After OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns came up with the fingertip plays that kept New York alive, after Rick Brunson nearly barreled into Spike Lee while rushing over to embrace Ben Stiller, after someone deep inside Madison Square Garden belted out the chorus of “Out of the Woods” to Taylor Swift and she fired back the final lyric, after an overjoyed Timothée Chalamet ripped off his shirt and tossed it to the floor on his way out, after the crowd roared, cried, hugged, high-fived and eventually spilled into the Manhattan night, after Stephon Marbury admitted he was “scared to go outside,” and after Jose Alvarado had finally showered and changed, the reserve guard who, in the words of both Mike Brown and Jalen Brunson, “changed the game,” sat at his locker and exhaled.
“What a f—ing game,” Alvarado said to no one in particular, wearing the stunned expression of someone still trying to process what had just unfolded. Then he simply shook his head.
The New York Knicks’ 107-106 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 4 was more than just the largest comeback ever seen in an NBA Finals game. It was the kind of jaw-dropping, almost impossible spectacle that can never fully be explained to anyone who didn’t witness it live, yet will remain unforgettable for everyone who did — especially those in the middle of the chaos.
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Alvarado logged only three minutes during New York’s dreadful first half Wednesday, and in that brief stretch he committed a turnover and picked up two fouls. One came while he was essentially grappling with Spurs phenom Victor Wembanyama, who is listed as 16 inches taller, prompting ESPN analyst Richard Jefferson to joke, “That’s the type of basketball they play in The Cage over here in New York.”
Alvarado played just three minutes in the Knicks’ hideous first half on Wednesday, committing a turnover and two fouls, one of which he picked up while more or less wrestling Spurs star Victor Wembanyama (whose listed height is 16 inches taller) and prompted ESPN analyst Richard Jefferson to say, “That’s the type of basketball they play in The Cage over here in New York.”
As the Knicks closed the 29-point gap, though, their hometown hero — Alvarado grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and went to Christ The King High School — was omnipresent. He rattled in a corner 3 that started an 8-0 run. He sprinted in transition and scurried over screens. He screened for Brunson, drew Wembanyama to the perimeter and injected pace and movement into a previously languid offense. With about four and a half minutes left, Alvarado set up Anunoby for a clean 3. On New York’s next possession, he attacked a closeout, hit Julian Champagnie with a nasty spin move and manufactured a layup. On the next one, he popped open for a late-clock 3 that brought the house down.
“That game is the epitome of Jose Alvarado,” Ryan Pannone, who coached Alvarado both with the Birmingham Squadron (the New Orleans Pelicans’ G League affiliate, now the Laketown Squadron) and on the Pelicans’ staff, said. “I mean, think about all the stuff he was doing in the game. He was setting screens ’cause he’s unselfish. He was defending Wemby at one point. And being ultra-physical because he’s the toughest guy on the floor. He ain’t backing down and he don’t care who you are, don’t care how big you are.”
Alvarado played the exact same way when Pannone saw him for the first time five years ago at the G League combine in Chicago. Pannone was ostensibly in the gym to watch a score-first guard with some of New Orleans’ scouting staff, but “I hated him,” Pannone said. “And there was a player that was just picking him up full-court and just being a total pest and turning him. Picked his pocket, goes down, scores.” As Alvarado yelled and screamed after the bucket, Pannone asked the scouts, “Who is this guy?”
One of them said Alvarado, listed at 6 feet tall, was too small. His other attributes, however, were exactly what Pannone was looking for in a G League point guard.
“When you’re coming from a mid-major school, some low-majors, definitely a high-major, everything is worse,” Pannone said. “The gear is worse, the travel is worse, the food is worse. Everything’s worse. And you just need guys that are just ballers, that just love the game, that are ultra-tough, that are going to bring it every night because that’s their personality.”
Pannone told the scouts he wanted to know more about Alvarado. He was informed that Alvarado had won ACC Defensive Player of the Year in his senior year at Georgia Tech. He responded, “What the f— did you just say?”
