The Knicks were down 29 points in the NBA Finals and OG Anunoby tipped in a missed three-pointer with 1.2 seconds left to win the game, and I am telling you right now that I need a minute.
At halftime it was 76-49. The Spurs had hit 14 threes in the first half, which is an NBA Finals record, and the crowd at MSG had gone from electric to the specific kind of silent that Knicks fans have spent twenty years learning to recognize. The kind where you start doing the math on when they might be good again. The kind where someone’s dad texts something that rhymes with “told you so.”
My dad texted at halftime. I didn’t open it.
What I can’t stop turning over is that it didn’t happen gradually. It wasn’t a slow bleed. The Spurs were up 95-75 with nine minutes left in the fourth quarter and then the Knicks outscored them 32-11 the rest of the way. Thirty-two to eleven the rest of the way in the NBA Finals, down twenty. I don’t know what to do with that number.
https://twitter.com/NBA/status/2064915089149366562
Jalen Brunson finished with 36 points and seven assists, which by itself is a great Finals game. But you need to understand that he also missed the three-pointer that Anunoby tipped in. He put up a prayer from thirty feet with the game on the line, it came off wrong, and OG was already crashing. OG, who you can read about in our preview of this series, went up and tipped it in softly — his words — while the entire building was making the noise that buildings make when something happens that shouldn’t be possible.
The previous largest comeback in NBA Finals history was 24 points, by the 2008 Boston Celtics against the Lakers. This one was 29.
Anunoby finished with 33 points on 10-of-15 shooting, seven-of-nine from three. That is not a man playing in a pressure situation. That is a man who has apparently decided he exists outside of normal human psychological constraints. Karl-Anthony Towns, who was a quiet 13 and 10 in 26 minutes, called it the right hand of God. Coach Mike Brown called it the most iconic shot in the history of New York basketball. I have no notes on either of those takes.
Meanwhile Wembanyama went 9-for-25 from the field. He had 24 points and 13 rebounds and still lost by one. At some point in the fourth quarter the Spurs went from a team that looked like it was coasting to a championship to a team desperately trying to hold a lead that was shrinking so fast you could watch it happen in real time. That’s what a 32-11 run does to a locker room.
The Knicks are now one win from their first championship since 1973. They got there by erasing the largest deficit in NBA Finals history. Brunson was the engine and Anunoby was the closer, and both of them played like people who understood exactly what was at stake and decided that was fine with them.
This Knicks comeback is going to live forever. Not because of the record. Because of what it means to every person who watched this team be actively terrible for two decades and kept watching anyway. I watched them lose to the Pacers. I watched them lose to Miami on a LeBron series that still makes my eye twitch. I watched years that didn’t have a single signature moment worth remembering. All of it from the same couch where I watched last night.
The Knicks have been building toward something since Game 1 in San Antonio. Game 5 is Saturday. One win.
Revis just looked at me from across the room and I genuinely don’t know how to explain what’s happening.
