Knicks Win NBA Finals, MVP Brunson, Wemby as a Villain, Matricide, Office Romance and Other Stories We Read or Watched

We discuss the stories we read and watched including articles about the Knicks winning the NBA Title, the essay “Matricide,” the film Office Romance, and the Apple tv show Widow Bay. (Check out video podcast near the end of this post)

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of June 8, 2026

“The New York Knicks Just Won a Championship of a Lifetime” by Danny Chau on The Ringer

• Click here to access the article. Chau on X: https://x.com/dannychau 
• Opening paragraph: Fifty-three years is a long time for an echo to travel, from the legendary Forum in Inglewood back in 1973 to the Frost Bank Arena in San Antonio on Saturday night. The one tether, the one constant, across two landmark moments in New York City history was the Knicks’ blue away uniforms, with orange and white trim.
• This is reference Wilt Chamberlain scoring his last basket vs. Knicks losing to them in finals: Where the Knicks’ last championship served as a farewell to a walking myth, their current triumph coincides with the arrival of Wilt’s spiritual successor—a modern-day Goliath who, if this series was any indication, will be the object of awe and derision for the rest of his career.
• And, most importantly, an all-time night from Jalen Brunson, the 2026 Finals MVP, who stands alongside Jordan with the most points in a championship-clinching performance on the road with 45. These 2025-26 New York Knicks? One of the greatest postseason teams ever. Let it sink in. Let it linger. 
• Mitchell Robinson proved himself to be the best offensive rebounder in basketball, bulldozing Wemby underneath the basket with 22 seconds remaining in the game to effectively clinch the title.
• Interesting sentence about Alvarado diving into former Mayor Bloomberg: “Alvarado—who was raised in an affordable housing co-op in Williamsburg that was the most ethnically diverse apartment building in the country—crash-landing into former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg (whose net worth exceeds $100 billion) in Game 3 is the kind of metaphor that could take years to fully unpack.”

A Few More Torg Notes on the NBA Basketball Season: 

• The #1 difference stats wise I saw in game 5 was that Brunson was 13-15 from the line. The only statistical advantage for either team was FTs made and attempted and it came from Brunson. Nobody on the Spurs can do that right now. 
• On Game 4: one of the most exciting games we’ve ever seen with the 29 point comeback, the Wemby missed FTs, the Fox try the lay up, and the OG tip in for game 4. Oh yeah, the KAT tip of the inbound pass. 
• I wondered if Jalen Brunson could do what he does against teams and defenders such as those on OKC and the Spurs. Yes he can! 
• Wemby is some version of KD on offense. He’s the best defender in the league and looks like he could be the best defender since the Celtics Bill Russell. 
• Jordan and Scottie Pippen went 6-0 in the Finals. John Havlicek went 8-0. Bill Russell went 11-1. What would you set the over/under for finals appearances and finals wins for Wemby and the Spurs? 

“Matricide,” an essay, by Meghan Daum

• It’s the opening essay in Daum’s 2014 collection The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion 
• Daum is a fellow born in 1970 human being with me. 
• Another Columbia MFA graduate like Beller and the H&H Bagel story we read. 
• Webster’s defines Matricide as the “murder of a mother by her child.” 
• The opening paragraph: People who weren’t there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue. A hospice nurse had been over a few hours earlier and said my mother was “very imminent.” She was breathing in that slow, irregular way that signals that the end is near. Strangely, I hadn’t noticed it despite listening for the past several weeks (months earlier, when her death sentence had been officially handed down but she was still very much alive, my mother had casually mentioned that she’d noticed this breathing pattern in herself and that I should be prepared to walk into the room and find her gone at any moment) but apparently it was here now and when I reached the third paragraph of the second page of the Hillary Clinton article (this remains imprinted on my brain; I can still see the wrap of the words as my eye scanned the column; I can still see the Annie Leibowitz photo on the previous page) I heard her gasp. Then nothing more.
• A second quote: My mother would die nine months later, and what most people don’t know is that of all the sad things about this fact, the saddest by far is that she did not have one day on this earth where she was both healthy and free of her mother. All her life she’d waited to be relieved of the burden of being unseen, only to have that relief perfectly timed with her own death sentence. FROM The Contemporary American Essay (p. 179) Kindle edition. 
• Quote: It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying. We expect wisdom, insight, bursts of clarity that are then reported back to the undying in the urgent staccato of a telegram: I have the answer. Stop. They’re waiting for me. Stop. Everyone Who Died Before. Stop. And they Look Great. Stop. We expect them to reminisce over photos, to accept apologies and to make them, to be sad, to be angry, to be grateful. We expect them to clear our consciences, to confirm our fantasies. We expect them to be excited about the idea of being a bird.
• Makes me think of when I bought our grandpa Bill a little waterfall with a picture of us in it to put by his bed. What the heck…
• Love this: In the beginning, I’d laughed and told her there was no cat, but with the dying you soon learn the folly of raining on a parade, especially one that might produce that holy grail of darnedest things: insight into the afterlife.
• A report on our mom. Yesterday, she went to some live music. I came in and she was in the atrium. She didn’t realize she’d seen it by the time I got her in her room. She took a few bites of a sandwich and fell asleep. She remarked their were bites in her sandwich when she woke up again. How does that work? 
• Was our mom a big talker? A conversationalist? Did I ever talk to her about a book? 
• Quote: It started with a fever. Actually it started before that. Of course it did. Nothing ever begins when you think it does.
• Why did mom’s short term memory go? One year she was taking care of dad and coming out back to watch the girls shoot and in less than a year she could barely stand up.  
• The writer gets sick: Even in my delirium, I cringed the way adult children cringe when they look down and realize the hands sticking out of their arms are actually their parents’ hands. I remember thinking that everyone was on to me now. My husband, the doctor, whoever else was there: they all knew not only that I was my mother’s daughter but that I was no different from her. Just as she had outlived her own mother by less than a year, I, too, would be denied a life outside of her shadow. The message was so obvious it might as well have been preordained: no woman in this matriarchal line would escape punishment for not loving her mother enough, for not mourning her mother enough, for not missing her enough, for refusing to touch her. None of us would be allowed out in the world on our own.
• For a review of the collection in Electric Lit, click here. 
• She’s @Meghan_daum on X and click here for her X page. She has a WKRP shirt on in her X profile pic. I said this from the show this week: As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. 

