The Knicks clenched a narrow victory over the Spurs last night. Jalen Brunson’s 36 point performance helped the team to a historic comeback. Down nearly 30 points at the half, New York vastly outscored the Spurs in the 3rd and 4th quarters to claim a one point win.

The game, which produced more than a few notable moments for the highlight reel, also put the Spurs in a difficult position. While still technically in the series, their path to claiming the championship has narrowed considerably. They’ll need three straight to clench, while New York is a single win away from claiming their first Finals victory since 1973.

Game 5 will be held on Saturday. Until then, we will take a closer look at what went wrong for the Spurs. First, let’s see how yesterday’s picks did.

Last Night’s Featured bets delivered with 0 hits and 3 misses.

Miles McBride played an extremely quiet seven minutes. During that time, he did not collect any rebounds—or do anything else that showed up on his stat sheet. It didn’t hurt New York too much. It did get us off to a rocky start.

Jordan Clarkson didn’t do much to help us out either. We needed only 4 points out of him. He put up 2 in just five minutes of playtime.

And Keldon Johnson completed our strikeout. He scored 2 points in eighteen minutes, shooting 20% from the field.

These were all reasonable picks, folks. It just goes to show you that plausibility is never a guarantee.

“What’s going through my mind right now? I think it’s going to go one of two ways. … A bad one and a good one,” Wembanyama said in the wake of the Spurs defeat. “The bad one would be giving up. The good one would be getting stronger through this, getting more together. I know this is what we’re going to do.”

His might be a slightly more optimistic take than that of most San Antonio fans. They might grow stronger in defeat, but right now, they don’t have any margin for error left.

It’s easier to relate to the first half of his quote. They did give this one away.

“That’s a game where you sit there and you say you had the type of personnel that you had, you shot the ball decent, played a pretty clean game,” San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson said. “Then kind of didn’t finish the job.”

The second half New York comeback was at least partially the result of an unrealistically strong first half performance. The Spurs made 14 threes in the first two quarters.

They finished the second quarter with 76 points, leading by 27. From there, they proceeded to score just 30 more points for the entire rest of the game.

It’s genuinely hard to say exactly what went wrong. At least part of New York’s comeback owes to the fact that the Spurs came out so strong to start. We wrote in an earlier newsletter this week about the concept of “regression to the mean.”

In other words, streaks end, and hot runs eventually cool off. That, in a nutshell, is what happened last night. The Spurs cooled while the Knicks heated up, and the game ended with a narrow, but conclusive New York victory.

San Antonio is not exactly out of this thing, but they’ll need to win every game in what would turn out to be a seven game series to make it happen. That’s a tall order against a remarkably resilient Knicks team.

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— Propsguru