Karl-Anthony Towns had a special person with him on the court. 

The Knicks center-forward (affectionately known as KAT) said he was visited by the presence of his late mother Jacqueline Cruz during the Game 1 of the NBA finals, which saw the New York team beat the San Antonio Spurs. 

“I don’t know what it was, but I just felt a calm and a peace that I don’t know had to be come from the woman above,” Karl told Shaquille O’Neal after the June 3 game. “So, I felt really confident about today. I felt good, you know, I felt like a kid. It felt like it was just fun out here. This is something that, as a kid, you always dream about. You always hope that you just hope to be an NBA player, let alone to be in the NBA finals. And all day was just a weird feeling.”

In fact, the 30-year-old likened the feeling to when he would prepare for his Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) games back when he was a kid and Jacqueline—who died in 2020 after being diagnosed with COVID-19 in the first months of the pandemic—was there to support him.