Sometimes, you’re in the right place at the right time for the perfect shot. It certainly helps to be courtside at Madison Square Garden, standing right in front of the hero of one of the greatest NBA Finals games of all time as he takes off to make an instantly legendary play. That was the case for ESPN/Prime Video analyst Kirk Herbstreit for Game 4 of Knicks vs. Spurs on Wednesday night.
Herbstreit had a prime spot among the many, many celebrities positioned around the court for perhaps the greatest win in New York history, just feet away from San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson. As the Knicks inbounded the ball with just over five seconds left and a chance to win the game Herbstreit instinctively took out his phone, as we all do when we think history might unfold in front of our eyes.
How right he was.
Incredible experience just being a fan at Game 4 at MSG!
— Kirk Herbstreit (@KirkHerbstreit) June 11, 2026
This is why we love sports-Here was my angle for the game winner… @nyknicks down 29 and just kept choppin wood to give themselves a chance at the end-and won it with poise and determination.
Appreciate Mark Shapiro for… pic.twitter.com/5eURvViraE
Herbstreit’s shot starts to his right, with Johnson mostly covering Anunoby, the inbounder that the Spurs fatefully forgot to account for after he tossed it in to Jalen Brunson.
Three seconds into the video, and Anunoby is almost directly in front of Herbstreit, calling for the ball—a detail that was easy to miss on the broadcast with the focus on Brunson’s shot. The moment that Brunson let it fly, Anunoby kicked it into high gear, and Herbstreit perfectly tracked his mad dash to the rim, where he tipped in the game-winner.
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And then ... absolute jubilation from the Garden crowd, including the trio of John McEnroe, David Zaslav and Larry David, who found himself in a perfect real-life Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque memeable moment minutes earlier when Josh Hart missed a layup that could have doomed the tea.
Herbstreit and the MSG crowd witnessed the Knicks make the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history
At two different points in the late second and early third quarters, the Spurs were up 29 points on the Knicks. That deficit made Wednesday’s game the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history.
ESPN’s win probability—a flawed metric but a fun one to look at after games like this—gave San Antonio a 99.5% chance to win the game as late as 8:07 in the fourth quarter after a Brunson foul. The Spurs had a 95–80 lead at that time. At the moment that Brunson missed the three with 4.4 seconds left, before Anunoby tipped it in, San Antonio’s odds of winning were calculated at 85.4%.
The Knicks’ comeback was capped by a bit of the magic that New York has displayed throughout their magnificent playoff run, but as Herbstreit said, it was proceeded by hard work. The Knicks kept chopping away at that huge, but not insurmountable, lead, the same way they did in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, down 22 to the Cavaliers midway through the fourth quarter. The Spurs, meanwhile, slowed their offense and became too reliant on threes despite going ice cold in the third quarter after a scorching first half.
That opened the door for the incredible sports moment above, and when it came, Herbie’s camera was pointed in the right place.
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