NEW YORK — What De’Aaron Fox thought versus what De’Aaron Fox did were two very different things. And the disastrous disconnect between them, make no mistake, might have cost the San Antonio Spurs a title.
In his mind, as the veteran Spurs guard explained after the worst collapse in NBA Finals history against the New York Knicks, a 107-106 loss in Wednesday’s Game 4, he would turn on the afterburners for which he has long been known and leave the Knicks’ OG Anunoby in his wake. The Spurs guard’s nickname is “Swipa,” after all, a hat-tip to the elite speed that has always been his greatest superpower.
Surely, then, he could chase down the ball that he’d tipped to himself and finish the break as if he were in the pregame layup line while putting the Spurs up three with 11 seconds to go. Even with the ailments that slowed him last month, including a high ankle sprain that he reinjured in the Western Conference finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Fox was sure that his wheels would still work.
“I just thought I’d be able to outrun him,” he said. “That’s it.”
He thought wrong.
The remarkable part, given the plot twist at the end of the game’s second-biggest play, is that Anunoby was running the wrong way when it began. The 6-foot-7, 240-pound wing was chasing the long rebound off a Jalen Brunson missed 3, only to see Fox poke the ball right past him and head the other way. That he found a way to catch up, after getting caught flat-footed and facing the wrong direction, shocked everyone in the building.
No one more so than Fox himself.
Fox, who lost some speed at the start of his sprint when Anunoby bumped him as he ran by, saw Anunoby by the time they reached the paint and still decided to go ahead with the plan. It backfired dramatically, with Anunoby swatting the layup and the greater basketball world immediately wondering why Fox instead didn’t dribble the ball out to kill time while waiting for the foul (and subsequent free throws).
Fox faced the media music afterward, answering every question that came his way and insisting that these Spurs can still somehow come back from this 3-1 series deficit. But his explanation, it’s safe to say, will do little to dissuade those who disagreed with his choice.
“Try to get a layup, get up three and force them to need a 3,” Fox said when asked about why he made the choice. “OG made a good block.”
A 48-minute game never comes down to one play. As coaches so often say, the ones on the front end matter just as much as the ones at the back.
Yet while plays like this one will be forever remembered because of the timing and stakes, there are always others — like Victor Wembanyama’s two missed free throws with 1 minute, 47 seconds left and the Spurs up one — that don’t draw the same scrutiny or spotlight despite factoring into the result.
Not that Wemby doesn’t know this awful feeling. It was his late-game blunder in the Spurs’ Game 2 loss — a pass to the back of Stephon Castle’s head — that was widely deemed the reason the Spurs trailed 2-0. You can’t stack up these kinds of basketball sins, blowing games that are right there for the taking, and still expect to walk away with the hardware.
There will be no forgetting this one for Fox, just as there wasn’t for Wemby. Not unless these Spurs join the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers as the only other team in league history to recover from a 3-1 deficit in the finals (15 teams have done it in the playoffs). And to make matters worse, this wasn’t the only tough moment for the 28-year-old All-Star as the Knicks roared back in the second half.
Not only did Fox have a rough shooting night, missing 10 of 16 from the field (including 4 of 5 shots in the fourth quarter), but all four of his turnovers came in the final 17 minutes of the game.
A mid-third-quarter bounce pass off a Wembanyama screen in which the big man popped when Fox expected him to roll. The Spurs led by 22 at that point.
The left-to-right pass near midcourt that sailed between Wembanyama and Castle, who, yet again, was not looking at the ballhandler in transition. The lead was down to 18.
The dribble off his foot with 33 seconds left in the third, when he kicked it into the stands as the Knicks’ momentum grew. The lead was 15.
The jump-pass to no one above the 3-point line with 2:07 left in the fourth. Wembanyama rolled on the screen when it appeared Fox expected him to pop, and Anunoby got his hand on the pass that landed in space. The Knicks’ Josh Hart was off and running the other way, only to blow the layup. The lead was just one.
The final exclamation point came at the end, when Anunoby placed himself in Knicks lore with the soaring tip-in of another Brunson missed 3. It was fitting, in a brutal sort of way, that the only reason he had an open lane to accelerate and launch was because Fox left him to double-team Brunson on the right wing in those final seconds.
The chosen plan led to pain, yet again, and the Spurs now find themselves on the edge of much offseason regret.
“We’ve got to try to put it behind us,” Fox said. “Get back to the things that we’ve done well in these games. … We have to figure out a way to hold the lead. We’ve been able to build double-digit leads in all four of these games, and we’ve got to figure out a way to sustain that.
“It obviously looks like a steep hill, but this is something that’s happened before. … We feel like we have a team that is able to come back from this, but we have to take this one game at a time.”