It took a lot of hard work for the New York Knicks to become the 2026 NBA Champions — and it wasn’t all on the court. Shortly after the Knicks won the finals on June 13, it was revealed that the team’s owner had encouraged the players to abstain from sex in order to get “an edge” in the playoffs. Now, center-forward Karl-Anthony Towns is revealing how that unorthodox was received by his fiancée Jordyn Woods.
Though Woods had been incredibly supportive of her partner throughout the NBA season — with many fans even crediting her viral orange purse as a lucky token aiding the Knicks to victory — there was a limit to how much she was willing to sacrifice. When Towns told his fiancée that Knicks owner James Dolan had asked the team to give up sex for the two-and-a-half month duration of the playoffs, she wasn’t on board.
“I would definitely say when I came home and told my fiancée what he said, she didn’t like to hear that one,” Towns said during his June 16 interview on The Howard Stern Show. As the radio host pressed Towns to see if he stuck to Dolan’s plan, the NBA star indicated that he and Woods opted out of that specific request. “I would say she’s very happy,” Towns simply replied.
It was not revealed until after the championship win in mid-June that Dolan had given the Knicks an impassioned speech all the way back when the playoffs began in early April, in which he recommended that the team practice abstinence for the coming weeks.
“”You need to eliminate all the distractions around you,” Dolan said, in a video shared by the New York Post. “I suggest that you go home … and you talk to your girlfriends and your wives, and you tell them about the next 10 weeks, about how you’re going to be different for the next 10 weeks. And how your families are going to sacrifice for the next 10 weeks.”
“I had this idea that maybe you should give up sex for the next 10 weeks,” he continued. “Like Spartans … They denied themselves so that they could have an edge. Get the edge.”