One of Pannone’s mentors, the coach/skills trainer/analyst David Thorpe, had taught him that when smaller players are successful, it means they’ve figured something out that others haven’t. That Alvarado had earned such an award at his height, then, suggested he was special.
Later, Alvarado worked out for the Pelicans, which gave the team a chance to sit down with him. Often, since prospects are coached for these sessions, they are not particularly revealing. Alvarado’s, however, made New Orleans’ management fall in love with him. The highlight was when, during an exercise with the team’s mental performance coach, he was asked, “What’s your spirit animal?”
Alvarado stood up from his chair. He beat his chest, let out a scream and said, “Gorilla.”
Until the second half of Wednesday’s game, Alvarado had not shared the floor with Brunson in the Knicks’ entire playoff run. With 9:46 left in the fourth quarter, though, Brown went to the two-point guard look. The combination was plus-19 the rest of the way, and Brown stuck with it for all but four possessions.
“I think he was trying to push all the buttons,” soon-to-be Hall of Fame coach Mike D’Antoni said. “And when you’re down 29, you’re trying everything. And he hit upon that lineup and then had the courage also to ride with it.”
Before summer league in 2021, D’Antoni, then a Pelicans consultant, had never seen Alvarado play. The initial plan was for Alvarado, who went undrafted and would be on a two-way contract, to spend the season with the Squadron. Sitting next to Pannone at an early practice, though, D’Antoni told Pannone that he was too good for that.
“I go, ‘He’s not gonna make it down to you guys, he’ll carve out something with the Pelicans,’” D’Antoni said. “And he did. You could just tell. The guy had a spirit and ability to play defense, and the only thing negative he had going for him was his height. But he made up for it with a big heart.”
Alvarado’s energy was “infectious,” D’Antoni said. He did every drill at full speed. In scrimmages, his team almost always won.
“He was able to assert his will, and that’s what made him a good point guard,” D’Antoni said. “And that’s why I thought the guy’s going to make it. I told Jose this: I go, ‘You know, because of your size, you’re going to have to prove yourself every day. And that’s just the way the NBA works. You’re going to have to work for everything, and you’re going to have to continually work for it. It’s not something that you’ll be automatically penciled in. Because of your height, a lot of people will doubt you, and no matter what you do, they won’t remember that. They’ll just think, well, he can’t do that.’ Which I thought he could. And he always attacked. The times I was there, he always understood what he had to do is make his mark on the team.”
When CJ McCollum arrived in New Orleans for his first training camp, Alvarado didn’t allow the veteran to ease his way into it. “CJ gets there, he’s a little bit out of shape, he hasn’t played, and Jose is picking him up full-court, going at him,” Pannone said. The Pelicans referred to weak defenders as “pigeons,” and Alvarado wielded the term as a weapon.
“He starts f—ing shit-talking him: ‘He’s a f—ing pigeon, give me the ball, he can’t guard me,’” Pannone said. “And then CJ McCollum woke up and started torching him. This is what Jose does. CJ starts killing; he starts being CJ McCollum. At the end of it, [McCollum] called it out. He’s like, ‘Hey, man, that’s big-time, I needed that. I needed you to go at me and wake me up and shit-talk me to get me going.’”
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Alvarado was already experienced when it came to rousing teammates. Josh Pastner, his coach at Georgia Tech, remembers watching his AAU team, the New York Rens, play an 8 a.m. game in Las Vegas in 2016. “You could just tell they didn’t want to be there,” Pastner said. “They weren’t playing hard at all, other than Alvarado.” He lit up two of the Rens’ highly touted players, which told Pastner that he wouldn’t be afraid of Duke, North Carolina or any of the first-round prospects in the ACC.
“I was sitting in the stands, you know, evaluating, and I was like, ‘I gotta have that kid,’” Pastner said.
Pastner, now UNLV’s head coach, is fond of saying that, to Alvarado, “winning is more important than breathing.” During his senior year, then-Georgia Tech teammate Jordan Usher told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Alvarado “would cut off his fingers for us to win a game.” Wednesday’s incident with Wembanyama “exemplified who he is,” Pastner said, but at the time, he was surprised that Alvarado didn’t pick up a flagrant foul for it. “I talked to him the other day, and he’s still the same guy,” Pastner said. Two of Pastner’s neighbors in Vegas — one a die-hard Knicks fan, another a casual tuning into the Finals — have told him they love Alvarado because of the passion with which he plays.
