Никс Сан Антониог буулгаж авснаар цувралын хувь заяаг эргүүлэв

SAN ANTONIO — The Spurs had a defensive formula that worked all year long. Victor Wembanyama would park himself by the rim, ball handlers would run the other way and San Antonio would win with its defense.

Karl-Anthony Towns presented the antidote. As the Spurs made their way to the NBA Finals, they didn’t face a team that could truly threaten them with a five-out lineup. The Oklahoma City Thunder were supposed to do that, then Chet Holmgren put up one of the worst series in recent memory.

Towns has posed the threat Holmgren couldn’t, and it’s the biggest reason the Knicks have a chance to clinch the title Saturday. The Spurs spent the second half of Game 4 fighting the tide to keep Wembanyama in his favored spot on defense. But New York presented so many challenges that made it untenable. That, combined with the Spurs’ horrendous offensive execution, allowed the Knicks to pull off the greatest comeback we’ve ever seen.

So how did it happen?

Typically, the Spurs have Wembanyama either guard the worst shooter on the floor or the big man, allowing him to stay near the paint. He has spent 79.6 partial possessions guarding Towns in this series, 45.2 on Mitchell Robinson, 39 on OG Anunoby and 35 on Josh Hart, per NBA Stats. Those stats may not include when Wembanyama is effectively in a zone and isn’t really marking anyone.

Wembanyama has spent 27.9 partial possessions on Jalen Brunson, often catching the Knicks’ star on a type of switch called a “Veer.” These moments shaped the game because of how it put the Spurs defense into rotation and how it wore down Wembanyama to take away his late-game offensive potency.

They happen when Wembanyama is dropping back on a screen, but Brunson gets downhill so fast that Wembanyama has to call for the switch and pick Brunson up. That will send someone like De’Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper off to guard Towns, which can either set off a series of switches to fix the cross-match or give Towns an advantage to go post-up or grab an offensive rebound.

The Knicks have been good at forcing these veers by running Brunson-Towns actions against the sideline with an empty corner. In theory, all of these veers for Wembanyama should help with his stamina a bit, since he doesn’t have to do as much cross-court sprinting and can settle into guarding one guy. But even in the first minute of the second half, Brunson crossed him up easily on a switch to get all the way into the paint and give Anunoby an open 3. Ironically, Wembanyama was the one sprinting to close out on Anunoby’s shot.

Trouble quietly reared its head a few minutes into the third quarter, when Wembanyama shut off a Mikel Bridges drive and confusion began to percolate. Bridges flowed up to the top of the arc for a handoff to Brunson, while Towns set a down screen at the free-throw line. The alarms went off when Wembanyama sat under Towns’ screen while Keldon Johnson, the defender actually guarding Towns, did the same. Brunson stepped into a wide-open 3 while Wembanyama pointed for Johnson to step up.

Suddenly, the Knicks had a solution.

When Robinson came back on the floor, Brunson started attacking Wembanyama in a deep drop. The Thunder tried this strategy too with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander but it worked more effectively for the Knicks because Brunson tends to seek separation for his midrange pull-up rather than to draw a foul against the Spurs’ astute defenders. When Wembanyama countered by guarding up on the action more and losing the ability to contain Robinson’s rolls, the Knicks stuck Fox’s man under the hoop so that the point guard was the backside rim protector. That ain’t gonna work.

Wembanyama said after Game 4 that the issues traced back to the third quarter and it was these coverage issues that were the root.

The Spurs’ zone defense stemmed the bleeding in the late third and early fourth quarters, but they went back to man-to-man entering crunch time with Wembanyama in the low-man spot. The Knicks put Anunoby, their best shooter and a good closeout attacker, in the opposite corner. The Spurs could’ve put Wembanyama on Hart and have him zone up the top of the paint instead, but mostly chose to keep him down by the baseline.

That gave the green light for Brunson to seek out a switch onto Julian Champagnie, who has been opponents’ primary crunch-time target throughout the playoffs. Champagnie’s defensive value comes from his hands on drives and his rebounding, but quick guards can take advantage of his footwork and beat him at the point of attack.

At the 5:35 mark, Castle and Champagnie were coming down the floor in transition, and Castle told Champagnie to guard Brunson. Perhaps this was essentially a pre-switch, hoping that Brunson would run a ball screen that could get Champagnie off him. Brunson gave it up to Towns, who couldn’t get past Wembanyama in an isolation. Brunson then got it back and beat Champagnie one-on-one for a great finish over Vassell’s perfect rotation at the rim. This play showed that as long as Wembanyama is pulled away from the rim and Champagnie is on Brunson, the Knicks had the advantage.

