Sports / NBA — The Knicks vs Magic score at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was 111-102, and the number that will follow the defending champions all week is the other one: 0-3. Orlando, playing without Paolo Banchero, trailed by 10 points with nine minutes to play, then scored 40 in the fourth quarter behind Franz Wagner to hand New York a start no reigning champion has made since the 2011-12 Dallas Mavericks.
NEW YORK — For three quarters on Sunday night, this looked like the evening the New York Knicks steadied themselves. They opened the game 12-0 while Orlando missed its first eight shots. They answered every Magic run. With 9:20 to play, OG Anunoby’s floater put them ahead 86-76, at home, against a visiting team missing its best player. Then the fourth quarter happened to the defending NBA champions, all at once: Franz Wagner scored 21 of his 23 points in the final period, Orlando put up 40 points in the quarter, and the Magic closed the game on a run that turned a 10-point Knicks lead into a 111-102 Orlando win and a piece of history nobody in the building wanted. At 0-3, the Knicks are the first defending champion to lose its first three games since the Dallas Mavericks in 2011-12.
The ending was loudest where it hurt most. Jalen Brunson, the captain and the Finals MVP of June, scored a game-high 28 points but shot 12 of 28, went 1-for-7 from three and 3-for-6 at the line, and committed a costly turnover with about two minutes left as the game slipped away. Afterwards he was one of only two starters who spoke to reporters, and he did not dress it up. “Not happy,” Brunson said. “Plain and simple.” His coach was just as blunt about the quarter that decided it. “Giving up 40 points in the fourth quarter is way too much,” Mike Brown said. New York has now lost its three games by six, by four and by nine points — close enough each time to make the pattern more worrying, not less: in all three, the game was there in the final minutes, and in all three, somebody else took it.
How Orlando stole it in the fourth quarter
The comeback had a shape, and the shape was Wagner. Held to two points through three quarters, the German forward opened the fourth by scoring nine points in an 11-0 run, finishing it with a three-point play that gave Orlando its first lead of the night with 7:25 remaining. Josh Hart answered with a three, the teams traded empty trips, and Wagner drove for two more layups to put Orlando back in front. The basket that finally broke the game came from Desmond Bane, whose three-pointer with 4:53 left gave the Magic the lead for good. Bane finished with 22 points. By the numbers the quarter was a rout inside a close final score: Orlando outscored New York 40-27 in the fourth, closed on a 35-16 run, and forced seven of the Knicks’ 16 turnovers in the period alone, turning them into 10 points.
What makes the result harder for New York to shrug off is who Orlando did it without — and with. The Magic arrived at 0-2 and missing Paolo Banchero, who is expected to miss at least a month with the ankle injury he suffered on Friday against Minnesota, and they were also without Jonathan Isaac. Their bench, led by Tristan da Silva’s 19 points and Anthony Black’s 18 in his season debut after an ankle injury of his own, outscored the Knicks’ reserves 47-11. And the win may still have cost them: starting point guard Jalen Suggs was helped off the court with 2:09 left after landing awkwardly on a layup attempt, with what was described as an apparent right knee injury. No diagnosis had been reported by late Sunday, and nothing firmer should be claimed until Orlando says more. Wagner’s final line — 23 points, 13 rebounds and nine assists, one assist short of a triple-double — gave Orlando its first win under head coach Sean Sweeney, and sent the Magic on to Toronto at 1-2 with a story to tell about their depth. For the background on the injury that kept Banchero out, see our Banchero injury update.
Why this matters
Three games is a week, not a season, and the honest case for calm is easy to make: the Knicks have lost three close games to three playoff-calibre opponents, their championship core is intact, and Karl-Anthony Towns (22 points, 14 rebounds on Sunday) and Anunoby (22 points) are producing. Defending champions start slowly often enough that a 1-2 or even a 2-1 with shaky performances would barely register. But 0-3 is a different category, because history says so. The last champion to open this way, the 2011-12 Mavericks, never recovered its championship form and was swept out of the first round the following spring. The comparison is not a prediction — Dallas was an ageing team dismantled by its own front office, and these Knicks are neither — but it explains why the number lands. A title defence is a claim that the hierarchy has changed. Three straight losses, all of them winnable, all of them lost late, is the league beginning to answer back.
