OG Anunoby's outlier shooting is reshaping the NBA Finals math

Jalen Brunson scored 45 points in Game 5 at the Garden, 29 of them after halftime, and lifted the Bill Russell Trophy as the 2026 NBA Finals MVP after the New York Knicks closed out the series in five games on the night of 14 June 2026. Sitting beside him in the trophy photograph was OG Anunoby, the 23rd pick of the 2017 draft out of Indiana, now a two-time champion in his ninth pro season, and the statistical footnote that quietly bent the series on its axis.

The official Finals line tells the obvious story: Brunson averaged 32.6 points on 42.1 percent shooting from the floor and 38.9 percent from three, the fifth-highest scoring average ever recorded by a player making his first Finals appearance. He also pulled off a season-long hat trick no one in league history has matched, taking Emirates NBA Cup MVP, Eastern Conference Finals MVP, and Finals MVP in the same campaign. But on a Knicks roster built around a heliocentric point guard, the swing variable was a 6-foot-7 forward who does not need the ball to swing a championship.

The shot chart that didn't show up

Anunoby's Finals shooting ran hot against the expectation models in a way that small samples usually do not survive. Per the league's own Inside the Game feed, circulated by the NBA Live channel on 12 June, the forward posted a positive cumulative delta against expected effective field goal percentage across the series, the kind of figure that the analytics community treats with both respect and suspicion. Respect, because volume from the corners is the single most predictive shot in basketball and he took them. Suspicion, because five games is the smallest sample a player can have on this stage, and outlier series have a habit of regressing the moment the rotation tightens.

What the chart cannot capture is the defensive gravity he created. Anunoby's primary assignment for the bulk of the series was containing the Spurs' lead initiator, freeing Brunson to operate as a scorer rather than a chaser. New York's defensive rating in his minutes on the floor, the team's switching architecture, and the Spurs' reliance on pull-up jump shots in the half court all point in the same direction: a defender who suppressed the opponent's preferred actions without needing to gamble for steals. The shooting was the headline. The coverage was the substrate.

Why the math shifted

The Spurs came into the series as the betting favourite in many futures markets, with a path that ran through a young core and a half-court offence built on pace and space. New York's path required two things: Brunson playing at an MVP ceiling, and at least one secondary piece outperforming his season-long splits by enough to swing the half-court margin. Anunoby's outlier shooting did the second job. When a role player posts a meaningful positive delta against expected eFG in a short series, every Spurs possession that ended in a make on the other end got harder to absorb, because the Knicks no longer needed to grind out a Brunson iso to keep pace.

The structural effect is straightforward. Championship efficiency in the modern NBA clusters in a narrow band; teams win or lose on which rotation pieces overperform their baseline by a few points per game. Anunoby gave New York three to four points above expectation from the high-value zones across five games. That is the difference between a five-game closeout and a series that returns to San Antonio tied 2-2.

The Spurs' window, still open

San Antonio exits the Finals with the rarer consolation. Most runners-up leave the stage asking whether the window is closing. The Spurs leave it asking when it opens next. Their core is young, their offensive engine proved it could score against a top-five defence, and the Finals experience itself is the kind of accelerant that tends to show up in second-year leaps. ESPN's early 2027 odds, posted the morning after the clincher, still list them among the favourites. The loss was real. The arc was not broken.

For New York, the harder question is sustainability. Brunson's usage will not come down. Anunoby's outlier shooting almost certainly will. The Knicks' margin between a back-to-back contender and a one-title wonder sits inside the answer to a single question: how much of what Anunoby did in five games was repeatable, and how much was variance dressed in a championship t-shirt.

The Finals as a small-sample sport

The Knicks' first title in 53 years was decided, as most titles are, on the smallest of samples. Five games. A handful of possessions per game decided by a role player whose shot-making fell on the right side of the distribution. Brunson's trophy is the headline. Anunoby's shot chart is the footnote. Both will be studied for years, the first because it was inevitable, the second because it was not.

What to watch now is the 2027 futures board. The Spurs' price will compress as the public remembers the closeness of the series. The Knicks' price will reflect a championship tax. Anunoby's projection, somewhere between the two, is the most interesting line on the board: priced like a role player, with a Finals résumé that no longer fits the bracket.

Sources

• https://t.me/s/NBALive, NBA Live channel, 12–14 June 2026
• https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45120000/nba-futures-runners-up-one-year-champions-next-early-look-odds-2027-nba-finals, ESPN, "NBA futures: Runners-up one year, champions the next?", 14 June 2026
• https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45118000/everything-we-learned-on-off-court-2026-nba-finals, ESPN, "Everything we learned on and off the court in the 2026 NBA Finals", 14 June 2026
• https://www.sport.es/en/basketball/nba/knicks-in-five-and-the-nba-is-alive-new-yorks-era-defining-title-is-a-win-for-the-believers/, SPORT, "Knicks in five and the NBA is alive", 14 June 2026

Desk note: Monexus is leaning on the league's own Inside the Game feed, as circulated by the NBA Live Telegram channel on 12 June 2026, rather than on season-long splits, because the Finals sample is the relevant population for the claim being made. The figure is reported with its statistical caveats intact: a cumulative positive delta against expected effective field goal percentage over a small sample, on the largest stage in the sport.