San Antonio’s stunning meltdown Wednesday night in New York — blowing a 29-point second-half lead to lose Game 4 of the NBA Finals on a buzzer tip-in by OG Anunoby — isn’t just a bad loss. It’s the biggest blown lead in Finals history, surpassing the Lakers’ 24-point collapse in Game 4 of the 2008 Finals.
And it’s a reservation in the Hall of Infamy, alongside the greatest choke jobs in professional sports history. The Knicks, who haven’t won a title since 1970, now lead 3-1. Game 5 is Saturday.
Here’s the company San Antonio just joined:
- 1993 Houston Oilers: Leading 35-3 in the third quarter of an AFC Wild Card game — now simply known as “The Comeback” — the Oilers watched backup quarterback Frank Reich lead the Buffalo Bills to a 41-38 overtime win, delivering one of the most stunning collapses in NFL playoff history. Houston had quickly built a 28-3 halftime lead with the help of four Warren Moon touchdown passes.
- 2004 New York Yankees: The only team in MLB history to blow a 3-0 series lead — and they did it against their archrival, the Boston Red Sox, in the ALCS. Mariano Rivera blew saves in both Games 4 and 5. Boston went on to sweep the Cardinals and end an 86-year championship drought.
- 2016 Golden State Warriors: The Warriors became the first team ever to blow a 3-1 lead in an NBA Finals, surrendering three straight to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers — after a record 73-win regular season.
- 2017 Atlanta Falcons: Leading 28-3 in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, the Falcons watched Tom Brady engineer a stunning comeback. New England scored 31 unanswered points to win 34-28 in overtime — the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history.
- 1996 Greg Norman: The Australian golfer entered the final round of the Masters with a six-shot lead, shot a 78, and lost to Nick Faldo by five strokes — the seventh time in eight majors he failed to hold a final-round lead.
For the record, the biggest single-game blown leads in the two highest-scoring major sports — where the numbers tell the most brutal story. Baseball and hockey, by nature of their lower scoring, don’t lend themselves to the same kind of quantification:
- NBA: The biggest blown lead in NBA regular-season history belongs to the 1996-97 Denver Nuggets, who surrendered a 36-point lead to the Utah Jazz — trailing 70-34 at halftime before losing 107-103. In the playoffs, the record is 31 points, set when the Los Angeles Clippers overcame a Golden State Warriors lead in the 2019 first round.
- NFL: The biggest blown lead in NFL history belongs to the Indianapolis Colts, who squandered a 33-point halftime lead to the Minnesota Vikings in a December 2022 regular-season game. In the postseason, that record is the Oilers collapse detailed above.
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