The Spurs offensive possession right after this epitomized why and how they pulled off the epic collapse. With the lead down to seven, Fox walked the ball up the floor and called for Champagnie and Webanyama to come screen for him. It took the Spurs forever to get the action going, with Champagnie finally screening with nine seconds on the clock after Fox sent Wembanyama away for some reason. It resulted in Fox taking a good stepback midrange jumper, which he bricked and Wembanyama tapped out of bounds. It’s unclear if Fox wanted to set up some sort of skip pass option to the opposite side, but he was on his own with nobody else sure of the plan.

This was the disjointed, mistimed offense that doomed the Spurs. They got stuck in a barrage of early-clock transition 3s that they all bricked, then couldn’t get their spacing on the same page when they slowed it down. Fox’s isolation 3 with 2:45 left showed just how exhausted the Spurs were and how much they lost their process. When he ran a ball screen with Wembanyama at the 2:06 mark and Wembanyama didn’t even look at him to receive the pass, the offense went from bad to broken.

Throughout New York’s comeback, the Spurs’ ball pressure on Brunson waned and the Knicks were able to execute more easily. The Spurs tried to keep Wembanyama assigned to the low-man role, marking the opposite corner shooter, and the Knicks designed their actions to bring Wembanyama up into pick-and-roll coverage. The Spurs tried to get Wembanyama out of the Brunson veers by temporarily double-teaming so he could release the coverage, but the Knicks swung the ball around too quickly for the Spurs to survive.

Part of the issue was that Wembanyama was in a high drop, where he would get to the 3-point line and then start moving backwards. Late in the game, he started stepping up to force Brunson to hit the brakes, which seemed to give the Spurs time to get sorted on the backside.

But the Anunoby 3 with 4:34 left epitomized how all of Wembanyama’s work was wearing him down. Just look at how Wembanyama floats back into the paint, way out of position, and appears to forget Anunoby is behind him.

OG FOR THREE. IT’S A 4-POINT GAME.

MSG IS GOING CRAZY ON ABC 🤯 pic.twitter.com/on1RsnJDoS

— NBA (@NBA) June 11, 2026

Wembanyama sees Champagnie sprinting across the court to pre-close out to Hart (why?) and turns around in slow-motion to close to the now wide-open Anunoby.While there were Spurs mistakes being made across the board, they contributed to Wembanyama losing steam.

It also led to a blunder with just under four minutes left when Jose Alvarado left Champagnie in the dust on a drive and Wembanyama could only watch the uncontested layup because he was pulled out of the paint to hover near Anunoby. If Wembanyama had more gas, he may have actively worked the paint and been ready to sprint out to Anunoby or even trap Alvarado to take away that kick-out pass. But he was just exhausted.

That was confirmed with a minute-and-a-half left when he couldn’t even rotate across the paint to contest a crucial Brunson floater.

JALEN BRUNSON AGAIN.

KNICKS HAVE THEIR FIRST LEAD OF THE GAME 🤯

GET TO ABC NOW. pic.twitter.com/SXzPmA6WbG

— NBA (@NBA) June 11, 2026

The Spurs defense flipped the switch back on in the final minute, and there were several unfortunate breaks that cost them on the other end. Wembanyama broke the offensive freeze by getting to the line, then somehow bricked them both. Castle drew what the NBA’s Last-Two Minute report said should have been a foul on Hart, but the officials called out of bounds off Castle instead in the moment. Fox made his grave error by trying to lay it in with 10 seconds left instead of dribbling it out to get fouled.

On the Knicks’ game-winner, Spurs coach Mitch Johnson called for Fox to double-team Brunson, along with Wembanyama, to force the miss on the attempted game-winner. Then, the Spurs got the most unlucky bounce they’ll ever see when Anunoby flew in to pull off perhaps the greatest tip in NBA history. On the last play, Towns got a finger on Harper’s inbound to a wide-open Castle, who was a virtual lock to lay in what would’ve become the most significant alley-oop in NBA history.

The Spurs fared well in the closing minute, aside from Fox’s blunder, but the attrition from the Knicks offense spreading them out did them in well before then. It’s a problem that has cost the Spurs three times now, as the Knicks’ spacing inevitably becomes the biggest advantage. Johnson should get Wembanyama more minutes on the bench in Game 5 after it became clear that playing him 44 minutes in Game 4 backfired tremendously. His backup, Luke Kornet, is now questionable with an illness.

If Kornet can’t play, Johnson likely won’t put in Bismack Biyombo, and Keldon Johnson and Carter Bryant haven’t been viable as small fives in this series. Mitch Johnson has some difficult decisions to make, and may not have a better solution than to challenge Wembanyama to find that mode only the all-time greats have.

According to Wembanyama, the Spurs still believe.

“Everybody thinks, everybody knows,” he said. “We’re going to do it.”