When it was over on Friday night, and the Knicks had put themselves within one win of a sweep against the 76ers and a win away from going back to the Eastern Conference finals, Mike Brown described the beginning of Game 3 thusly:
“They jumped out and kind of punched us in the mouth.”
It is what the Knicks have mostly done, first against the Hawks after falling behind two games to one and now against the 76ers. When they haven’t hit the other team early they have hit it late, not only punching the other guys in the mouth but nearly through the ropes after their season was very much on the brink and on the line against Atlanta. It is why, if they do put the 76ers away on Sunday afternoon, they will have done something no Knicks team, not even in the glory years, ever did, which is win seven playoff games in a row.
The other time they won six in a row was in 1999, when they made their last trip to the NBA Finals. That was part of some magical run that year, when they came from being a No. 8 seed to make the Finals, a run that began with Allan Houston making that runner on another playoff Sunday afternoon, in old Miami Arena, to beat the No. 1 Heat.
They finished the Heat that day, swept the Hawks in the second round, didn’t lose again until Game 2 against the Pacers. Now, on a similar roll, they have set themselves up to roll a historic seven, at least for this franchise. And the reality of where they are, even if it looks as if they are going against more B-listers in the Sixers, is that they are a couple of last-second jumpers from CJ McCollum away from having run the table so far. As a legendary Sixer named Moses Malone once said, these Knicks are that close to having gone fo’ and fo.’
“A team effort,” Jalen Brunson said after putting 33 more points on Philly and adding nine assists.
It was all of that, even without OG Anunoby, who’d been averaging 21 points a game in the playoffs. It has been all of that since April 23, when McCollum did it to them again, down in Atlanta that time, and the Knicks were staring at a 1-3 hole if they didn’t win Game 4. But they won Game 4 by 16 points and Game 5 by 29 points and then all they did in a closeout game at Madison Square Garden was beat the Hawks by 51 points that somehow seemed like even more at the end.
So the average margin of victory has been right around 26 points per game. Of course it’s been against a Hawks team whose best players Knick fans couldn’t have named going into that series, and against a team from Philly — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — with Joel Embiid hobbled again. But right now with the Knicks, with the No. 1 Pistons likely waiting for them in the conference finals, it isn’t as much about who they’ve played, it’s how they’ve played since Game 3 against the Hawks, when Brunson only had two baskets in the fourth quarter (both on drives to the basket), missed a big shot with 16 seconds left, finally committed a killer turnover after that.
Brown joked on Friday night about how Brunson, who seemed to have made every big shot he looked at down the stretch, was his “blanket,” meaning security blanket. At the end of the Game 3 against the Hawks that seemed to have put the Knicks into a world of trouble, he looked more like a wet blanket, even scoring 26 points. It was OG who carried the Knicks offense that night, finishing with 29. It wasn’t enough before McCollumn had a second Reggie/Haliburton moment in three games.
It was the last time the Knicks lost. Seventeen days ago. This is the way the Knicks really did look in ’99, before they ran into the Spurs in the Finals. This is the way they looked two years before that, what I still believe was the most complete Knicks team of the ’90s and one that could have and would have won it all if Charlie Ward and P.J. Brown hadn’t gotten into that fight in Miami. We all know what happened after that. When they got back to the Garden for Game 6, what should have been a closeout game, Patrick Ewing was one of the Knicks who’d been suspended because of the aftermath of that fight. They didn’t close out the Heat, lost on the road in Game 7, and just like that the season was gone for Jeff Van Gundy’s team.
Now the 2026 Knicks have shown a different kind of fight, at both ends of the court, the best kind, every single night. When they didn’t have another blowout win at the Garden the other night, they grinded their way to a 2-0 edge in the series. They came back on Friday night after the 76ers led by as many as 12 points in the first quarter. At the end, Brunson did Brunson things and now the Knicks are on the threshold of making it four straight against the 76ers and seven straight in all and going back to the conference finals.
We’ve seen what we’ve seen from Victor Wembanyama in the Western Conference, and from the defending champ Thunder, led by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. But the Thunder especially haven’t looked any better than the Knicks have looked across all the games of this winning streak. Gilgeous-Alexander is once again playing like the MVP for the league that he was a year ago and might be again. He came into the weekend averaging 29 points per game for these playoffs. Jalen Brunson goes into Game 4 on Sunday averaging 28. He is a different kind of player than the Thunder star. It doesn’t matter. He is the Knicks’ SGA. The only player averaging more points than either one of them is the Pistons’ Cade Cunningham.
If Anunoby can get back to full strength, there is no reason to think the Knicks can’t continue to play this way, and that means playing like the most complete team in the Eastern Conference. A lot has broken right for them, for sure. The Celtics blew that lead against the 76ers and then Jayson Tatum had to sit out Game 7 and so there would be no second-round rematch with the Celtics.
So here the Knicks are, on this kind of heater, looking to finish what is the job at hand and finish off the 76ers. This is the team they thought they could be, the team that James Dolan and Leon Rose thought they should be even after firing Tom Thibodeau, who took them this far last spring. The player Mikal Bridges has been since getting shutout in Game 3 against the Hawks, that’s exactly the player for whom Rose traded all those draft picks. Karl-Anthony Towns has generally played his best all-around ball as a Knick. OG has looked like their DeBusschere when he’s had his legs underneath him. And Brunson is Brunson, the best guard they’ve had since Clyde.
Here they are. We talk a lot about the good old days with the Knicks. The last two-and-a-half weeks, the good old days have been now.
JUDGE A BARGAIN FOR YANKS, GREEN NO MATCH FOR BARKLEY & SHAI IS A STAR …
Here’s a big, complicated, seamhead, analytics question for everybody:
Are the Yankees this good or is the rest of the American League that bad?
By the way, on the subject of the Yankees, you know what Aaron Judge is?
A bargain, is what he is.
Even at those prices.
Say it again:
Max Fried, so far and so good, goes in with the best free agent acquisitions for starting pitchers in Yankee history, despite getting nicked to death by the Brewers on Friday night.
Even with that loss on Friday, his record with them still stands at 23-7.
Jaxson Dart — he’s not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan, right?
Asking for Giants fans.
All Giants fans.
It is starting to appear as if it would take some kind of tranquilizer dart to stop Jaylen Brown from talking.
And maybe not even that.
Apart from drafting Cooper Flagg, the Dallas Mavericks have done hardly anything right lately.
But hiring Masai Ujiri to run the basketball operation down there is like getting themselves another No. 1 pick, just for their front office.
You wouldn’t take advice from Sean Duffy, the clown serving as Transportation Secretary, on which exit to take.
The next time Draymond Green — who wasn’t half the basketball player that Charles Barkley was — smart-mouths Barkley on television, Sir Charles should remind everybody of the time Green was enough of a chucklehead to cost the Warriors one more title.
They were ahead of the Cavs three games to one in the 2016 NBA Finals.
Going home to close things out in Game 5.
Except Green, knowing that one more technical foul would get him suspended, got one in Game 4.
Sat out Game 5.
Cavs won on the road.
The rest, as they say, is history.
It is always worth remembering that it isn’t Fed or Rafa or Novak Djokovic who won more men’s tennis tournaments than anybody in history, it was Jimmy Connors with 109.
No one will ever be Michael Jordan.
But, as my friend Bob Ryan would say, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sure is a reminds-me-of.
Skip Bayless was back on ESPN after 10 years still screaming for LeBron to get off his lawn.
It was like what I imagine a Beach Boys concert is these days.
Sometimes you get the idea that Mike Vrabel is one more bad news cycle away from stepping away from the Patriots.
