NEW YORK — Nobody wanted to leave.
The one thing I will remember most about being in Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night is not the New York Knicks’ comeback itself, or even the tip-in by OG Anunoby, but the communal joy in the immediate aftermath of the Knicks’ stunning 29-point rally to beat the San Antonio Spurs 107-106 in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.
Emotionally, MSG became 20,000 Kelly Slaters riding a perfect barrel on the North Shore, and they weren’t bailing on that wave of euphoria until they got every last carve of the ride.
From the biggest celebrity in the building to the most remote nosebleeds in what might technically have been New Jersey, they stayed and soaked it all in. Nobody was leaving, the late hour on a school night be damned. Not Taylor Swift, who was dancing in her in seat well after the buzzer went off, not the other courtside fans and celebs who melded into a sea of Knicks players and staffers on the floor and certainly not the working Joes in the nosebleeds near my media seats, who had to be politely told by ushers near midnight, 45 minutes after the game ended, that they needed to leave.
Nearly an hour after the game ended, fans were still chanting “OG! OG!’ in a line for the men’s restroom in the 400 section.
“You could feel the abundance of joy from everyone at one time,” Knicks big man Karl-Anthony Towns said. “The collective joy that came out of everybody for that one moment, to hear the buzzer going off and not to see the ball go in the basket, I think we all felt something, like that emotion that was special.
“It’s something that MSG hasn’t had, that kind of moment, in a long time, so shoutout to our fans for real.”
If the Knicks win one of their next three games and claim the championship, then the Game 4 comeback becomes etched in history as one of the most significant and memorable games in league annals — with Anunoby’s tip-in a “Where were you when … ?” moment on par with the Ray Allen shot, Michael Jordan’s walk-off, Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game and Kawhi Leonard’s four-bouncer.
So while New Yorkers revel in ecstasy for at least one more day, let’s talk a little about what it signifies. One reason New Yorkers are reacting to this playoff run with such unbridled joy is that it seems so unexpected, given fans’ prior beliefs about what championship-caliber teams look like.
These Knicks — along with a few of their brethren from the past half-decade — might cause us to adjust our assumptions about title contention.
For starters, there’s the distinct possibility that Anunoby — generally considered New York’s third-best player, and one whom I said was “OG Anonymous” as recently as two weeks ago — could win NBA Finals MVP. Deservedly, he’s had an amazing series and made his greatest impact in the highest-leverage moments.
On the other hand, here’s an amazing stat: Of the 18 players who have played at least 20 minutes in this series, the lowest offensive rebound rate belongs to … Anunoby. It was zero until the final two seconds of Game 4.
He’s a relatively low-usage player, and his winning finals MVP would be quite unusual over the last four decades of the NBA.
Anunoby would be the second zero-time All-Star to win since the Detroit Pistons’ Joe Dumars in 1989 and only the fourth ever. If he doesn’t get selected in the future, he would be the first never-All-Star to be finals MVP since the Boston Celtics’ Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell in 1981.
Which takes us to my second point about the Knicks, and about several teams like them in recent years who have either climbed to the top of the mountain or come tantalizingly close.
As I noted when the series started, New York doesn’t have a dominant alpha player dragging it to greatness. While its best players (Towns, Jalen Brunson and Anunoby) are very good, none of them have made first team All-NBA. In fact, no Knicks player received a single vote for MVP this season … not even for fifth place.
New York’s strength also didn’t manifest too heavily in the regular season. While the Knicks technically meet my minimum historical bar for a champion — a top-3 seed with at least 52 regular-season wins — they barely clear the hurdle at 53.
This is not an isolated incident, either. The Indiana Pacers, a 50-win and No. 4-seeded team, were one Achilles tendon away from winning the crown in 2025.
Check out other recent champs: The 2023 Denver Nuggets won only 53 games, as did the Golden State Warriors in 2022; both played teams that won 51 or fewer games in the finals. The 2021 Milwaukee Bucks were prorated to just 52.3 wins (that regular season was limited to 72 games because of the pandemic).
We haven’t had a finals in which both teams won at least 54 games since 2019, something that in the past represented a modest floor for contention. In fact, if the Knicks end up winning this week, only two of the last six champions will have won 54 or more regular-season games.
