There probably isn’t much to glean from a single game in December, but the Knicks beat the Spurs in this season’s Emirates Cup final.<\/p>\n
And in that contest, New York absolutely pummeled San Antonio on the boards, 59-42.<\/p>\n
Of course, Victor Wembanyama only played 25 minutes that night. He’s bound to average significantly more in the Finals, but Karl-Anthony Towns and Mitchell Robinson will lean on him plenty during the series. And with OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart, New York has a chance to win on the physicality front on the wings.<\/p>\n
That, of course, doesn’t really extend to the backcourt. The size and athleticism of Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper could cause problems for Jalen Brunson, but the Knicks star has loads more experience.<\/p>\n
And though San Antonio’s lack of the same hasn’t really shown up in this postseason, that’s historically been a critical component for deep playoff runs.<\/p>\n
Towns, Brunson, Anunoby, Bridges and Hart have all taken plenty of playoff lumps during their careers. Even when you include De’Aaron Fox, the Spurs really haven’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There probably isn’t much to glean from a single game in December, but the Knicks beat the Spurs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-699018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}