Office Romance on Netflix: 

• Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) with Jennifer Lopez. 
• Written by Brett Goldstein. Goldstein also in Shrinking with Harrison Ford. 
• Directed by Ol Parker who also directed Ticket to Paradise. 
• Some funny stand alone scenes. A really good scene where Goldstein’s understated lawyering style works well and the romance starts to kindle. 
• Some beautiful shots of the DR! 
• Ends like Notting Hill. Hits romantic comedy tropes hard, which is no problem. 

Secret Window rented on Amazon. Came out in 2004. 

• Based on the long short story Secret Window, Secret Garden 
• Directed by David Koepp (sounds like Kep to me) who also directed some Jurassic Park movies, Death Becomes Her, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones, 
• Film summary spoiler alert: The writer Johnny Depp character gets away with murdering his wife and her new boyfriend. 
• Love this about the short story: The Shooter character manifests by supernatural powers, kills the writer, and the wife and boyfriend survive. 
• Starring Johnny Depp, John Turturro (was in San Antonio for the Knicks Finals win), Maria Bellow and Timothy Hutton. 
• Great shots of the window and the garden in the film. They are telling us the whole story what’s going to happen. A running commentary on writing. The ending is the most important part. 
• Strengths: Spoiler alert that the Shooter character isn’t real and is just a creation of the writer character Johnny Depp’s mind. Depp’s performance is dark and funny. 
• Weakness: hits me today in a way it didn’t 20 years ago that this is a story about a man who gets away with killing his ex wife and her new boyfriend. Lots of Johnny Depp napping. 
• An alternate ending was included on the home media release, explicitly showing both Ted’s and Amy’s dead bodies underneath the corn patch in Mort’s garden.

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of June 8, 2026

Why the NBA Champion Knicks are the greatest team in New York Sports History by Ian O’Connor, (The Athletic) X: @Ian_OConnor 

• Likability is the authors final tipping point
• Fearless, tough, blue collar, facing social media challenges 
• 1998 Yankees runner up
• No split like Yankees-Mets, Jets-Giants, no one cares about nets 
• 16-3 in playoffs 
• Be talked about in 100 yrs???
• https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7357933/2026/06/13/knicks-nba-champions-greatest-new-york-team-column/

The Knicks Logo Almost Included the Empire State Building by Jeremy Rellosa (Curbed)  Is this him? @jrello9 

• https://www.curbed.com/article/new-york-knicks-logo-design-empire-state-michael-doret.html?isNewSocialUser=false&providerId=google.com 
• Micheal Doret in 1991 updated logo for knicks, building had I know it just it just typed that right in there the words I said is I don’t know licensing issues. What is your fav std logo in NBA. Me: Bucks, Nuggets, Hornets

Widow Bay on Apple TV 

• Scary/Comedy combination
• Well acted, interesting actors.
• Some real scares but not too many. Lots of references to other scary movies. 
• “A reminder that It’s not mandatory that you speak” at funeral 
• Renewed for 2nd season 
• Matthew Rhys

Thanks for checking out the Torg Stories website!