The New York Knicks completed the largest comeback in NBA Finals history on Wednesday night, erasing a 29-point deficit to beat the San Antonio Spurs 107-106 in Game 4 and move within one win of their first championship since 1973.
OG Anunoby provided the decisive points, tipping in Jalen Brunson's missed three-point attempt with 1.2 seconds remaining to cap a rally that had seemed implausible at halftime, when San Antonio led by 27.
Brunson finished with 36 points and Anunoby added 33 as New York outscored the Spurs 58-30 after the break. San Antonio made 11 of its first 16 three-pointers in building the lead, then went 3-for-17 from deep in the second half as the Knicks' defense tightened and the young Spurs' offense unraveled.
No team had previously come back from more than 24 points down in a Finals game — Boston's 2008 rally against the Lakers — since the league began keeping complete play-by-play records in 1997. The Knicks' 29-point recovery now stands alone, and it came on the road.
The defeat is a brutal one for a Spurs team built around Victor Wembanyama that arrived in the Finals as the league's ascendant young power. Having split the first two games and taken Game 3 at home, San Antonio was a half away from a 3-1 lead of its own; instead it must now win three straight against a veteran New York side to avoid elimination.
For the Knicks, the franchise's half-century championship drought — no title since the 1973 team of Walt Frazier and Willis Reed — is suddenly one win from ending. New York gets its first opportunity to close out the series in Game 5.
The comeback instantly entered the conversation among the great single-game turnarounds in American sports, and capped a night in which the Finals, for once, upstaged everything else on the sporting calendar a day before the World Cup opened in Mexico City.