Knicks storm back from 29 down to beat Spurs in Game 4, move within a win of first title since 1973
The New York Knicks trailed the San Antonio Spurs by 29 points on Wednesday night and looked finished. Five quarters of basketball later, they were one win from a championship. OG Anunoby's putback in the final seconds — his 33rd point of the night — sealed a 107-106 victory at Madison Square Garden and gave New York a 3-1 lead in the 2026 NBA Finals, the franchise's first appearance in the series since 1999. The 29-point hole is the largest any team has overcome in the 79-year history of the NBA Finals, eclipsing a 21-point deficit the Boston Celtics erased in 1957, according to a roundup of league records carried by Al Jazeera on 11 June 2026.
What happened inside the building was straightforward: the Knicks shot poorly for a half, shot well for two, and made the only play that mattered at the end. What happened outside the building — at the bar on Eighth Avenue, in the season-ticket lines in Scarsdale, on the subway platforms under the Garden — was the kind of civic moment New York has been waiting on for fifty-three years, since Willis Reed played hurt and the Knicks beat the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 7 of the 1973 Finals. The team has not won a title since.
How the Knicks climbed back
The Spurs built their lead the way Spurs teams built leads for two decades under Gregg Popovich: with ball movement, with the mid-range jumper, and with the assumption that the other side will eventually miss enough to make the margin permanent. San Antonio pushed New York behind by 29 early in the third quarter. The Knicks' offence, which had run through Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns all postseason, went cold. Mike Brown, in his first season as Knicks head coach, burned timeouts that produced no visible change in body language.
The reversal came in stages rather than in a single run. New York cut the lead to 16 by the end of the third, then to single digits inside the first six minutes of the fourth. Anunoby's 33 points led all scorers; the supporting cast, which had been a question mark for the entire playoff run, finally produced the kind of fourth-quarter shooting that turns a comeback into a finish. A Towns three-pointer tied it. A Brunson drive gave the Knicks their first lead of the second half. San Antonio answered, as San Antonio has answered for a generation. Anunoby's putback — a second-chance effort off a missed Brunson jumper with under two seconds left — ended it.
"Do whatever it takes to win... I just tried to make a play," Anunoby said after the game, in remarks carried by NBALive on 11 June 2026. Brown called the shot "the most iconic in the history of New York basketball." Jose Alvarado and Towns, both raised in the metropolitan area, told a courtside reporter, in quotes carried by NBALive, that playing in a Finals game for the Knicks was something "two kids from here" could not put into words.
The Spurs' side of the ledger
The temptation after a loss like this is to treat it as a moral collapse — a team that had the game and gave it away. The Spurs, to their credit, did not collapse. They shot better than 50 percent from the floor for most of three quarters. They limited Brunson, the Knicks' offensive fulcrum, to well below his season average. They won the turnover battle for long stretches. A 29-point lead is not a lead at all if the other team plays the way the Knicks played in the second half, and the Spurs allowed them to play that way.
San Antonio's veteran core — built through the draft, supplemented with the kind of mid-career acquisitions the franchise has specialised in for thirty years — is now down 3-1. The Spurs have not been in this position before in the Victor Wembanyama era. Whether the series returns to the Frost Bank Center for a Game 6, or ends in New York on Friday, depends on whether San Antonio can solve the problem every Spurs team eventually solves: the problem of finishing a close game against a team that refuses to lose one.
What the comeback actually means
A 29-point Finals comeback is the kind of number that gets attached to other numbers, and most of them will be wrong. The 1957 Celtics trailed by 21, not 29. The 2002 Lakers came back from 15 down in the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, not the Finals themselves. The 2016 Warriors — a frequent reference point for any New York comeback conversation — trailed by 15 in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the previous year's Finals, won in Cleveland, and that number is the one that has lived in the heads of Knicks fans for a decade. New York did not break the 2016 record on Wednesday; it set a different, larger, and harder one.
The structural point is that comebacks of this scale are not flukes. They require an offence that does not panic, a defence that can get a stop when a stop matters, and a roster that has been through enough playoff basketball to know that a 29-point deficit is a problem, not a verdict. The Knicks cleared all three bars on Wednesday. The Spurs cleared none of them when it counted.
The stakes, and what Friday decides
A Knicks championship on Friday would be the first by a New York team in any of the four major North American men's professional sports leagues since the 2011 Giants, and the first by the Knicks since 1973. The commercial significance is obvious: ticket prices for next season at the Garden, already among the highest in the league, would reset upward. The cultural significance is harder to price. New York has spent the better part of two decades watching other cities' parades. A title in 2026 would not be a beginning, but it would be a punctuation mark on a long, often disorganised, sometimes embarrassing rebuilding project that has finally, at the very end, produced a team that plays the way a New York team is supposed to play.
The Spurs, for their part, will be playing for the series. Down 3-1 in a Finals is not a historical impossibility — the 2016 Warriors, again, came back from exactly that deficit against the Oklahoma City Thunder a round earlier — but it is a historical improbability, and the Spurs will need Wembanyama to play the best game of his career and a supporting cast that has spent three games looking slightly outclassed to suddenly look like the team that won sixty-plus games in the regular season.
What remains genuinely uncertain is whether Wednesday's result is the hinge of the series or merely a delay. The Knicks have been the better team for three games running; the Spurs have been good enough to lead by 29 in one of those games. A 3-1 lead in the Finals is the kind of lead that holds roughly 95 percent of the time, but a 29-point comeback is the kind of event that happens roughly never. The next forty-eight hours will tell the league, the two franchises, and the two cities which of those numbers mattered more.
Desk note: this publication treats the 29-point margin as the operative historical fact, sourced to Al Jazeera's 11 June 2026 wire and to the official league records referenced therein. The 1973 comparison is the only previous Knicks title worth making; we have left the broader 2016 Warriors comparison for the reader to draw, on the evidence, rather than importing it.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/NBALive/2061
- https://t.me/NBALive/2064
- https://t.me/NBALive/2062
- https://t.me/NBALive/2063
- https://t.me/NBALive/2060