It wasn’t always like that, even in recent history. The 14 champions from 2007 to 2020 all won at least 57 games, prorated for an 82-game season. Most of their finals opponents did, too.
A New York win would also be another blow for the Great Bracket Breakdown. The post-COVID-19 NBA has been much less chalky in the postseason than it used to be. My historical benchmark of 3 1/2 playoff upsets per spring (“upset’ being a team without home-court advantage winning the series) has struggled to hit the under lately.
A Knicks win would make this another five-upset year (New York over San Antonio in the finals; San Antonio over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals; the Cleveland Cavaliers over Detroit in the second round; Minnesota Timberwolves over Denver; Philadelphia 76ers over Boston in Round 1), and cement the trend line.
In 2025, there were six, and Tyrese Haliburton might have made it seven if he’d been able to. The six years from 2020 to 2025 had 31; we’re averaging over five of these a year. The 2020 Miami Heat, 2023 Dallas Mavericks and 2024 Heat made the finals without home-court advantage in any round (although the 2020 Heat technically had no home-court advantage in the NBA bubble).
Again, it wasn’t always like that. The six years pre-COVID-19 produced only 20 upsets, lower than my benchmark of 3 1/2. The 1997 postseason gave us zero; several other seasons between then and 2015 had only two.
Those playoff upsets result in clashes of No. 1 seeds in the finals less often than we used to see; that trend was already underway pre-COVID-19. We haven’t had two top seeds meet since … 2016! Before that, it was in 2008. This year’s finals didn’t have either No. 1 seed, marking the third time in six years that’s happened (Oklahoma City and Detroit are meeting in some other, parallel-universe finals on the planet Kepler-22b).
If you’re not getting where I’m going yet, let me lay it out for you: The model of having a dominant regular season built around an alpha star seems to have much less championship equity than it used to. That equity is instead flowing to bracket-breaking squads innocently hiding in the middle of the standings, like the Pacers and Knicks.
While teams built around a demigod-tier superstar always have a chance — the 2025 Thunder are one obvious recent example, and the 2026 Spurs could still be — the Knicks’ success underscores that something else is at work.
That mechanism, one that also worked for the Pacers in 2025, the Celtics in 2024 and even the Nikola Jokić-driven Nuggets in 2023, is that the NBA is becoming more of a “weak link” league. Superstars will always matter, but in a structure where defenses switch nearly everything and offenses go matchup hunting with ruthless efficiency, an MVP-and-four-guys-from-the-Y roster construction hits a ceiling fast.
Matchups matter, and so does being able to match up different ways each round depending on what the opponent throws at you. Having the least-bad weakest link can and does matter as much as, or even more than, having the best superstar.
Look again at the first four games. The Spurs have the best player on the court (even if he hasn’t always played like it in the highest-leverage moments) and a talented group of guards, but the Knicks’ superpower is that all five starters give them something. They have a mix of sizes and skill sets that lets them match up different ways.
Sometimes the weakest link is Josh Hart (wiping his brow after his final minute in Game 4 was erased by Anunoby’s heroics); sometimes it’s Mikal Bridges (whom we didn’t see much of in the fourth quarter in Game 4); and sometimes it’s a sub like Game 4 hero Jose Alvarado or conference finals ace marksman Landry Shamet.
However, with big forwards like Anunoby and Bridges, two centers they trust (except for foul shots) and go-to guys both big and small in Brunson and Towns, the Knicks can throw more things at opponents and handle more body blows coming back at them.
Compare that to the Spurs, who have a six-player circle of trust that only includes two players taller than 6 foot 5. When — lacking an Anunoby of their own — San Antonio played four guards on the Knicks’ last play of Game 4, and Brunson drew Wembanyama away from the hoop, the board was open for Anunoby’s heroics.
Yes, it was only one moment in one game in a series that has turned on razor-thin margins, so I’m leery of extrapolating too much from it in a vacuum. But this is a trend we’ve seen for six years now, and it shows no sign of abating. The question “What does a championship team look like?” — an important one if you work in a front office — has a very different answer now than it did in 2019. The Knicks are just the latest example.
