Minutes after the New York Knicks had won Game 4 of the NBA Finals, Taylor Swift led an impromptu pep rally in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, on her way out. She waved a towel and jumped up and down and celebrated with strangers, as a crowd gathered around her.
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Timothée Chalamet exited through the same tunnel and was also hooting and hollering with his fellow Knicks fans. Earlier, the video screen had shown him looking shocked, his hands on his face — just like the 19,000 others who bore witness at the Garden that night.
The Knicks had just pulled off the impossible. They had trailed by 27 at halftime, 29 at one point in the third quarter, 15 entering the fourth quarter and 11 with about six minutes remaining. At the end of the fourth, down by 1, Jalen Brunson launched a 30-foot 3-pointer, which missed and bounced into the air. The Garden went quiet for a moment, everyone collectively holding their breath, until OG Anunoby came out of nowhere to tip the ball into the basket with 1.2 seconds left.
After the score went final — Knicks 107, Spurs 106 — the Garden erupted. The Knicks shoved Anunoby in excitement. The crowd chanted, “O-G! O-G! O-G!”
The party was now continuing in the tunnel. A group of Knicks dancers, in orange and blue sequined outfits, huddled together and sang along as “New York, New York” blared from the Garden’s speakers. “One more win!” they started chanting. “One more win!” That’s right: The Knicks were now one win away from their first NBA title since 1973.
All of this was clearly audible no more than 40 feet away, across the tunnel in a makeshift press conference room, where San Antonio head coach Mitch Johnson was trying to explain how his team blew such a big lead. “Honestly, it’s tough,” Johnson said. “We felt the momentum. Too much to overcome? I didn’t feel that until the clock hit zeros.”
Back in their locker room, there was nothing but silence, players looking at their phones or staring off into space. They were trying to process what had just happened, too. The comeback had been as much about what the Spurs had done wrong as the Knicks had done right. “We gave this one up,” Spurs forward Keldon Johnson said. “It hurts.”
The Spurs offense, for instance, only mustered 30 points in the second half. “Stopped moving the ball,” San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama said. “Stopped executing.”
With 1:47 left, Wembanyama had actually gone to the free throw line, with the Spurs clinging to a 1-point lead. The crowd attempted to bother the 22-year-old. They had done the same thing in Game 3, with Stephon Castle at the line, and he had calmly sunk both free throws. This time, Wembanyama missed them both.
“What was going through my mind? Same thing as always,” Wembanyama said. “It’s just a shot. You might work on your form for hours and hours. At the end of the day, it’s just a shot, so you need to shoot it the normal way.”
The Spurs still had a 1-point lead with 13.5 seconds left when Brunson missed a shot and the rebound happened to ricochet out to the Spurs’ De’Aaron Fox, who was ahead of the pack and racing the other way. Fox went for a layup, and was blocked by Anunoby, who had sprinted back into the play.
“[We] hadn’t scored,” Fox said. “Tried to get a layup to get up three, force them to hit a three, and OG made a good block.”
After the game, lots of people pointed out, Fox could’ve tried dribbling out the clock, since the shot clock was off, and forced the Knicks to foul and send him to the free throw line. “Just thought I’d be able to outrun him,” Fox said.
Despite those miscues, the Spurs still had a chance to win. The Knicks needed that last-second tip-in from Anunoby to win. “I was contesting the first shot,” Wembanyama said. “Turned around and saw him up there. That’s all I saw. That’s all I can tell you.”
Rookie guard Dylan Harper was right there as Anunoby skied for the ball. “I could play, wish I could have did this, wish I could have did that,” Harper said. “I definitely thought I had a hand on it. I definitely think I helped put the ball in the rim. But just got to box out.”
Around 12:40 a.m., about an hour after the game had ended, Wembanyama and his teammates walked quietly down a ramp toward the Garden’s exit. The tunnel party had dissipated by then. But somewhere in the city, Knicks fans were surely still celebrating.
