Some games get you thinking about a higher power. Not because it seems like some cosmic force has put a thumb on the scale in favor of one side or the other, but because the game in question produces a result so unlikely, so ornately designed, that it can only have occurred exactly as it did.
Game 4 of the NBA Finals has me feeling like one of those Kansas creationists who point to a bacterial flagellum and start shouting about the presence of God in the creation of life. How else could something this unlikely, this beautiful, this fate-altering have happened? The Knicks won, 107-106, after erasing a 29-point deficit. They were down 76-49 at halftime. They trailed by 20 with 9:33 to play in the fourth quarter. How? How? How?
The Knicks' performance in the first half was just as strange and stultifying as their second half was miraculous. An ill omen seemed to have wrapped itself around Madison Square Garden when Karl-Anthony Towns picked up his second foul—the result of an incredibly bold challenge by Spurs coach Mitch Johnson—barely a minute into the game. The Knicks' success in this series has felt inextricably linked with Towns's ability to stay focused and on the floor, as he's their best defensive matchup for Victor Wembanyama and their most efficient offensive hub, and here he had been removed from the game basically before it started.
With Towns screwed to the bench for all but two minutes of the first quarter, the Spurs started to dish out their punishment. They were up 41-22 at the end of the first quarter, and by the end of the second had produced one of the most scalding first-half box scores in playoff history: 76 points and 18 assists on 59 percent shooting; 14 made threes on 26 attempts. Everything was going in. Everyone was having fun. Wembanyama was in the Knicks' heads.
The second half is where things started to get spooky. What transpired was 24 minutes of basketball that left me convinced that if just one thing had happened differently, one shot, one pass, one deflection, the Knicks would have lost by 10. If the first half had reduced the Knicks to a pile of rubble, the second half felt like watching the pieces rise from the ground and begin to reassemble themselves into a sort of improvised Jenga tower. Remove just one of those pieces, or place one at the wrong angle, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Here are some load-bearing beams: From the 8:39 mark of the third quarter, at which point the Spurs were up 81-56, until the 2:14 mark, San Antonio attempted 10 shots. Nine of those were from three-point range, and all nine were misses. By the time that stretch of basketball was over, the Knicks had cut their 27-point halftime deficit to 15. In the moment, it was difficult to weigh the importance of those six minutes, because a 15-point lead is still a 15-point lead, and the Spurs needed to play just one quarter of decent basketball to even the series at 2-2. By the time the Spurs' lead had swelled back to 20 at the start of the fourth quarter, I had all but forgotten about those missed threes.
Now, however, the Spurs' needlessly quick and devastatingly inaccurate third-quarter shooting sits alongside all of the fourth quarter's more obviously miraculous occurrences in the unbelievable story of this game. Where do you even begin with the final frame? With Jose Alvarado channeling Bob Cousy in the lane to outfox the Spurs' defense and make it 102-97 with four minutes left to play? With Jalen Brunson's pull-up three-pointer over Wembanyama, which made it 104-103 with 2:21 left to play? With Wembanyama's missed free throws that kept it there with 1:47 left to play? How about De'Aaron Fox, grabbing a loose ball in the Knicks' half of the court with 13 seconds left and needing only dribble around a little bit to protect his team's 106-105 lead, only to try and lay the ball in over OG Anunoby and get blocked at the rim? What about Alvarado's heads-up backcourt-violation-that-wasn't which allowed the Knicks to call timeout and set up for one final shot?
You know where it all ends, of course: with the right hand of Anunoby. After inbounding the ball with 5.7 seconds left, Anunoby was farther from the rim than any other player on the court besides Brunson, who was busy launching a 31-footer over Wembanyama. Anunoby had flashed to the three-point line and raised his arms to let Brunson know he was open, but as soon as the shot went up he changed course. Three long strides brought him to the center of the paint, and when Brunson's shot bounced high off the front of the rim, he leapt higher than Dylan Harper and Devin Vassell, kissed the ball with his right hand as the power of his jump carried him toward the baseline, and watched one of the greatest moments in NBA Finals history resolve itself while sliding out of bounds on his ass. Just look at Anunoby's hand, at the height it reached and the softness with which it cradled and redirected the ball, and see if you don't consider, even for a second, that it was being pulled skyward.
But of course it wasn't. God didn't win this game for the Knicks. Anunoby, Brunson, Towns, and Alvarado did. And only something as untamable as sports could produce a game with so much joy, heartbreak, and beauty packed into it. You can forgive me for thinking otherwise, though, can't you? Because when sports are at their best, they can produce the same feelings that drive a person to religion. In the moment, it can feel as difficult to wrap your mind around a game like this as it is to wrestle with questions of creation and consciousness.
Perhaps this is where the Knicks' advantage over the Spurs truly lives. It is ironic that the team without the star player who spent a summer with monks is the one I most want to describe as monastic. How else to describe Anunoby, minutes removed from the greatest moment of his professional life, popping canned statements like, "We're resilient, we never give up, it's a game of runs," during his postgame interview, like he'd just won a game against the Grizzlies in January? Brunson was similarly placid, perhaps even a little dead-eyed, when he joined the ESPN postgame show and said, of his mindset when his team was down 29, "You're allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, but you gotta go out there and do something about it."
Every NBA season demands something specific from its champion. This one seems to be calling for one that can face down the awe-inspiring and panic-inducing unpredictability of sports, and just keep walking forward. I've never seen a team more equipped for the task than these Knicks.
