Mikal Bridges has lived this exact movie. He is telling his Knicks teammates that the ending was not great.
The New York forward was a key rotation piece for the 2021 Phoenix Suns team that took a 2-0 NBA Finals lead over the Milwaukee Bucks and then lost four straight games. Bridges has not forgotten that, and he is not letting Jalen Brunson and the rest of his teammates forget it either.
“I just remember losing four straight. That’s what I remember out of that,” Bridges said Sunday morning of his Suns experience.
“My New York Knicks teammates all know too, and they understand as well that the series is far from over. It’s always going to stick with you.”
That is the right voice in the right room at the right time. The Knicks are up 2-0 on the San Antonio Spurs heading into Game 3 at Madison Square Garden. The temptation to celebrate is real. Bridges is the human reminder that 2-0 leads have collapsed before, and that the team holding the lead is usually the one that gets caught looking ahead.
The 2021 Suns and 2026 Knicks have some uncomfortable parallels. Both teams took advantage of a championship-favorite opponent that did not have its full roster early in the series. Both teams won the first two games at home with relative ease. Both teams featured a young, dynamic point guard playing his best basketball at the perfect time. The Suns had Chris Paul. The Knicks have Brunson.
The big difference, and Bridges pointed it out, is that New York stole both of those first two games on the road. The Knicks won Game 1 by 10 in San Antonio and won Game 2 in overtime. That is a much harder hole to climb out of than the one the Bucks faced when they came home tied 0-2.
Coach Tom Thibodeau has reportedly been hammering the same point in film sessions all weekend. The series is 0-0 mentally. The Spurs are not going to roll over. Victor Wembanyama is still the best player on the floor in any given moment, and a young Spurs team with nothing to lose in Game 3 is exactly the kind of team that punches first and makes a series interesting again.
Bridges is not just talking. He has been playing his best basketball of the playoffs over the last two weeks. He is averaging 18.4 points in this series on 49 percent shooting from the field and 41 percent from three. His defensive assignment on Devin Vassell has been one of the underrated stories of the Finals, holding the San Antonio guard well below his regular-season averages.
The Knicks need that version of Bridges to keep showing up. They also need the veteran voice he is providing. Brunson is the alpha, Karl-Anthony Towns is the matchup nightmare, OG Anunoby is the lockdown defender. Bridges is the guy who has felt exactly what could go wrong if the team relaxes.
President Donald Trump is reportedly attending Game 3 at MSG, the Knicks’ first Finals home game since 1999, and the crowd is going to be the loudest crowd New York has produced in 25 years. The Spurs will have to weather all of it.
If the Knicks take care of business Monday night, they go up 3-0 in a series that no team has ever come back from in NBA history. If they lose, suddenly the 2021 Suns comparison gets uncomfortable real fast.
Bridges has lived both versions. He is making sure his teammates know which one he wants.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
