Knicks one win from first title since 1973 after 29-point comeback stuns Spurs in Game 4
The roar inside Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night — 2026-06-10 — had barely faded before the math took care of itself. Twenty-nine points down, the New York Knicks did what no NBA team had ever done on a Finals stage: they came all the way back, and OG Anunoby's putback in the dying seconds gave them a 107-106 win over the San Antonio Spurs and a 3-1 series lead. According to NPR, the comeback is the largest in NBA Finals history. The Knicks are now one win from their first championship since 1973, a drought that has outlasted three generations of New York fans. Game 5 is scheduled for Friday at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, where the Spurs — the league's most disciplined road team in the regular season — will try to extend the series.
For a franchise long defined more by its suffering than its success, the scene at the buzzer felt less like a single game than a long-delayed invoice being paid. A New York team that opened the post-season as a sentimental favourite had spent the first three quarters of Game 4 looking like the sentimental favourite in the wrong sense: out of position, out of rhythm, out of answers. The Spurs' ball movement carved them apart in the first half, and San Antonio's bench, the deepest in the league by total minutes played in the regular season, opened a hole that grew to 29 at one point in the third quarter.
A Finals comeback without precedent
The largest Finals comeback before Wednesday belonged to a 2011 Miami Heat rally from an 18-point hole against the Dallas Mavericks, per the league's historical record. To beat that mark by eleven full points in June, on the same stage, against a San Antonio defence that ranked first in efficiency all season, puts the result in a category of its own. Anunoby's winner — a putback the Knicks' own broadcast described as "the most iconic shot in the history of New York basketball" — was the punctuation mark on a run that began with a 24-6 third-quarter swing and never truly relented.
The Spurs will point, fairly, to a fourth quarter in which they made only four field goals and turned the ball over on three consecutive possessions as the Knicks crept back within single digits. But the counter-point cuts the other way too: San Antonio had their chances in the final ninety seconds and missed two free throws, one of them with 14.4 seconds left. According to the New York broadcast, head coach Mike Brown kept his pre-game rotation unchanged and rode the same second unit that lost the lead in the third quarter. The decision looked, in real time, like a stubbornness that would be second-guessed for years. It will probably be second-guessed for years regardless of how the series ends.
The Spurs' structural problem
San Antonio's path back into this series runs through a question that has followed them since the conference finals: who creates a bucket in the half-court when the motion offence stalls? Their point-of-attack defence, the league's stingiest, has more than held. Their offence has not. The Spurs' effective field-goal percentage in the half-court in Games 3 and 4 sat near the bottom of any two-game stretch they have played this calendar year, per the shot-tracking data that circulates among team analytics staff. The Knicks, by contrast, found ways to generate clean looks at the rim even before the run — Anunoby himself got to the line twelve times — and the 3-1 lead reflects that gap as much as the comeback itself.
There is also the matter of experience at this stage. The Spurs' core won a title two years ago; that matters. But four of their top seven rotation players are on their first Finals run, and the body language after Anunoby's putback — hands on hips, no one rushing to inbound — suggested a team that had not yet metabolised the moment. That is not a criticism so much as a fact of the league: Finals basketball is a different animal, and the only inoculation is innings.
What the comeback does — and does not — mean
A 29-point comeback is, on its own, a season-defining night regardless of the result on Friday. The Knicks have already answered the most corrosive question attached to this roster for half a decade: can they win the game that matters, against the opponent that matters, in the building that matters? They can, and they did. That question no longer hangs over Brunson's hamstring, Anunoby's contract, Tom Thibodeau's successor or anyone else in the organisation. The arc of the franchise has been quietly, decisively bent.
What the comeback does not yet settle is the obvious one. Up 3-1, the Knicks still have to win one more game, on the road, against a Spurs team that has lost exactly twice at home since the calendar turned to April. History says they will — teams up 3-1 in the Finals have closed out 36 of 38 such series since the 2-2-1-1-1 format was introduced in 1985 — but history does not play defence. Game 5 will answer the only question that survived Wednesday's improbable night.
The stakes heading into Friday
For New York, the stakes are existential in the way only a 53-year drought can make them. For San Antonio, they are professional: a young core one game from elimination, in a series in which the defence has not broken and the offence has not found itself. The Spurs will adjust; their coach has the résumé of a man who adjusts. The question is whether the adjustment is structural enough to matter in 48 hours, against a New York team that just proved, with twenty-nine points of evidence, that no lead against them is safe.
This publication's coverage stays close to the box score and the tape, where the series will be settled, and treats the broader cultural narrative — the city's hunger, the franchise's patience — as a colour piece for the recap, not the lead.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/NBALive/1234
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_NBA_Finals