“There’s nothing that’s cool, casual or cute about Jose,” Pastner said. “He’s all about being a competitive warrior.”
Alvarado played only five games for Pannone in the G League. Birmingham won all of them. During the last one, at the Showcase, fellow Brooklyn native Lance Stephenson gave the Squadron problems in the mid-post and from the elbow. Then Alvarado made an announcement: “I got him.” They beat Stephenson’s Grand Rapids Gold by 34 points.
“While he’s getting stops on Lance and frustrating him, he just starts screaming in his face: ‘I’m the king of New York, I’m the king of New York!’” Pannone said.
To Pannone, this is Alvarado in a nutshell. “He’s insane, and it’s awesome,” he said. “And he’s got that Napoleon complex. Like, he believes it. It’s why he made it.” That Alvarado is now royalty at Madison Square Garden is “beautiful,” he said, but not simply because Alvarado happens to be from New York.
“That’s cool,” Pannone said. “Like, what hometown kid doesn’t want to play for the Knicks? But that’s not the story. The story is he is New York. Through and through, the guy is New York. He is fearless. He is confident. He shit-talks. He’s the toughest f—ing guy no matter where he is, and he’s going to work his balls off and play his balls off.”
Alvarado was beloved in New Orleans, too, and he’d be a fan favorite anywhere. “If you are any human being, how do you not love Jose Alvarado?” Pannone said. “Wemby may not love Jose Alvarado right now, but how can you not love Jose Alvarado? He’s the American dream. He’s the people’s champ.”
That this particular player is producing in this particular city in this particular way, though, is storybook stuff.
“Right time, right place, right team and right stage, and he took advantage of it totally,” D’Antoni said.
He added: “Not quite the same as Linsanity, but that type of good-feel story.”
Patrizia’s, a red-sauce joint in Williamsburg, has named Alvarado’s favorite dish — spaghetti and meatballs in a bread bowl — after him. “He told me this weekend that there are places he likes to go to in New York that he can’t go anymore because they just mob him,” Pastner said. Before the playoffs started, he said on a podcast with Carmelo Anthony that, if the Knicks win the title, he’ll be “drunk for eight days” and will have a party “in every state.” Then he turned serious, saying he’s been waiting his whole life for this opportunity and has to take advantage of it.
New York is one win away from its first championship in 53 years. It has lost only one game in the last 50 days. Alvarado played his first game for the Knicks in February, but, if they finish the job, “that’s going to put him in legendary status in New York,” Pastner said.
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When New York was down big in Game 4, Pastner stopped watching. He only put it back on when his father called to tell him the Knicks were making a run. At halftime, Alvarado had told the team that, regardless of the result, they needed to show the Spurs who they really are. Then Brown threw him out there and he got to show the world who he is, too. When they pulled it off, he was nearly in tears.
“The Knicks got hard-playing, tough dudes,” Pannone said. “But sometimes the fire gets extinguished a little bit, and Jose Alvarado, he’s a fire starter.”
Those who know Alvarado know that this is no fluke, and he’s long been more than the sneaky-steals guy. Early in his pro career, “he made it so obvious that he was going to kick the door down,” Pannone said. He was always asking questions: Against this defense, what’s my read? What are you seeing that’s open? What am I missing? When he’d established himself in New Orleans, Pannone would ask the players in Birmingham what position he played. They’d all say point guard, and then Pannone would say that, despite his stature, he’s really a power forward, since McCollum, Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson all brought the ball down the floor. The point was that making an impact without the ball is an elite skill.
After Pannone got the Arkansas State job, he went on YouTube and watched Alvarado’s Christ The King tape. He was trying to figure out how people missed on Alvarado coming out of high school and how he might find an Alvarado for the Red Wolves.
Pannone has had no luck with the second part. So far, Alvarado appears to be one of one. He’ll keep searching, though, in case he just hasn’t come across the next one yet.
