ESPN’s Vincent Goodwill Talks Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals with Rich

We love when Vincent Goodwill stops by, and he stopped by right before game four of the NBA Finals, suited and booted, ready to talk Knicks and Spurs with Rich. The fatigue was real. "I had to do 'Get Up' this morning, so it's been a long day," Goodwill said. The excitement was realer.

The conversation opened on the thread Rich expected to roost from game three into game four: the officiating. Let everything go for the first six or seven minutes the way they did in game three, Rich warned, and you run some real risks. Goodwill talked him off the ledge. Every game has a different crew, and tonight's lead was Zach Zarba, who Goodwill called maybe the NBA's best official. "The players respect him and they like him." A 30-second captain's meeting sorts most of it out. "I don't think we are at the risk of something ugly happening. This is the NBA Finals. Nobody wants to get thrown out of a game." The Victor Wembanyama incident from the other night, Goodwill said, was "a little retaliatory for things that have been happening throughout the course of the series."

Protecting Jalen Brunson came next. Rich floated the idea that you can't let your captain get shoved over in your own garden and live to tell the tale. Goodwill agreed someone has to answer, but warned against thinking of it as mano e mano. "It doesn't mean you go after Victor Wembanyama." It means a hard, clean screen on Stephon Castle that sets the tone. And he delivered the honest part: the Knicks were not the more physical team in game three. "The Spurs were by far the more physical, aggressive team." When refs see that mismatch, they stop bailing the softer team out.

Then the pressure debate. Goodwill, like Chris Brockman, put it squarely on the Knicks. Rich, a native Brooklynite who grew up on Staten Island, pushed back: lose tonight and the Spurs have to win three in a row against a team that won 13 straight in the playoffs. Goodwill conceded the point but held his line. "The San Antonio Spurs have two players in their rotation who are 19 years old. They don't know how to spell pressure." The Knicks were built to win a championship. You can't call the Garden the Mecca and then claim the pressure lives somewhere else.

His favorite storyline nobody's talking about: Mitch Johnson, the not-yet-40 Spurs head coach in his first Finals. So much of the Spurs talk runs through the lineage of Gregg Popovich, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, that Johnson himself gets lost. Popovich, who had a stroke over a year ago, handed him a team and a cauldron. "He's getting cat called and everything else when he's walking the streets of New York by Knick fans," Goodwill said. "This is so enormous for someone to go through for the very first time."

Rich added the Sam Amick report that Popovich joined the flight to New York, gave a speech, and sat with players individually. Goodwill folded it into the Spurs DNA, the franchise that absorbed the Ray Allen game six in 2013 and didn't break. "They don't care and they don't scare."

Asked to call the game, Goodwill stepped out of his lane and into honesty. "I want to see a long series. I don't want this NBA season to end." Game fours, he noted, are usually classics. What he's chasing is one name. "Either Jalen Brunson or Victor Wembanyama adding their name to NBA Finals lore. Game four tells you who's winning the series, and it tells you who the best team is. And that answer may not always be the same team."