The Comeback
The largest comeback in NBA Finals history used to be 24 points. The Knicks just erased 29 against the Spurs and won 107-106 on an OG Anunoby tip-in with 1.2 seconds left. Two of the five biggest Finals comebacks of all time now belong to this single series.
- 29
- Points overcome
- 27
- Spurs lead at halftime
- 107-106
- Final score
- 1.2 sec
- Anunoby tip-in to win
Twenty-four was the record. It stood for eighteen years. The Knicks broke it by five on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden.
Twenty-four was the ceiling. Until Game 4.
Prior to Game 4, the largest comeback in NBA Finals history belonged to the 2008 Boston Celtics: 24 points overcome in Game 4 against the Los Angeles Lakers. That record stood for eighteen years.
The Knicks blew past it. They trailed by 29 twice in Game 4: at 3:06 left in Q2 (71-42) and again at 9:40 left in Q3 (81-52). They won 107-106 when OG Anunoby tipped in a missed Jalen Brunson three with 1.2 seconds left.
The Spurs spent the lead before halftime
The reason a 29-point Finals comeback is supposed to be impossible is that Finals defenses give them up grudgingly and Finals offenses do not waste them.
The Spurs shot 59.6% in the first half and a Finals-record fourteen three-pointers before the intermission. They shot 20.5% in the second. That is the entire game in two numbers. The Knicks did not need a miracle in the second half. They needed San Antonio to stop being San Antonio. San Antonio did.
Two of the top five now belong to this series
ESPN's post-game list of Finals comebacks above thirteen points runs nine games long. The top five are spread across four different matchups. Two of those five belong to this single Knicks-Spurs series.
The new record (29) and the Game 1 comeback in this same series (14) bracket the all-time top five. In 79 years of Finals basketball, no single matchup had ever produced two top-five comebacks. The Knicks and Spurs did it in the same series.
The model gave the Knicks a 1 in 435 shot
The win-probability curve has a shape. You can see the moment.
Through Q1 the Knicks bled steadily. By the 3:06 mark of Q2 they were down 29 for the first time. They closed the half down 27, then gave back two more in the first 2:20 of Q3 to hit -29 again at 9:40 of the third quarter. A simple logistic on score-differential and time-remaining, calibrated against the BR Finals corpus, gave them roughly 0.23% at that moment. About one in 435.
79 years of Finals, and one dot floats above the rest
Plot every Finals game's largest deficit overcome by the winning team on a scatter, with the year on the x-axis. ESPN's list above 13 points runs nine games long across four decades. Most of the chart sits well below it.
One dot lives a full bar-width above the rest. That is the entire story of the chart.
The Spurs scored 30 in the second half
The flip did not happen in a four-minute miracle. The Knicks outscored San Antonio by 12 in Q3 and 16 in Q4 because the Spurs scored 14 and 16 in those quarters after dropping 41 and 35 in the first two. The defense did its part by buckling down. The Spurs did the rest by going cold.
Anunoby went 7-of-9 from three on his way to 33 points. Brunson scored 36. Two players carried 69 of the 107. The shot that won it was not theirs, exactly - it was a Brunson three that missed long, an Anunoby tip with 1.2 on the clock, a tenth of a second of basketball that finished a half of it.
The recap reads 107-106
The box score shows 107-106 and the recap will lead with Brunson's 36 and the Anunoby tip.
What the box score won't say out loud: that for a window of about three minutes spanning the end of Q2 and the top of Q3, this game was over - and then it wasn't. In 79 years of NBA Finals basketball, no team had ever climbed out of a deeper hole.
Until Game 4.