Knicks erase 29 to set NBA Finals comeback record
New York wiped out a 29-point deficit to beat San Antonio 107-106 on a bucket with 1.2 seconds left, taking a 3-1 series lead.
- New York erased a 29-point deficit to beat San Antonio 107-106 in Game 4 of the Finals.
- It broke the previous Finals comeback record of 24 points, set by Boston in 2008.
- OG Anunoby hit the game-winner 1.2 seconds from the buzzer and finished with 33 points and seven threes.
- The Knicks lead the series 3-1 and sit one win from the title.
Somewhere in the third quarter, with San Antonio up 29, the people in the front rows at Madison Square Garden started reaching for their jackets. Leave early, save the night, a tale as old as a blowout. Then came the thing that earns this building the name basketball cathedral. The ball started falling at one end, the crowd rose, and what looked like a funeral turned into something the NBA Finals had never witnessed.
In Game 4 of the Finals, New York toppled a record that had stood for eighteen years. The Knicks erased a 29-point hole to beat San Antonio 107-106, the largest comeback in the history of the championship round. The old mark, the 24 points Boston flipped on the Lakers in 2008, now looks modest. The winning bucket fell 1.2 seconds before the buzzer, and the series is now 3-1 in the home team’s favor.
Who flipped the game in the final minute?
OG Anunoby. The man who had quietly stacked his numbers all night took the game over when it mattered most. After a teammate misfired, he crashed in for the rebound and tipped home the go-ahead basket, then blocked a shot on the next possession to seal it. He finished with 33 points and seven made threes, figures that mean far more in this moment than any season average.
“When the shot went up, I was open. Nobody boxed me out, so I just went in and put it back,” Anunoby said afterward, as calm as if he were recapping a practice rep rather than the play that swung a Finals.
Alongside him, Jalen Brunson carried New York all night with 36 points. He was the constant, the engine that kept the scoreline from running away entirely until the rest of the team woke up. When you talk about a 29-point comeback it is easy to reduce it to the final possession, but without Brunson’s output across three quarters that ending never happens.
What the first-half numbers explain
San Antonio did not lose this game by playing badly. Far from it. The Spurs set a Finals record with 14 made threes in the first half, shooting that looked impossible to guard and that built the 29-point cushion in the first place. Victor Wembanyama chipped in 16 points and six rebounds and was the hub the whole visiting attack revolved around.
The trouble for San Antonio is that heat like that cannot hold for forty-eight minutes. Once the threes stopped dropping, what remained was a team with no plan B, while New York tightened its defense and turned every missed possession into a fast break the other way. The gap between a team up 29 and a team trailing 1-3 in a series is sometimes just ten bad minutes.
Nights like this live in history not because of the score, but because of what they do to a team’s head. San Antonio now travels home knowing it had the game in its pocket and dropped it in the worst possible place for a rival. New York heads to Game 5 with the wind at its back and a chance to close the series out. The next game is in Texas, where San Antonio has to win just to keep the series alive.
Do you think San Antonio can climb back from 1-3, or did this comeback break the Spurs for the season?
