Anunoby tips Knicks past Pacers in biggest Finals comeback as New York moves within one win of the title
The New York Knicks spent three quarters of Game 4 looking like a team that would be remembered for what it could not do. By the time OG Anunoby tipped the ball in with 1.2 seconds remaining, they had rewritten a piece of Finals history that had stood for nearly half a century. The forward finished with 33 points, shooting 10-of-15 from the field and 7-of-9 from beyond the arc, and added a 6-of-6 mark at the free-throw line to seal a win that moved the Knicks within a single game of the championship at 3-1 in the series.
A 29-point deficit had separated New York from Indiana at its nadir, a hole that the league's own historical record books now list as the largest comeback ever assembled in an NBA Finals game. Anunoby's final touch — a tip-in at the rim off a missed perimeter attempt — was the punctuation on a shift in the game that had begun quietly, then arrived all at once.
How the comeback took shape
The first three quarters belonged to the Pacers. Indiana built its lead behind the same ball-movement identity that carried it through the Eastern Conference finals, and it looked, by halftime and into the third, as though the series would return to Indianapolis tied at two games apiece. The Knicks' defence — top-five for the regular season and through the first three games of the Finals — was a step slow on closeouts and gave up the kind of live-ball turnovers that turn halfcourt advantage into transition points.
New York's adjustment, when it came, was not subtle. Tom Thibodeau shortened his bench and committed to the lineups that had built the team's identity over the past two seasons: a heavy dose of two-big lineups and extended minutes for Anunoby and Jalen Brunson. The Knicks began to dictate the pace, getting into the paint before Indiana's defence could set, and the Pacers' once-fluid rotations started to look a half-step late.
Anunoby was the constant. He hit three of his seven three-pointers in the fourth quarter, drew the fouls that kept the clock moving, and then converted the play that mattered most with the game tied in the final five seconds. His post-game summary was the kind of line a veteran delivers when he does not want to be the story: "Do whatever it takes to win … I just tried to make a play."
The Finals-record framing
The official NBA communications account and the league's broadcast partners have been careful in recent years to contextualise historical markers against the pace, the rules environment, and the depth of competition in each era. A 29-point Finals comeback belongs in the same conversation as Boston's 22-point reversal against the Lakers in 1969, but the league's own historical summary stops short of declaring one era harder than another; it simply records that the Knicks' margin from deficit to lead is now the largest on record.
The counterpoint is reasonable, and worth stating. Indiana did not have its starting centre for stretches of the second half, and the Pacers' bench unit, which had been the difference-maker in Games 2 and 3, ran out of gas in the fourth. A comeback of this size is rarely a story of one team alone; it is a story of one team rising and the other cooling at the same time. The Knicks' shooting — 7-of-9 from three for Anunoby alone, and a high team-wide effective field-goal mark in the fourth — is the variable that the historical record will not capture. The Pacers' 2-of-14 mark from three in the fourth is the other half of the same ledger.
What a 3-1 lead has meant in the past
Historical Finals data is, in this respect, brutal for the trailing team. Teams that have taken a 3-1 lead have closed out the series in 35 of 38 previous Finals opportunities — a 92.1 per cent conversion rate. The 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers remain the only team to have come back from that deficit, against the 73-win Golden State Warriors. The Knicks' position is not just favourable; it is the position from which the championship is, historically, almost always finished.
The structural read is straightforward. A 3-1 lead in a seven-game series does not just shift the win probability; it shifts the coaching calculus, the rotation length, and the willingness of a trailing team to absorb short-term pain in the name of an uncertain upside. Indiana, with its deep rotation, is better equipped than most teams to absorb one bad game and reset. Whether it can absorb the psychological effect of a last-second loss in a game it had controlled is a separate question, and one the series will answer in Game 5.
Stakes, and what Game 5 will tell us
If the Knicks close out in Game 5, the conversation pivots to the franchise's first championship since 1973 and the place this group — built around a Brunson-Anunoby core and hardened by two seasons of Thibodeau minutes — will hold in the league's modern history. Anunoby's free-agency future, the long-term extensions of the supporting cast, and the question of whether the Knicks' defence-first identity can survive a 2026-27 schedule compressed by the upcoming international windows, all become the next debate.
If Indiana forces a Game 6, the league gets the series it has wanted from the start: a best-of-three with home court, an MVP-grade centre-quarterback duel, and the only active Finals comeback from 3-1 in the modern era in the Pacers' memory. Either outcome is plausible; neither is inevitable. The evidence, for now, points to a Knicks team that has solved itself one quarter at a time, and a Pacers team that has run out of margin for the kind of slow start that no longer leaves the game in reach.
This publication frames the result as the historical record states it — the largest Finals comeback — while noting that the Pacers' injury context and a cold fourth quarter from three are part of the same arithmetic. The wire carried the line; the explanation sits one layer down.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/NBALive/
- https://t.me/NBALive/
- https://t.me/NBALive/