Karl-Anthony Towns wasn’t nervous in the lead-up to Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night. 

That, he said, was due to his mother.

“I don’t know what it was, but I just felt a calm and a peace that, I don’t know, had to be coming from the woman above,” Towns said on ESPN after their 105-95 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. 

Towns’ mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, died in April 2020 due to complications from COVID-19. She was 58.

While Jacqueline wasn’t able to be in the stands for the first NBA Finals game of Towns’ career, he said he absolutely felt her presence. And that made all the difference.

“I felt really confident about today, I felt good,” Towns said. “I felt like a kid. It was just fun out here. This is something that as a kid you always dream about. You always hope to be an NBA player, let alone to be in the NBA Finals. 

“All day, it was just a weird feeling. It felt like I was a kid getting ready to play my Saturday AAU games and my Sunday AAU games. In a way, it felt like I was seeing her in the stands. It was fun, it was really fun, and it was really comforting.”

Towns finished with 18 points and 12 rebounds in the Knicks’ 10-point win on Wednesday night, which gave them the early 1-0 lead over the Spurs. It marked the team’s 12th straight win in the playoffs, too. They swept both the Philadelphia 76ers and Cleveland Cavaliers to reach the Finals for the first time since 1999.

Towns, now in his second year with the Knicks, averaged 20.1 points and 11.9 rebounds per game this season. 

Towns and the Knicks will run it back on Friday night in San Antonio for Game 2 of the series before returning to Madison Square Garden next week. While they still have a long way to go to actually secure what would be the franchise’s first championship since the 1970s, the Finals couldn’t have gotten off to a better start for Towns, both on and off the court.