Knicks Pull Off 29-Point Comeback to Take 3-1 Lead in NBA Finals: Inside the Wildest Rally in Finals History
The Madison Square Garden crowd booed its team off the floor at halftime. Three hours later, the same building watched the New York Knicks complete the largest comeback in NBA Finals history.
New York trailed by 29 in the second quarter of Game 4 against the San Antonio Spurs. They won by one. OG Anunoby tipped in a Jalen Brunson miss with 1.2 seconds on the clock for a 107-106 victory and a 3-1 series lead.
This is now the largest deficit any team has ever overcome to win a Finals game. The previous record, a 25-point Cleveland comeback against Golden State in the 2018 Finals, just got tossed in the trash by a Knicks team that looked finished by the end of the first quarter.
Brunson led the way with 36 points and seven assists. He did most of his damage in the second half, when the Knicks finally figured out how to attack the soft spots in the San Antonio defense. Anunoby added 33 points and the game-winning tip-in. The two of them combined to outscore the entire Spurs roster after halftime.
Victor Wembanyama had 24 points and 13 rebounds for San Antonio. He was excellent. He still lost.
The turning point came in the third quarter. The Spurs were up 21 with under nine minutes to play in the period. Tom Thibodeau finally went small, pulled Mitchell Robinson, and put four shooters around Karl-Anthony Towns. The math changed immediately. New York closed the quarter on a 24-6 run and suddenly the building came back to life.
San Antonio still had its chances. The Spurs were up one with 11 seconds left. De’Aaron Fox controlled a loose ball and went for a contested layup instead of running out the shot clock. Anunoby blocked it. Brunson ran the floor, missed a three, and Anunoby cleaned it up.
The Knicks are now one win from their first championship since the Walt Frazier and Willis Reed teams of the early 1970s. Game 5 is Saturday night in San Antonio. Game 6, if needed, is back in New York on Tuesday.
This series has been the strangest Finals in recent memory. The Spurs are a 50-win team built around a 22-year-old French phenom and a veteran All-Star point guard. The Knicks are a defensive juggernaut with one elite shot-creator and a roster of role players. Three of the four games have been one-possession affairs. Now one of them is going down as the wildest comeback in the history of the championship round.
Thibodeau will get the credit, and he deserves some of it for the lineup change that sparked the run. But the truth is the Knicks needed Fox to make a basketball mistake in the final seconds. He obliged. The rest of the city took it from there.
Wembanyama said after the game that the Spurs “let it slip.” He’s right. A team in the Finals does not blow a 29-point lead by accident. It does it by getting comfortable, then by panicking, then by making the kind of decision that gets pinned on the locker-room wall in San Antonio for the next decade.
The Knicks will not care how they got the lead. They just need to win one more game. And if they pull this off, this comeback will be the moment New York points to when the next generation asks how it happened.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
