The Sheer Numbers. The Knicks finished the playoffs with a plus-283 point differential, the highest in NBA history by a massive margin. The 2017 Golden State Warriors — the team that added KD after winning 72 regular season games the year before — are second with a plus-230 point differential. You could subtract the Knicks’ 51-point win over the Hawks and they’d still hold the record. The Knicks also have the best net rating in playoff history at plus-15.4 points per 100 possessions; the 2001 Lakers with Shaq and Kobe are in second place at plus-13.7.

(And one last time: the Knicks played the best eight-game span, the best nine-game span, the best 10-game span, and the best 11-game span in NBA regular season or postseason history.)

The Drama. Last week I wrote about how the Knicks had two of the top five comebacks in NBA Finals history. Update: They now have three of the top six comebacks in NBA Finals history: The 29-point comeback in Game 4, the 16-point comeback in Game 5, and the 14-point comeback in Game 1. THREE OF THE SIX BIGGEST COMEBACKS OF ALL TIME, IN ONE SERIES ALONE! And that’s not even including the 22-point fourth-quarter comeback against the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals.

The Improbability. The Knicks were +2200 to win the championship at the start of the playoffs, the lowest odds of any eventual champion since anybody started tracking. The Athletic asked 146 NBA players to give their anonymous pick for the NBA championship; zero picked the Knicks. (Somebody picked the Hawks!) Fair! The Knicks were the 3-seed in the weaker conference. They had a 2-9 stretch in January. Then they went 15-3 in the NBA Playoffs.

The City. The New York Knicks are the most popular team in the largest metropolitan area in America. I’m not going to be a New York Snob who claims New Yorkers are inherently more interesting or valuable than people from other places … but you’ve gotta admit there are a lot of us! So many, in fact, that most leagues have successfully snuck a second team in there — the Yankees and Mets, the Giants and Jets — but in hoops, the city’s most beloved sport, it’s all Knicks. The Knicks’ championship run has made one of the biggest cities in the world feel like a small town, where everybody’s talking about the big game that the local college or high school is playing. Eight million people all pulling in the same direction is a powerful force — so powerful that I bet you felt it, even if you live 10,000 miles away.

(I couldn’t decide whether it was meaner to mention the Brooklyn Nets or not mention them. I don’t mean to punch down while celebrating the greatest moment for Knicks fandom ever … but after watching raucous Knicks celebrations taking place literally five minutes away from the Nets’ stadium, I kinda think they need to move. The dream that a second franchise could maybe split the city 70/30 someday feels dead. Any potential swing voters made up their minds this month.)

The Wait, and the Weight: It had been 53 years, the longest NBA championship drought ever snapped. (The previous record belonged to the Milwaukee Bucks, who went 49 years between titles.) If the Knicks ever win again, it won’t mean as much as this.

The win over Paraguay was the highest-scoring game in USMNT World Cup history, and tied for the biggest win. The team’s two previous three-goal wins came all the way back at the very first World Cup, in 1930, a tournament many teams skipped instead of making long treks to South America by boat. (Incidentally, one of the teams the Americans beat by three at that World Cup: Paraguay.)

They’ve already scored more goals than the last time they hosted the World Cup in 1994, when they had three goals in four games. Same for the last World Cup in 2022.

I have never seen an American striker play as well as Folarin Balogun, who scored twice and had a third goal pulled back due to an offside player in the buildup. Balogun came into the World Cup in incredible form — he had a seven-match scoring streak for Monaco earlier this year — and is somehow surpassing expectations.

The real MVPs: The airline agents who wouldn’t let Balogun’s heavily pregnant mom onto a plane back to England, leading to her giving birth to her goalscoring son in the States. Massive W for birthright citizenship! Fourteenth Amendment fans stand up!

But the win was about much more than Balogun. The Americans held 65 percent of possession; they completed more than twice as many passes as Paraguay (509 to 233); they attempted 13 shots inside the Paraguayan box. They looked at Paraguay and saw … (googles Paraguayan cuisine) vori vori, a thick, yellowish soup with little balls made of corn flour and cheese that has been recognized by TasteAtlas on three occasions — in 2023,^[1] 2024,^[2] and 2025^[3] — as the most prestigious soup worldwide.

The result was surprising because Paraguay appeared to be a very impressive defensive team, perhaps one of the best in the tournament. In World Cup qualifying, they allowed just 10 goals in 18 matches, shutting out Brazil and Argentina in 1-0 wins. The USA scored four goals on them.