The deeper problem is the pattern, not the record. Against Philadelphia on ring night, the Knicks lost a six-point game in which their third quarter vanished. At Boston on Friday, Jayson Tatum scored 36 and hit the deciding shot with 30 seconds left, and the Knicks lost by four — the game we covered as the loss that dropped them to 0-2. On Sunday they led for most of the night and were outscored by 19 points over the final nine minutes. Different opponents, same failure: the closing lineup that owned the fourth quarter in June cannot currently defend one. New York’s starters are carrying a bench that contributed 11 points on Sunday; Brunson is being asked to create nearly everything late, on heavy minutes, and his efficiency is bending under it — 12 of 28, with the misses and the late turnover arriving exactly when the Magic’s pressure peaked. A team can survive a cold week. It cannot survive a structural one, and three games in, the question hanging over the champions is which of those this is.
What the numbers actually say
Start with the shot that defined the night by its absence and presence. Orlando made 18 three-pointers on 42 attempts (42.9 percent); New York made nine on 38 (23.7 percent). That is a 27-point gap from beyond the arc in a nine-point game — the entire margin, twice over, with change. Da Silva and Black, the two bench heroes, went a combined 10-for-16 from three. Add the bench gap of 47-11 and the fourth-quarter turnover split, and the box score describes a depth contest the Knicks were never equipped to win on this night: Orlando’s second unit produced more points than New York’s starting backcourt. Wagner’s line deserves its own comparison, too. A forward scoring 21 points in a single quarter against the defending champions, on their floor, while also leading his team in rebounds and assists, is the kind of performance that reorganises a scouting report: with Banchero out for weeks, Orlando’s offence now formally runs through Wagner, and Sunday was his proof that it can. For New York, the one clean number is also the oldest problem: Towns and Anunoby combined for 44 efficient points, Hart added 13, and it was still not enough, because championship defence is a five-man activity for 48 minutes and the Knicks have so far played it for about 39.
What happens next
The calendar now does the Knicks one favour and one piece of menace. The favour: it is October, the East is forgiving, and a single win resets the story before it hardens. The menace: the next game is at home against Detroit on Tuesday, and a loss would make New York the first defending champion to start 0-4 since the 1969-70 Boston Celtics — a team from another basketball civilisation, which is precisely the point. Every day the streak lives, the historical company gets older and stranger, and the questions move from Brown’s rotations to the roster itself. Expect Tuesday to be coached like a playoff game: shorter bench, Brunson and Towns staggered so one is always on the floor, and a defence challenged publicly by its captain to hold a fourth-quarter lead for the first time this season. Orlando, meanwhile, takes its first win to Toronto for games on Wednesday and Friday, waiting on word about Suggs’ knee that will matter more to its season than any single result in October. The champions, for their part, have already had their banner night spoiled — as we reported when Philadelphia crashed the celebration on opening night. Three games in, the ring still fits. The defence of it has not yet begun.
Sources
Reuters (Field Level Media), “Franz Wagner explodes in fourth as Magic keep Knicks winless,” October 25-26, 2026. USA TODAY, “Knicks stumble again as defending champs start 0-3 after loss to Orlando Magic,” October 25, 2026. New York Post, “Jalen Brunson fails late again as Knicks blow 10-point lead to shorthanded Magic for ugly 0-3 start,” October 25, 2026. Sportradar official box score, New York Knicks vs Orlando Magic, October 25, 2026. Rookie Wire (USA TODAY network), Magic-Knicks takeaways, October 25, 2026.