4 stats explaining the NBA Finals

Shocking rim protection numbers, OG Anunoby, Jose Alvarado, and more

It’s been ~36 hours now, and I’m still reeling from the aftershocks of Wednesday night’s incredible, historic Knicks comeback.

The Spurs have held a lead with fewer than two minutes left in all four games of this series. They’re now 1-3, preparing for Game 5 with a broken heart after blowing a Finals-record 29-point cushion.

I wonder, and I guess we’ll find out, if a team this young is more or less resilient than a veteran group? The Spurs have reasonable hopes of making it back to the Finals again in the near future, but there’s also the knowledge that they just made history in the worst way possible. Does that hit 22-year-olds harder than 30-year-olds?

The Knicks, on the other hand, will need to avoid an emotional hangover in Game 5, but they’re sitting pretty. They’ve lost three times in these entire playoffs; San Antonio needs to beat them three times in a row.

That’s an order tall enough to overshadow even Victor Wembanyama. But if Game 4 proved anything, it’s that nothing is impossible.

Let’s walk through some stats explaining why and how the series is the way it is. If you’d rather/also want to hear my unhinged, delirious reactions to Game 4’s comeback, watch my post-game reaction podcast with Wes Goldberg on RealGM YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. It’s a lot of me stifling curse words and looking up stats on the fly (did you know the Spurs shot 20.5% over the entire second half?); if you’re not a San Antonio fan, you’ll enjoy it. If you are, uh, maybe steer clear.

133

Okay, so this is less explanatory and more, “Holy s***!”

The San Antonio Spurs have led for 133 minutes in this series. That’s 69.3% of the 192 minutes played so far. If Kenny Atkinson were still here, he might say that, analytically, the Spurs should be the team up 3-1.

I already talked about Jalen Brunson and New York’s slow first quarters, and Game 4 was the most extreme possible example of that. Jalen Brunson made zero field goals in the first (he’s now 5-for-25 to start each game in the series). The Knicks have been outscored by 47 points in first quarters and have subsequently had to spend the rest of each game digging themselves out of holes ranging from shin-deep to coffin-sized.

And yet! We know how these games have generally ended. Call it inexperience; call it killer instinct; call it a lack (or surfeit) of optionality and depth; call it exhaustion; call it bad (or good) luck. When we’re talking about samples this small, it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions, but it’s clear that something is happening.

If this series goes the way that history suggests it will, the Spurs will have an offseason full of regrets. I’m not sure whether losing in the Finals fits the “young team taking its lumps” narrative we always talk about, but I am sure that San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson, Wembanyama, and the rest will take plenty of lessons away from this experience.

Meanwhile, New York will have to settle for taking away a banner.

59.6%

Alright, let’s dive a little deeper. The Knicks are shooting 62.6% at the rim, which is way below their season average and actually a tad worse than what San Antonio allowed during the regular season (which makes sense, given Wemby’s increase in minutes). 62.6% would’ve been the lowest rim accuracy of any regular-season team.

But the Spurs are shooting a paltry 59.6% at the rack, highlighted by a sub-50% shooting performance in Game 4! New York’s stellar rim protection has been a hugely underrated part of their success.

Some of that number is a bit overblown. Wembanyama tallies a couple of misses each game on wild putbacks; the Spurs have missed some absolutely inexplicable bunnies. But in the aggregate, the Knicks have met the Texans at their greatest strength and been more than their equal.

Despite those basement-level shooting percentages, this hasn’t been a block party of a series; the Spurs have 22 blocks, and the Knicks have 20, both of which are right around what you’d expect.

But New York has had a lot of success bringing extra bodies on every Wembanyama roll and post-up. They’re even helping off of shooters like Julian Champagnie and Devin Vassell far more than I would have expected:

Sometimes, Wemby can’t even get a shot up to miss. OG Anunoby, in particular, is a master of the help-and-recover. Watch him slam Wemby with a vicious shoulder tag (right after Brunson did the same!) and then fly back out to the three-point line:

Those aggressive tactics can leave New York vulnerable to an explosion from downtown, as we saw in the first half of Game 4. But the Knicks are betting that bringing all this pressure will help more than harm, and so far, they’ve been proven right.

12

Let’s talk more OG.