Victor Wembanyama just guaranteed the Spurs are coming back, and I, a person who has been a Knicks fan for 26 years and watched every one of those years end in catastrophe, am choosing not to find this funny.
“Everybody thinks — everybody knows — we’re going to do it,” Wemby said after Game 4. The Spurs are down 3-1. He went 9-for-25 from the field. His team trailed by 29 points and watched Jalen Brunson and OG Anunoby drag New York back from the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. And this 22-year-old walked to a microphone and told the world it wasn’t over.
https://twitter.com/ClutchPoints/status/2065491824899162313
The rational part of my brain knows exactly what this is. A kid who just went cold in the second half of a loss and couldn’t prevent Anunoby’s put-back with 1.2 seconds left from putting a knife in his chest, and then walked out and guaranteed a comeback. Fine. People do that. Athletes say delusional things at podiums all the time. Go home, sleep on it, move on.
Except the only team that has ever actually done this, come back from 3-1 in an NBA Finals, is the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers. LeBron James. Kyrie Irving. The most famous comeback in basketball history. That is your precedent. One team. Eleven years ago.
The problem is I want to file this under “athlete talk” and stop thinking about it. But Wembanyama has already made people look stupid for doubting him this postseason. He took SGA and Oklahoma City in seven games in the WCF, won MVP, and nobody thought he was doing that either. People were sure OKC was too deep, too experienced. They were wrong.
He said it just hurts right after Game 4. And then, within a few hours, he walked back out with this: “It’d be a mistake to waste our energy on multiple games. It’s one game at a time.” Which, fine. That’s a reasonable reframe. One game. Don’t think about the series.
But that’s also exactly what someone says when they genuinely believe they’re going to win three consecutive elimination games against a team that just erased a 29-point deficit in the fourth quarter.
22-year-olds who guarantee comebacks from 3-1 down either look delusional inside 48 hours, or they become the story people tell forever. LeBron did not take a poll before Game 5 in 2016. He walked out and willed it. And for the rest of his life, anyone who doubted him in that moment has to live with that. Wemby is betting he’s that guy. The unsettling part is he has a case.
As a Knicks fan, I’ve been doing the math. Three straight wins with Brunson and Anunoby healthy. At Madison Square Garden. Against a team that still has Wembanyama, who, let’s be clear, was bad in Game 4 and still finished with 24 points and 13 rebounds. That’s his bad game.
Game 5 is tonight. I need the Knicks to win so badly that I stress-ate half a bag of pretzels by 9 AM. And I cannot stop thinking about the fact that this kid has been wrong exactly zero times when people assumed he would fail.
I hate this so much.
