No NBA team has ever come back from down 3-0 in a best-of-seven playoff series and now the San Antonio Spurs don’t have to try.
For the third straight game, the young Western Conference champions had a lead over the more veteran New York Knicks in the final minutes, but for the first time they were able to close it out, squeezing out a 115-111 win. They will now try to even the series in Game 4 on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden (Sportsnet, Sportsnet+ at 8:30 p.m. ET).
The Spurs held the Knicks to 7-of-27 shooting in the final frame, which was crucial, given San Antonio shot just 6-of-21 themselves. But Victor Wembanyama was able find a way to score 10 of his game-high 32 points down the stretch, polishing off his best game of the series with eight rebounds, six assists and three blocks by going 8-of-9 from the free throw line, including a perfect 6-of-6 in the fourth.
The Spurs needed every made shot as the Knicks pushed the game to the limit with a pair of threes in the final 33 seconds by Jalen Brunson and OG Anunoby that cut the lead to two with 9.4 seconds left before Spurs guard Stephon Castle iced it with a pair of free throws.
It was a disappointing end to a magical night for Knicks fans, delirious at the notion of their team playing a Finals game at the Garden with a chance to take a 3-0 lead in their quest to win their first championship since 1973.
Without the added security from Game 3, getting into the Garden should be a little easier for Game 4, but the task of eliminating the Spurs just got a little harder.
Basketball can call a lot of places home. It’s rooted in the fabric of rural Indiana, as captured by the movie Hoosiers, which was inspired by tiny Milan High School’s run to the 1954 state championship. In Europe, Serbia and Lithuania would make a similar claim. The game was invented by a Canadian, James Naismith.
But there’s never been a question of New York City’s bona fides. In 1970, Pete Axthelm wrote The City Game, Basketball from the playground to the Garden, tracing the New York Knicks’ first championship that year, but also how the basketball played on the city’s playgrounds was the sport’s heartbeat. Rick Telander spent a year in the early 1970s writing Heaven is Playground about the street basketball scene in New York. In 1994 Darcy Frey wrote The Last Shot, chronicling a year in the life of the Lincoln High basketball team on Coney Island, which included a teenaged Stephon Marbury. Basketball in New York City is lore.
It’s part of why the Knicks being in the NBA Finals is a big deal; bigger in its own way that it is for other NBA cities. Remember when the Toronto Raptors captured the imagination of Canadian sports fans nationally? Now compress all that passion in one city, and layer on a couple of additional generations of angst. It’s something like that. The excitement around the Knicks playing their first Finals game at Madison Square Garden since 1999, with their best chance to win their first title since 1973, is real and it’s justified.
The energy was evident even watching the moments before the tip on television. Imagine the things that ESPN commentator Charles Barkley has seen and done during a career spent in the spotlight?
And yet he spoke for a lot of people when he said, “I ain’t gonna lie, I got goosebumps.”
This was Wembanyama’s best game of the Finals, and he pulled it off by returning to the same formula that served him well in posting arguably the best of his career back in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, where he scored 42 points and grabbed 24 rebounds in the Spurs’ double-overtime win over the Thunder.
He had a lot on the line Monday night, fresh off his unforced turnover at the end of Game 2, where he threw a pass off the back of teammate Stephon Castle in the final seconds with the game tied and then fouled Jalen Brunson. That led to the winning points for the Knicks after Wembanyama’s potentially game-winning jumper went long.
In Game 3 Wembanyama came out seemingly determined to make up for it. He scored four times in the first quarter, all at the rim, three times on dunks. It looked so easy. The Spurs jumped out to a 12-point lead in the first quarter and it seemed like Wembanyama and his team were going to have their moment.
The second quarter told a different story. Wembanyama hit a big three and finished one of his impossible lobs, where he catches the pass two feet above the rim and places it in the basket. But the Knicks fought him a lot harder for position in the paint and won that fight more often than not for long stretches. His only shot when the Knicks were surging back early in the second quarter was a fadeaway jumper he missed.
And here is the issue: Part of the fascination around Wembanyama’s profile and trajectory as a potentially all-time great is that he can do something of everything offensively (in addition to his defence). In theory.
But what’s been evident at this level of competition is that Wembanyama doesn’t have the tools to consistently defeat it. He has struggled all series to beat Karl-Anthony Towns off the dribble, something that hasn’t been traditionally difficult for other NBA players. He struggles to hold his position on post ups, which isn’t surprising, given his frame. And while he can shoot the ball well at times, he’s as prone to cold streaks as anyone else, but every time he pulls up for a three or a spinning fadeaway it feels like a win for the defence because he’s not dunking home a lob.
To his credit, and the Spurs’ good fortune, Wembanyama kept pushing. In the guts of the game he caught a pair of lobs that only he could. He fought for an offensive rebound, drew a foul and made both free throws. He drove against Landry Shamet, spun and got fouled, making two more free throws. Wembanyama finished 8-of-13 in the paint, including 7-of-9 from the rim, and added eight more points on free throws. The perimeter looks were accents to the main course — it’s a recipe that Wembanyama should try to repeat in Game 4.
The Knicks’ burly two-way wing has been superb through the playoffs, save for a brief hiccup after a hamstring strain kept him out of a couple of games in the second round. The former Raptor came into Game 3 averaging 19.3 points per game with a True Shooting (capturing efficiency on two-point field goal attempts, three-point field goal attempts and free throws) of 71.5.
Absurd stuff, except the defensive specialist was even better in Game 3. He scored 28 points on 9-of-13 shooting and was his usual self on defence, coming up with crucial plays such as his block on Dylan Harper on a fastbreak lay-up that led to a Knicks runout and a Brunson three, cutting the Spurs lead to five with six minutes left to play. After Brunson it’s hard to deny that Anunoby has been the second-most essential Knick in the playoffs, though Towns would get a lot of votes. But that kind of scoring punch with that kind of efficiency and that kind of defensive versatility is the definition of a championship-level player, and Anunoby is proving he’s clearly that.
If the Spurs end up losing the NBA Finals, they won’t regret how they defended Brunson. The Knicks star came into Game 2 shooting 33.9 per cent from the floor and — while better — was still only 11-of-25 from the floor in Game 3 with three turnovers. As well as Towns has played, he’s only averaging 16.7 points per game for the Finals after his 11-point outing Monday night.
But it seems like every time the Knicks needed an oxygen hit, someone on their bench was ready to deliver. Jordan Clarkson hadn’t scored all series and he came off the bench for 10 points in 13 minutes, including a crucial end-of-shot clock three at the end of the third quarter.
In Game 3, however, the Knicks didn’t get quite enough from their bench or secondary scorers. Shamet, the Game 2 hero, finished with just three points on 1-of-8 shooting. Miles McBride, who had some key buckets in Game 2, was scoreless.
Instead the Spurs got 13 points from Harper off the bench. Luke Kornet had seven, and each of Devin Vessel, Julian Champagnie and De’Aaron Fox cracked double figures. It was just enough.
