NEW YORK — This was the most glorious basketball night in Madison Square Garden history, made possible by an NBA Finals comeback like no other, by a crowd that just would not quit, and by a stunning midair play from OG Anunoby that no other New York Knicks player could have made.
Not Willis Reed, Patrick Ewing, Dave DeBusschere, Bernard King or Carmelo Anthony.
Nobody.
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In the final seconds of Game 4, Anunoby swooped in while tracking Jalen Brunson’s deep miss, Superman style, and went flying above the San Antonio Spurs players who forgot to put a body on him. The uber-athletic 6-foot-7 forward was thinking of executing a right-hand follow dunk, but the rebound didn’t cooperate. It was over his head. Anunoby could get a piece of the ball only with his right fingertips, which deflected it toward the goal, through the net and into a forever place in NBA lore while he crashed onto his rump and slid out of bounds.
The World Cup is here, so why not call OG’s a “hand of God” play? His coach, Mike Brown, argued that it was “bigger than any other play in the history of Knicks basketball.”
Jerry Seinfeld was among the 19,812 witnesses who had that look on their face best captured by Jack Buck’s immortal call of Kirk Gibson’s homer in the 1988 World Series:
I don’t believe what I just saw.
The crowd went wilder than it did when one of the spectators, Larry Johnson, made his famous four-point play in the 1999 Eastern Conference finals. I was there that day. I was also at the Garden in 1994 when Ewing sent the Knicks to the finals, stood on the scorer’s table and wrapped his extended arms around the city.
This comeback from a 29-point third-quarter deficit, and OG’s OMG finisher with 1.2 seconds left in a 107-106 victory, defined the greatest event I’ve ever attended in the Garden, hands down. The Knicks left the building with a 3-1 series lead. They are 48 earnest minutes of basketball away from their first championship since 1973.
Hugs and kisses and tears all around. If you weren’t a member of the Spurs’ traveling party and you didn’t have goosebumps, you should have checked immediately for a pulse.
Two nights after they kicked away a chance to sweep San Antonio like they had swept the Cleveland Cavaliers and Philadelphia 76ers, the Knicks were all big winners for the 14th time in their last 15 postseason games, everyone from Anunoby to Brunson to Karl-Anthony Towns to Jose Alvarado.
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But only one Knick amid the celebration had the nerve to essentially guarantee the victory. And he was the one member of the home team who had the most to lose.
‘We will win’
James Dolan grew up on Long Island wanting to be Joe Namath. All these years later, as the billionaire baron of the Garden, Dolan was feeling comfortable enough about his Knicks’ title chances to pull a Broadway Joe on WFAN Radio’s “The Carton Show” fewer than five hours before tipoff. A sample of what he said:
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• “We’re going to win tonight, and we’re going to win the finals.”
• “If our guys come out and play the game that they know they can play and they know how to play, we will win this game, and we will win the series.”
• “It’s not who we play, it’s not the referees. It’s how we play. … If we come out ready to play this game, I guarantee you we will win.”
Some comments included qualifiers, some did not. But none of them was necessary right before the crucial Game 4.
At least when Namath guaranteed a Super Bowl III victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, he was responding to a heckler who had predicted the Jets’ demise during an awards banquet at the Miami Touchdown Club.
Radio hosts Craig Carton and Chris McMonigle were not heckling Dolan, just asking him questions about the finals and the controversy over the canceled watch party outside of the Garden. As Dolan repeatedly ripped into Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, and Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, for allegedly pooping the party, I couldn’t help but think about the most compelling and combustible sports owner I’ve ever covered.
Even George Steinbrenner wouldn’t be kicking up these dust storms hours before Game 4 of the World Series.
Knicks coach Mike Brown said he wasn’t aware of Dolan’s interview before tipoff. “You know, he owns the team,” Brown said. “He can say whatever he wants to say. Maybe he feels something, I don’t know. But I’m 100 percent OK with him saying whatever he feels like he needs to say.”
“I don’t think they have faith in their own police force…the mayor’s office, and the commissioner too, do not have the experience to do this…they’re not Knicks fans. He’s not a Knick fan” – James Dolan pic.twitter.com/Qe4di2bdoq
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 10, 2026
But this started before the Garden and the mayor traded punches in statements and posts. Dolan had invited his dear friend, President Donald Trump, to sit with him in his suite for Game 3 on Monday night, creating the need for a police state right smack in the middle of the finals. It certainly changed the dynamic outside and inside the arena, and whether it impacted the team and the crowd is in the eye and the ear of the beholder.
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Inviting the most powerful and polarizing person on the planet — also a native New Yorker and legit Knicks fan — is one thing. Fighting the mayor and police commissioner from a radio studio and putting more pressure on your basketball team while potentially angering/inspiring the Spurs is quite another.
Earlier in the postseason, Brown said the common thread connecting the Golden State and San Antonio title teams he worked for as an assistant was the fact that “nobody got ahead of themselves. And nobody in this group, from ownership on down, got ahead of themselves during this run.”
Until this week. Dolan had waited so long for this moment since taking over the Garden in 1999 that he couldn’t help himself. Hey, before Monday night, a lot of us were talking about a sweep and parade plans too.
Then again, a lot of us don’t own the Knicks.
To be fair, Dolan was a good, entertaining listen on the drive into the Garden.
“You have an easier chance of getting into Area 51 today than you do into Madison Square Garden,” he told his customers. The owner claimed that Mamdani and Tisch were in over their heads trying to manage the watch-party issue. “It’s like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” he said. “It’s coming out the sides.”
Dolan’s funniest line? “We had Cardi B at halftime for our third game, and a reunification of Wu-Tang (Clan) for the fourth game. And San Antonio had a dog on a beach ball.”
But nobody was laughing when the Spurs were humiliating the Knicks for most of the night, almost silencing the crowd. More than a few credentialed scribes, including this one, were warming up their keyboards to tell the story of Dolan costing his team by losing focus as he closed in on the grand prize.
And then the Knicks did what the man said they were going to do — they won the game, this time in astonishing fashion. They needed some breaks in the end, like De’Aaron Fox trying to shoot the ball rather than dribbling out the clock.
“You’ve got to have a little luck in sports,” Brown said.
As it turns out, the Knicks’ luck has been the residue of Dolan’s design. Jimmy D is the one who gambled with the Leon Rose hire. He’s the one who spearheaded (with Rose) the drive to replace Tom Thibodeau, an even riskier roll of the dice. He’s the one who notarized Brown’s hiring.
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Dolan has made a ton of mistakes in his day with the Knicks, on and off the court, but this is his time at last. His basketball team means even more to him than his hockey team, the Rangers.
“It would make his life complete,” Wayne Gretzky once told me, “if he could win a Knicks championship.”
James Dolan’s life is about to become complete then. His Knicks just authored the greatest Garden story ever told, and all but booked him for a float in a ticker-tape parade.