weiss, Esperi.

At the scene of the Knicks stealing game one from the Spurs, 105-95.

At home.

At home.

How about that?

It was a Knicks-type crowd. It was kind of a Knicks crowd. It was, I mean, we knew this was going to happen, but the Nicks travel hard. They're absolute psychos. They were chanting Nix and Ford during the national anthem. Shout out of America, very patriotism. But listen, we're in the United States to Nix right now. And after this game, like, we saw Jalen Brunson closes out. Spurs don't have a closer they can count on in this game. And the rebounding battle was a huge part of it. Like Knicks knew how they wanted to crash. Spurs certainly didn't. And yeah, we're going to have a long series. I think so. And I want to just start right at the first quarter where I thought the series might have been over when Jalen Brunson's leg gets rolled over.

Harrison Barnes goes down, rolls over his leg. He goes straight to the locker room.

And I look over at S and I'm just like, oh, well, there goes out of hope. And then he comes back,

looks fine, falls down, Luke Cornet steps on his ankle. And I'm thinking to myself again, wow, Jalen Brunson, are we going to lose him? This guy is a warrior. And I know that we throw that. He's a Nick, actually. I knew you were going to say. We throw that turnaround a lot in sports, but this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

It's game one of the NBA finals.

This guy clearly was hobbled.

Couldn't tell.

And Jalen Brunson is still the scariest man on the planet in a close basketball game with five minutes left.

And he showed it in this game tonight, in spite of being a little bit banged up.

I think he was incredible yeah um and everything that they said there was a stat that came out a couple days ago uh from

lev a cabas i believe his last name is um that jelan brunson is as efficient if not more

efficient than michael jordan in terms of clutch playoff efficient. Well, after the night, he's off that chart. Yeah. It's insane. I mean, you know, look, you cover the spurs. Have you seen anybody be able to do what he did tonight? I mean, Shay a little bit, but no, I mean, Brunson's, what I love about Brunson's game tonight, I mean, besides that he went 12 or 31, which is just hilarious, was in the crunch time, the way that he organized their spacing was like unbelievable. There was this play where they didn't even score off of it, but I think they got the rebound and they got fouled or something like that where he ran he ran like a sideways pick and roll

at half court yes he just like kept like telling guys like get sideways get sideways and like they

wouldn't do he's like no no no all the way yeah and just like he knows exactly what he wants

he really does yeah he this guy's got great boundaries really he's like you got to play my game

and i'm and i'm gonna set you up the way i want to play you know daren fox said that at the end of the first half like perfect execution right so like coming the spurs just couldn't quite get to that in crunch time and brunson he just like he knows how to get either his ISO is space or he knows how to run his pick and roll the way he wants it and he got it now the spurs going to figure out like how do we disrupt that can i ask you a question what do you think is different between how brunson operates in the clutch and how and i can't believe i'm going to do this but like shay what's the differentiator because it felt like there was so many more solutions that the spurs had against shay than they had against Brunson in that fourth quarter.

...