Dylan Harper has an explanation for how the San Antonio Spurs’ title run fell apart at Madison Square Garden, and it involves Jay-Z’s hands.
The 20-year-old guard told GQ that Hov put a hex on his team during Game 5 of the NBA Finals, right from his courtside seat.
According to Harper, Jay-Z yelled “Come on!” in his direction and then threw up the Roc-A-Fella diamond. To the young Spur, it looked like something dark being cast over the visiting bench.
“We started losing,” Harper said. “Shit went downhill from there.”
For anyone who grew up on the Roc, that diamond isn’t a random gesture. It’s the hand sign tied to Roc-A-Fella Records, the label Jay-Z cofounded with Damon Dash and Kareem Burke in the mid-90s, and it has followed him from album covers to arenas ever since.
Jay-Z also has real basketball history in New York. He once held a small ownership stake in the Nets, so seeing him heckle a Finals opponent at the Garden made for a very New York scene.
The less mystical reading of Game 5 is that the Spurs were already in deep trouble. The Knicks led the series 3 to 1 heading in, and they’d just pulled off the largest comeback in Finals history in Game 4. New York erased a 29 point deficit in that one, with OG Anunoby’s tip-in sealing it.
That kind of swing drains a team before any diamond goes up. Momentum had flipped hard, and Game 5 felt less like a turning point on paper and more like the final push.
It still came down to a single point. The Knicks won 107 to 106 and captured their first championship in more than half a century, sending the Garden into a frenzy and leaving San Antonio to wonder what might have been.
The run itself was never supposed to go this far. Victor Wembanyama was 22, Stephon Castle was 21 and Harper was 20, making the Spurs the second youngest team ever to reach the Finals.
They got there the hard way. San Antonio knocked out the Oklahoma City Thunder, the defending champions, along with back to back MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, which is why so few people were ready to write them off even down 3 to 1.
So there are two ways to read Harper’s story. It could be a young player finding a funny, very human way to process losing a Finals by one point in a hostile building.
It could also be a sign of how much Jay-Z’s presence still rattles people, even players who were born years after Reasonable Doubt came out.
Jay-Z hasn’t publicly addressed being cast as the Spurs’ personal curse. With Wembanyama, Castle and Harper all this young, San Antonio is likely to be back on this stage soon, and the players already know who they’ll be looking for courtside if the Knicks are waiting.
