Top 10 Plays of the 2025-26 NBA Season: OG Anunoby's Finals Tip-In Crowns the Countdown

The new season tips off tomorrow night, and the Knicks will raise a banner at Madison Square Garden that New York waited 53 years to see. Before it goes up, one last look back. This is Previously’s countdown of the ten plays that defined the 2025–26 NBA season — regular season and playoffs, dunks and daggers — built from the season’s official retrospectives and the games nobody has stopped talking about since.

The rules were simple: the play had to be verified, and it had to matter — to a game, to a season, or to a city’s memory. Five of these are game-winners. Five are dunks. And the last one finished the greatest comeback the NBA Finals have ever seen.

No. 10 — Brandon Miller turns a steal into a statement

Bucks 123, Hornets 113 — December 29, 2025, Charlotte. Milwaukee won the game, and Brandon Miller still owned the highlight. Midway through the fourth quarter, Miller jumped a Kyle Kuzma pass, took off the other way with Kuzma chasing him down, and rose straight through the contest at the rim — dunk, foul, and-one. It was the loudest moment of a season-high 31-point night, and it landed at No. 4 on NBC Sports’ ranking of the season’s best dunks. Read the pass, beat everybody down the floor, finish through the man who threw it: that is the whole playbook in one break.

No. 9 — Shaedon Sharpe climbs over Russell Westbrook

Trail Blazers 98, Kings 93 — December 20, 2025, Sacramento. Westbrook did everything a veteran is taught to do. He rotated over from the corner, squared up and planted his feet to take the charge on Shaedon Sharpe’s fourth-quarter drive. Then Sharpe left the floor — all 47 inches of measured vertical — and the charge became a poster. Westbrook bailed at the last instant, Sharpe finished over the top of him anyway, and Portland closed out a 98–93 win behind Sharpe’s 23 points. Some plays win games. This one just wins arguments.

No. 8 — Cam Whitmore puts Jalen Duren on a poster

Pistons 137, Wizards 135 (OT) — November 10, 2025, Detroit. Yes, Whitmore was a Washington Wizard then — he has since been traded to Cleveland — which makes this one easy to misremember. In the fourth quarter of a game Washington nearly stole in Detroit, Whitmore got past Ausar Thompson, one of the league’s best young perimeter defenders, and finished a two-handed dunk directly over Jalen Duren, the Pistons’ rim protector. Detroit survived in overtime, but the dunk survived longer: NBC Sports ranked it the No. 2 dunk of the entire season.

No. 7 — Rui Hachimura, LeBron’s pass, and the end of a 1,297-game streak

Lakers 123, Raptors 120 — December 4, 2025, Toronto. The buzzer-beater is only half of this story. Tied at 120 in the final seconds, Austin Reaves — on his way to 44 points — got blitzed, and the ball swung to LeBron James at the top of the key. James had a look at the basket and a clearer one at history: two more points would extend his NBA-record streak of 1,297 consecutive games scoring in double figures. Instead he whipped the pass to Rui Hachimura in the corner, and Hachimura buried the three at the buzzer. James finished with eight points and 11 assists, the streak over because he made the right play. He had told Hachimura earlier in the game: I got you. It’s coming to you.

No. 6 — Austin Reaves floats the Lakers home in Minnesota

Lakers 116, Timberwolves 115 — October 29, 2025, Minneapolis. No Luka Dončić. No LeBron James. A 20-point lead gone, and Julius Randle’s basket putting Minnesota up 115–114 with 10.2 seconds left. Austin Reaves took the inbounds with 6.6 seconds to play, split a double team of Jaden McDaniels and Rudy Gobert at the top of the floor, and floated a 12-footer that dropped at the buzzer. Reaves finished with 28 points and 16 assists in a game the Lakers had no business winning, and NBC Sports ranked the shot the No. 4 game-winner of the season.

No. 5 — Wembanyama throws it off the glass, to himself

Warriors 109, Spurs 108 — November 14, 2025, San Antonio (NBA Cup). The Spurs lost this game by a point and won the internet anyway. Victor Wembanyama pump-faked just inside the arc, and instead of shooting, tossed the ball off the backboard, caught his own pass in the air and dunked it — a self alley-oop from a 7-foot-4 Defensive Player of the Year. Stephen Curry, collecting the inbounds pass, could only smile. Wembanyama finished with 26 points, 12 rebounds and three blocks, and produced the season’s most imitated playground move: every tall kid in America has tried it since.

