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The Knicks made the wrong kind of history in the first quarter on Saturday.

The New York Knicks entered Game 5 one win away from an NBA championship but instead opened with one of the most offensively challenged quarters in modern Finals history, scoring just 13 points against the San Antonio Spurs.

New York’s 13-point first quarter immediately put the performance in rare historical territory, placing the Knicks alongside some of the lowest-scoring opening periods the NBA Finals has seen since the shot clock was introduced in the 1954-1955 season.

San Antonio led 23-13 after one quarter, a 10-point edge built almost entirely on New York’s offensive futility. The Knicks shot 6-of-28 from the field in the period — 21.4% — compounding a stretch of cold shooting with turnovers that handed the Spurs easy buckets in transition.

For context on how rare that kind of output is, modern NBA Finals first quarters routinely land in the mid-20s to low 30s per team. A 13-point opening quarter in the current era is not a bad night. It’s a historical catastrophe.

Knicks’ First Quarter Among Worst Ever

The Golden State Warriors scored 11 in the opening frame of Game 6 in the 2016 Finals to set the shot-clock era futility record.

The Milwaukee Bucks in Game 3 of the 1974 NBA Finals scored 13 against the Boston Celtics, and the Fort Wayne Pistons tallied just 13 in Game 2 of the 1955 Finals against the Syracuse Nationals.

The lowest documented first-quarter total in NBA Finals history belongs to the Minneapolis Lakers, who scored 10 points in a 1954 game against the Syracuse Nationals — a pre-shot-clock era contest played at a fundamentally different pace.

The record for the lowest-scoring single quarter in NBA Finals history — any quarter — is 7 points, put up by the Dallas Mavericks in a fourth quarter against the Miami Heat. That Game 5 number from New York isn’t that extreme. But it’s close enough to belong in the same conversation.

What makes Saturday’s first quarter particularly striking is the moment. These are not two exhausted teams grinding through a mid-January back-to-back. The Knicks came into Game 5 with a chance to close out their first NBA championship since 1973, against a San Antonio team fighting for its life since falling behind 3-1.

Knicks’ Game 4 Comeback Looms

This series has already established that the Knicks are not a team that folds under a deficit. In Game 4, New York erased a 29-point hole — one of the largest comebacks in NBA Finals history — to extend their series lead to 3-1. That performance became an instant part of the franchise’s postseason legend.

Whether Game 5 produced a similar recovery from the 10-point first-quarter hole depends on what followed Saturday’s opening frame. But the 13-point quarter itself is already in the books, a number that will show up in Finals record searches for years, regardless of how the rest of the night played out.

The Spurs, for their part, played exactly the kind of desperate, suffocating defense a 3-1 deficit demands. San Antonio’s 23 first-quarter points reflected a team refusing to let the Knicks celebrate without a fight.