The San Antonio Spurs owned the night. Then, in the span of one half, they gave it all away.
What looked like a commanding Game 4 statement turned into the most agonizing loss of the Spurs’ season, as the New York Knicks erased a 29-point deficit to win 107-106 at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, completing the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. OG Anunoby tipped in a missed three-point attempt from Jalen Brunson in the final seconds to deliver the winning basket and push San Antonio to the brink of elimination, trailing 3-1 in the series heading into Saturday’s Game 5 at Frost Bank Center.
A first half that looked like a masterpiece
The early signs pointed entirely the other way. San Antonio opened with a 12-2 run, coaxed Karl-Anthony Towns into his second foul just over a minute into the game, and proceeded to dismantle New York with precision shooting and relentless pace. Victor Wembanyama and three teammates combined for 59 points by halftime as the Spurs set a record with 14 three-pointers made in a single half of NBA Finals basketball. San Antonio carried a 27-point lead into the locker room, its largest after two quarters in any Finals game since Cleveland’s dominant first quarter performance against Golden State in 2016.
The second half was unrecognizable. The Spurs managed just 30 points after the break on 8-of-39 shooting, coughed up 10 turnovers, and watched a lead that had felt insurmountable dissolve point by point as the Knicks steadily closed the gap.
The final minutes and what went wrong
With 13 seconds left and San Antonio protecting a one-point lead, veteran guard De’Aaron Fox drove hard to the rim in an attempt to extend the advantage to three points. Anunoby tracked him down and blocked the layup cleanly, opening the door for the tip-in that ended San Antonio’s night. Fox might have preserved the lead by holding the ball and forcing New York to foul, but the decision to attack the basket cost the Spurs dearly.
Earlier in that same sequence, Wembanyama missed a pair of free throws with under two minutes remaining while his team trailed by one. The misses, combined with the Fox turnover, summed up a second half in which the Spurs repeatedly failed to execute when the game demanded it most.
Wembanyama played 44 minutes despite the large early cushion and acknowledged afterward that the workload may have caught up with him by the fourth quarter. His head coach defended the decision to keep him on the floor, noting the stakes of the moment and the desire to close the game out early. It did not go according to plan.
A locker room in shock and a series on the line
The scene after the final buzzer told the story. Players sat in silence, uniformed, heads down, phones in hand. The quiet in the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden carried the weight of a team processing a loss that may define or derail their season.
What makes the collapse particularly difficult is that it follows a pattern. San Antonio has built double-digit leads in every game of this series and has held on to one only once, in Game 3. The Spurs own a plus-47 point differential in first quarters across the four games. What happens after tip-off remains an unsolved problem.
San Antonio has faced elimination before in this postseason, surviving a seventh game against Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Finals. Whether that experience translates into resilience on Saturday remains the only question that matters now