No. 4 — Kevin Durant breaks Phoenix’s heart, one night after Booker

Rockets 100, Suns 97 — January 5, 2026, Houston. Twenty-four hours after Devin Booker’s winner against Oklahoma City (more on that shortly), Kevin Durant got an ending of his own — against the franchise he used to play for. Tied at 97, Booker missed a fadeaway, a shot-clock violation handed Houston the ball, and Durant rose over Royce O’Neale for a 27-foot three with 1.1 seconds left. He finished with 26 points and 10 rebounds, and afterward he did not hide the edge, saying he felt he had been scapegoated during his time in Phoenix. NBC Sports ranked it the No. 2 game-winner of the season. As a piece of theatre — the back-to-back nights, the former team, the quote on the way out — nothing in the regular season touched it.

No. 3 — Anthony Black dunks on four Grizzlies at once, in Berlin

Magic 118, Grizzlies 111 — January 15, 2026, Berlin. The NBA staged a regular-season game in Germany for the first time, and Anthony Black gave Berlin the season’s signature dunk. Orlando had trailed by 20. Tied at 107 late in the fourth, Paolo Banchero forced a turnover from Jaren Jackson Jr., and Black took the break the other way — straight into four converging Memphis defenders, every one of whom ended up in the photograph. The dunk put Orlando up 109–107 with 2:24 left, Black finished with 21 points, and the league said the play became the most-viewed highlight of the entire season, drawing 85 million views. The NBA’s own social team later named it the Dunk of the Year.

No. 2 — Devin Booker silences the Thunder

Suns 108, Thunder 105 — January 4, 2026, Phoenix. Less than a month earlier, Oklahoma City had beaten Phoenix by 49 points in the NBA Cup quarterfinals. This time the Suns climbed out of an 18-point hole, and when Jalen Williams tied the game at 105 with 8.2 seconds left, the ball went to Devin Booker — who had not made a single three-pointer all night. Booker stepped back over Alex Caruso, with Lu Dort arriving a half-step late, and buried it with 0.7 seconds remaining. He finished with 24 points, nine assists and six rebounds; his first made three of the night was the winner. Deadspin’s national roundup led with the shot the next morning, and NBC Sports ranked it the best game-winner of the regular season. It sits second on this list only because of what happened in June.

No. 1 — The tip-in: OG Anunoby finishes the greatest comeback in Finals history

Knicks 107, Spurs 106 — NBA Finals Game 4, June 10, 2026, Madison Square Garden. Game 4 was over. San Antonio led 76–49 at halftime, pushed the lead to 29, and made an NBA Finals-record 14 three-pointers in the first half alone, as ClutchPoints noted in its account of the night. The Knicks were still down 20 with 9:33 left in the fourth quarter. In the play-by-play era, no team had ever erased a deficit that big in the fourth quarter of a Finals game — 0-for-45 before this night. This became the first.

Knicks coach Mike Brown had challenged Anunoby at shootaround that morning: as big, as strong and as athletic as he is, Brown told him, he had to be a monster on the offensive glass. Anunoby spent the night proving the point — 33 points on 10-of-15 shooting, 7-of-9 from three — and then he saved the game twice in eleven seconds. With San Antonio up 106–105 and 11.1 seconds left, De’Aaron Fox drove for a layup instead of draining the clock, and Anunoby chased him down and blocked it, as NBC Sports described in its live coverage. Timeout, Knicks ball, 5.7 seconds.

Anunoby inbounded to Jalen Brunson, who rose over Wembanyama for a deep three that would have won it. It missed. But the inbounder was the one man San Antonio never picked up — The Daily Hoosier pointed out that Anunoby simply followed his own pass straight to the rim — and he tipped Brunson’s miss home with 1.2 seconds left. Knicks 107, Spurs 106: the largest comeback in Finals history, passing the 24-point record Boston set against the Lakers in 2008. Brunson finished with 36 points. Three nights later in San Antonio, his 45 points closed the series 4–1, and the Knicks had their first championship since 1973. There were prettier plays this season. There was no bigger one.

Tomorrow night, it all starts again: Philadelphia at the Garden for the banner raising, and Oklahoma City at San Antonio — a rematch of the seven-game Western Conference finals the Spurs won in the spring. The ten plays above are the standard now. Somewhere, in some arena, somebody is already plotting to top them.

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