At this point, the Americans are all but guaranteed a spot in the knockout round. (The Athletic gives them a 97 percent chance of advancing.) It would be almost impossible for them to finish fourth in the group behind both Paraguay and Turkey, which lost to Australia. And if they finish third, they’ll still likely advance, as this 4-1 win gives them a great head start on various tiebreakers like goal differential and total goals scored.

At this point, it’s probably fair to start thinking about winning the group, which would put the Americans on a very favorable path through the knockout round. The group winner gets a third-place group finisher in the Round of 32.

If you’re ranking the biggest wins in USMNT history … the win over Mexico in the Round of 16 of the 2002 World Cup probably has to be #1, but I don’t think the team has ever looked better than it did Friday night. (Maybe the first half of the 2009 Confederations Cup Final against Brazil. If you know you know!) If they can keep it up, we could be in for a special month.

Bussi is a Long Island native (and Knicks fan 🙂) who went undrafted and had a modest career at Western Michigan, where he helped the Broncos win their first NCAA Tournament game in school history. Bussi’s LinkedIn notes that he worked at the Chipotle in North Andover, Massachusetts during the summer of 2020. Strange time to be a Chipotle employee, tbh.

Chipotle marketing has to be having a blast right now. The Knicks have a guy who eats the same burrito bowl every day and a former employee just lifted the Stanley Cup.

Bussi spent his early pro career in the Bruins’ organization, but the Bruins had a really solid goalkeeper rotation for the entirety of his tenure, and he never appeared in an NHL game. In 2025, he was a backup again … in the AHL, the top-tier of minor league hockey, after losing the Providence Bruins’ starting job.

He came to Carolina likely expecting to be the team’s third-string goalie. After all, the Canes had Andersen, and an exciting prospect in Pyotr Kochetkov, who was younger, highly-drafted, and proven at the NHL level. But Kochetkov suffered a series of injuries this year, which led to Bussi’s NHL debut in August.

Bussi looked pretty good. Carolina won 11 of his first 12 games. He actually posted better stats than Andersen during the season, going 31-6-2 as a starter.

But the team made the safe choice and rode with Andersen in the playoffs … and he looked great! Andersen was incredible in the first few rounds of the playoffs, with a .931 save percentage allowing just 1.53 goals per game. Then he fell apart in the Stanley Cup Final, allowing 12 goals in less than three games with a .815 save percentage. He was subbed out with Carolina trailing 4-0 in the second period of Game 3.

It’s unclear what happened to Andersen, whose availability, even as an emergency backup, was in question after his benching. The Canes had to scramble to pull an additional goalie from their AHL affiliate. Without prying too much, it’s hard to imagine Andersen wasn’t in some way affected by the loss of his longtime agent and mentor Claude Lemieux, who died by suicide in late May.

What is clear is that Bussi immediately turned around Carolina’s fortunes. The Canes rallied back to force overtime and Bussi went over 40 minutes before allowing his first goal, a flukey shot that bounced off the wall and off his back. His numbers for the series were nearly identical to Andersen’s during the first few rounds — a .931 save percentage, and 1.60 GAA.

According to the NHL, Bussi is the first player to win the clinching game of the Stanley Cup Final after not starting Game 1 in over 40 years, since Oilers goalie Andy Moog in 1984. And it had been another 20 years before that. All in all, Bussi is just the eighth player to come off the bench mid-series and clinch the Cup, and six of them played before before 1963.

Backups do win the Stanley Cup sometimes! In fact, the team that lost these Finals, the Golden Knights, won the Cup three years ago with backup Adin Hill stepping up in the postseason. Hill went back to his role as Vegas’ backup … and is actually still there. He had to watch Carter Hart let in goal after goal after goal for the Knights while Carolina’s backup relived Hill’s moment from a few years back. (Knights coach John Tortorella said that the idea of benching Hart for Hill was “the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.” Always a delight, that guy.)

If Bussi is more than just a flash in a pan, the Canes are in great shape. They were able to ink Bussi to a three-year, $6 million deal midway through the season — a nice deal for a guy who was slinging burritos a few years ago, but, retrospectively, an absolute bargain for a goalie who can win you the Cup.

But even if Bussi is just a flash in the pan? HE JUST WON THE STANLEY CUP! That’s all that matters!