The NBA season ended on Wednesday in San Antonio, but the basketball weekend it kicked off felt like a thank-you note from the calendar. A trophy presentation Friday night, a Liberty home game that was less stylish than effective on Saturday, and a slate of BSN evenings in Puerto Rico that produced exactly the kind of close-margin nonsense that league always seems to manufacture in June. Three different competitions, three different reasons to be glad you stayed in. Let's go in order.

The Knicks closing it out, again

If you blinked, you missed it. Two games, two wins, one trophy. The clincher was Wednesday, but the games either side of it bookend the weekend's basketball story neatly enough that I want to talk about Tuesday's Game 5 anyway, because the rebound number from that night still hasn't left my head.

In San Antonio on Tuesday, the New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs by ten and out-rebounded them by five, 54 to 49. That is not how Game 5 of a Finals between a young, athletic, lottery-built Spurs team and a New York side that started Karl-Anthony Towns at the five was supposed to read. The Knicks shot 26 percent from three on 43 attempts, missed 32 of them, and still won by double digits, because Spurs missed 25 of their own three-point looks too and turned the ball over nine times on dead-eyed possessions where the offense never quite found its shape. The 20-of-25 line at the free-throw stripe for the Knicks did the rest. When the games come down to who hangs on, the team that doesn't squander free points usually walks out of the building first.

What I keep coming back to, watching San Antonio in this series, is how much of their basketball depends on actually making perimeter shots. The Spurs got to 31 percent from three on Tuesday, which is fine, but they only put up 36 attempts and asked a couple of role players to manufacture rim pressure that wasn't really there. The series turned on those two numbers. Volume from three and Towns rebounding both sides of the floor.

The Knicks deserve the trophy. They had the better defensive identity, they had the better free-throw discipline, and in Towns and OG Anunoby they had two players who could shrink to the rim and stretch back out without the offense seizing up. Brunson got his minutes and the system did the rest. Mike Brown won't get the credit he deserves, because he never does, but you do not bench Towns in fourth quarters of a Finals run unless you trust everything else in the building.

Liberty grind one out at Barclays

Indiana Fever travelled to Brooklyn on Saturday night and lost 83-75. The Liberty did not play well. They shot 7-of-23 from three and turned it over fourteen times. They were also at the line forty times less than the Fever, who got there on a forty-trip night and made 33 of them. That is a colossal number. Indiana's Sunday line at the stripe should have been a winning line.

What kept them from collecting was their three-point shooting, which was nothing short of catastrophic. The Fever made three of their twenty attempts from deep, a 15 percent night, with shots from Mitchell and Boston rattling out, and with their best shooter, Lexie Hull, never quite getting comfortable. They held a 48-40 advantage on the boards and were ahead in steals, 9-4, and still gave up the game. Coach Christie said after the game that they had done enough things right to win, which is the kind of postgame interview line that gets less consoling the more you sit with it.

For New York, the night belonged to assists more than buckets. Twenty assists to Indiana's fourteen, which suggests an offense that worked, and a couple of timely Sabrina Ionescu three-pointers in the third that turned a five-point lead into something the Fever could not chip back into. Stewart was Stewart at the rim. The Liberty are 5-3 now and the league still feels structurally tilted toward them, even on nights when their shotmaking is wobbly.

Friday and Sunday in the BSN

Three games on Saturday night in Puerto Rico, and one on Sunday, and between them you get a fair window into where this BSN season is heading. Vaqueros de Bayamón beat Mets de Guaynabo 103-91 on Saturday, which sounds straightforward until you look at the rebound margin. The Mets out-rebounded Bayamón 34 to 26 and forced six steals to Bayamón's twelve. They turned the ball over only twelve times to Bayamón's sixteen. They lost by twelve anyway, because the Vaqueros shot 44 percent from three on 27 attempts and Mets shot 36 percent on 28. The story of that game is that on a night the Mets won every category that says "we played harder", a single statistical line tipped it twelve points the wrong way.

Down the road in Ponce on the same night, Leones beat Aguada Santeros 98-91 in a game shaped by Leones' three-point shooting (13-of-27, 48 percent) and Aguada's surprisingly tidy fourteen-assist offense that just couldn't keep pace. Santeros went 8-of-23 from three and shot 91 percent from the line on 22 attempts, which in any other building should have been enough. It wasn't, because Leones had four extra makes from deep and that was the entire margin. The BSN this June feels exactly like this. Two well-coached teams trading possessions and the team that nails the three or four extra three-pointers wins by seven.

On Sunday in Arecibo, San Germán came in and beat Capitanes de Arecibo 103-99 in a game I don't have full box numbers on, but a four-point road win in Arecibo always means something. San Germán have now played four games in five nights and won three of them. If this team holds its rotations together through the next two weeks, they're the side I'd be most reluctant to draw in a playoff series.

The takeaway

A weekend without much basketball is supposed to feel quiet. This one didn't, mostly because the Knicks lifting a trophy on Wednesday made the days either side of it feel like they belonged to the same story. The WNBA is settling into a rhythm where Liberty home games are slowly turning into matches the rest of the league has to solve, and the BSN is reminding anyone watching that small-sample basketball can ride on a single shooting percentage swing. Nothing earth-moving in any of the three competitions this weekend, but plenty to chew on, which is exactly what a June Monday should give you.

See you next Monday.