Anunoby's tip-in caps 29-point Knicks comeback — the largest in NBA Finals history
The New York Knicks erased a 29-point deficit on the way to a 107-106 win over the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, taking a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals on a tip-in by OG Anunoby with 1.2 seconds remaining. The comeback is the largest ever recorded in an NBA Finals game, surpassing every prior Finals rally on record, and pushes New York to within a single win of its first championship since 1973.
The result, sealed in the final seconds after a sequence that included a chase-down block at the other end, is the sort of night that resets a franchise's self-image. For a building that has been waiting since the Willis Reed era, the numbers do most of the talking: 29 down, 33 from Anunoby on 10-of-15 shooting, and a series lead that now requires only one more win in the next three games.
How it unfolded
San Antonio arrived in New York trailing the series 2-1, and the early portion of Game 4 followed the script of a road team trying to steal momentum in a building that has not hosted a clinching Finals game in a generation. The Spurs built their lead over the opening quarters and held it deep into the second half; the New York offence, which had carried the team through the first three games, spent long stretches looking like the second-best group on the floor.
The Knicks chipped away in the third and kept chipping in the fourth. Anunoby carried the bulk of the scoring load, finishing with 33 points on 10-of-15 from the field, and Jalen Brunson — who has been the offensive spine of the New York run all post-season — continued to set up the actions around him. The arena, alerted to a real possibility, did the rest.
The decisive sequence came in the final minute. With the game tied, a Spurs possession ended with Anunoby's chase-down block on the defensive end; on the ensuing New York possession, the ball found Anunoby at the rim and his tip-in dropped with 1.2 seconds left. San Antonio's final attempt missed, and the buzzer confirmed a 107-106 finish.
What the players said
The on-court reactions captured the scale of the moment. Anunoby, asked post-game about the team's track record of comebacks, kept the formulation plain. "You do it once, you know you can do it again," he said, in remarks relayed by the league's official highlights account.
Brunson, who has spent the post-season deflecting individual credit, chose the opposite approach. "We have a superstar in our locker room," he said, naming Anunoby directly. The line is the loudest endorsement Brunson has offered a teammate all series and the most concrete evidence of how New York's hierarchy is being internally recalibrated after three consecutive wins.
For Karl-Anthony Towns and Jose Alvarado — both products of New York-area basketball, both playing in their first NBA Finals — the night carried an extra layer. "You said it, two kids from here," Towns said, in comments captured on the broadcast, before trailing off. "It's really something I couldn't put into words." The homegrown framing matters: the Knicks' roster construction, long criticised in the analytics era for overpaying mid-tier veterans, has produced a Finals group with two New York-bred rotation players anchoring the back end of the rotation.
The structural picture
The 29-point hole is the relevant number, but the larger one is what it took to climb out of it. New York's offence has run all post-season through Brunson pick-and-rolls, but the Spurs' Game 4 game plan was built to load the paint, force the ball out of his hands, and dare the Knicks' secondary creators to beat them. For three quarters, the dare worked. The fourth quarter was the rebuttal.
Anunoby's 33 points is the headline line, but the supporting cast — the contribution required to come back from 29 down against a defence as disciplined as San Antonio's — is the actual story. Towns and Alvarado both hit shots that earlier in the series they had been hunting. The Knicks' bench, maligned at points in the regular season, outscored San Antonio's second unit over the final twelve minutes. A team built to lean on one creator spent a Finals game proving it could win in a different shape.
The comeback is also a Madison Square Garden story. The building has hosted 2,758 consecutive regular-season and playoff sellouts by the franchise's own count, and the crowd's role in the late run was visible on the broadcast. The New York Police Department had announced on Tuesday that it would bar fans from gathering outside the arena during Game 4, citing security planning — a quiet acknowledgment of how much the city had been treating the home Finals games as civic events, not just sporting ones.
Stakes and what is still uncertain
A 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals is not a series. Of the 35 prior Finals to reach a 3-1 margin, the leading team has closed 33 times, but the two that didn't are part of the league's folk memory, and San Antonio — a franchise that has closed out its own share of comebacks — will not be a passive opponent. Game 5 is in San Antonio on Friday, and the Spurs have the kind of offensive system that can string together three consecutive quality performances in a building that feeds their transition game.
What is also unsettled is how the Anunoby performance recalibrates the rest of the series. The Knicks entered the Finals as a Brunson-and-everyone-else offence; they are leaving Game 4 as a team that has seen its second option deliver a 33-point night on a stage that punishes hesitation. The Spurs, for their part, have to decide whether the late-game defensive breakdowns that produced the tip-in are fixable in 48 hours or whether the Knicks have simply found a matchup edge that travels.
The recovery of the 29-point deficit is the largest in NBA Finals history, but it is also, in the more honest sense, only a 3-1 lead. The Knicks are now one win from the franchise's second championship. The Spurs are one win from making the next two games in Texas a referendum on whether Wednesday night was a turning point or a last stand.
Desk note: Monexus framed this as a comeback win anchored by a single player's late heroics, with the series-state math stated explicitly — the wire coverage leaned more heavily on the historical-comparison angle; we kept that frame but pushed the structural argument onto how the Knicks' secondary creators finally arrived alongside Brunson.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/NBALive/216
- https://t.me/NBALive/215