The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! What’s life if not just a long string of series? Inside:
Basketball: Spurs vs. Knicks, starting WednesdayWe have our NBA Finals.The Spurs beat the Thunder last night in Oklahoma City, 111-103, setting up a final confrontation with the Eastern Conference champ Knicks that begins on Wednesday in San Antonio. So concludes one of the best Western Conference Finals ever, a true classic.One more series to go. Here’s an interesting set of facts about it. The Knicks will:
Enter as the hottest team in the history of the NBA playoffs. They have won 11 games in a row, against the Hawks, 76ers and Cavaliers. In running up a 12-2 playoff record, the average score of their games has been Knicks 120, Opponents 101. New York’s 19.4-point margin per game is, for the moment, six points ahead of any other postseason team since the NBA-ABA merger. (If you’re into trivia, I put the three closest teams behind them at the bottom of this section.)
Have been resting since last Monday, while the Spurs spent an extra five days slugging it out in a brutal conference final against an ultra-elite opponent.
