Knicks fans booed as President Donald Trump appeared on the jumbotron at Madison Square Garden before the game, saluting from a private box during the national anthem. Later, they had more reasons to be grouchy, after the San Antonio Spurs gutted out a 115–111 road win. Both teams went cold from three-point range in a tight fourth quarter, but in the final minutes the young Spurs finally showed the kind of poise they’d been missing in the first two games of the series. With the win, San Antonio halted New York’s winning streak at thirteen, and brought life to a series that was verging on a Knicks coronation.

After the game, the New Yorker editor David Remnick was joined by the staff writers Louisa Thomas and Vinson Cunningham for a live discussion on Substack. The mood this time was understandably less buoyant among the Knicks partisans. “Nothing went right that needed to go right,” Cunningham lamented. Taking the wider view, they discussed how the Spurs played with a newfound confidence, what went wrong for the Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns, and why the game felt somehow even bigger than Trump. ♦