Knicks have benefited from highly improbable comebacks all playoffs, and the script finally got flipped

These NBA playoffs are getting too wild to even comprehend, let alone actually calculate. Still, I wanted to run some numbers Wednesday morning on some of the most statistically unlikely events we’ve seen over the past month. Sort of a madness ranking, if you will. I walked into the office of our Sportsline math wiz Stephen Oh, who started scribbling “Good Will Hunting” equations on his white board. 

The first scenario he ran was the Pacers having won two playoff games after trailing by at least seven points inside the final minute, first against the Bucks in Game 5 and then again against the Cavaliers in Game 2. 

He started with the historical data: Prior to the Pacers’ first comeback, teams that trailed by at least seven points inside the final minute were a combined 1-1,640. Without even factoring in any predictive models that included a more accurate look at the specific circumstances of these games, this historical data equated to about a 0.0006% chance — or a little more than 1 in 166,000 — of it happening once. 

But twice? Stephen started mumbling stuff to himself as he worked the problem again, something about squaring this and dividing that, and then he just put the cap on his marker and let out a little laugh as he deemed the problem to be, for all practical purposes, “incalculable.”

“Put it like this, dude,” he said, “there’s a much better chance of the asteroid taking us all out.”

For Knicks fans, that’s what it must’ve felt like to watch the Pacers pull off a third incalculably crazy comeback to steal Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals at the Garden on Wednesday night. Like an asteroid slamming into the heart of a city that was less than a week removed from its biggest basketball victory in a quarter century.

Pacers’ shocking comeback over Knicks creates result that’s never been seen before in NBA playoffs

Austin Nivison

To even write this feels like an out-of-body experience. Like, did this really happen again?

Yes. It did.

The Pacers trailed by 17 halfway through the fourth quarter and by 14 with 2:45 to go, at which point Indiana was officially in never-happened-before territory. 

When the Pacers were still down by nine with under a minute to play, this thing was over. And then, in a blink, it wasn’t. Aaron Nesmith splashed five 3-pointers over a four-minute span, OG Anunoby missed a vital free throw and the next thing you knew Tyrese Haliburton was throwing up the Reggie Miller choke sign as he caromed in what appeared to be a game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer. 

It turned out to be a premature punking as Haliburton’s foot was on the line, but it only dragged out New York’s torturous death. The game went to overtime, where Indiana finished the deal, 138-135, to take what is a truly unbelievable 1-0 lead in the series. 

For the Knicks, to call this a gut punch would be an understatement. It already feels like a knockout blow. For a team to mentally recover, to say nothing of the physical toll gone to complete waste, from a loss like this to win a series is almost incomprehensible. The Knicks should know better than anyone. They’ve been on the other side of these comebacks all through the playoffs, playing with the very fire that has now burned them. 

It started in Game 1 vs. Detroit, when the Knicks went on a 21-0 fourth-quarter run to flip a game in which they were pretty roundly outplayed. It’s not to take anything away from the run, or certainly the win, for both of which they deserve all the credit. Statistically, it was just an extremely unlikely outcome. 

How unlikely? Well, out of 2,300 playoff games in the play-by-play era (since 1997), there had been three fourth-quarter runs of at least 21-0. That’s about a 1 in 76,000 probability event that went the Knicks’ way, and it was just the start of an almost statistically impossible playoff run. 

Never mind the Game 4 win against Detroit that was gifted to the Knicks by an admitted blown no-call on a Tim Hardaway Jr. 3-point attempt at the buzzer, or the 11-point fourth-quarter deficit they crawled out of to seal the first-round series. Statistically, those are unlikely events, but surely nothing extraordinary. We’ve seen it before. 

What we hadn’t seen was a team win two consecutive playoff games in which they trailed by at least 20 points in the fourth quarter. Literally, it had never happened. Until the Knicks did it against the Celtics in Games 1 and 2 of the conference semis. 

Fact is, to recover from a 20-point deficit at any point in a playoff game, let alone two — let alone two straight — is extremely unlikely. Prior to the Knicks pulling these two rabbits out of their hat against Boston, teams that had gone down by 20 in a playoff game had a record of 27-830. That calculates to worse than a 1 in 3,100 shot to just recover from a 20-point deficit at any point to win one playoff game. I asked Stephen to calculate the odds of it happening not just in two straight games, but in the fourth quarter of both, and again he could only chuckle. 

“Same thing,” he said. “Better shot of the asteroid.”

The point of this isn’t to diminish any of the Knicks’ playoff success to this point. It is, again, merely to point out that a lot of statistically unlikely outcomes — to put it mildly — have gone their way. If you’re going to live by that sword, I suppose you have to be OK with dying by it as well. 

As for how long the Pacers can keep getting away with this? Well, if the Knicks finally getting burned by the crazy-comeback hand that has fed them so well thus far is any indication, you would think that a dark day is coming for Indiana, too. The Knicks just have to hope it comes soon.