TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — Before the New York Knicks had even wiped out the Atlanta Hawks, their coach was discussing lessons learned.
The Knicks had switched up their offense, and thus their identity, after falling down two games to one earlier in the series. Now, they were just one win away from moving on to the second round. In the process, they found out a new way to maximize themselves. Head coach Mike Brown called their reinvention “holistic.”
The team had won an impressive 53 games during the regular season, but did not always operate like a juggernaut. On one night, the Knicks would destruct an elite squad. On the next, they would obstruct themselves. Over the final three Hawks games, they had gotten out of their own way. The offensive style they deployed early in the season, the strategy that appeared messy enough for the Knicks to veer in another direction by the winter, made a grand return, and it was crisper than ever. Each screen had purpose; each cut was sharp.
The Knicks took a 3-2 series lead. In the process, they had evolved. And, as Brown stated 90 minutes before his team would turn the Hawks to dust, external circumstances spurred their improvement.
Quin Snyder’s coaching staff in Atlanta, Brown said, had made the Knicks better, cornered them into a situation that presented them only two choices: Mature or get lost.
The first option seemed more enticing. During the first three games against Atlanta, which included two Knicks losses, Brown had leaned on funky lineup combinations. Mikal Bridges had floated into oblivion. Karl-Anthony Towns hadn’t dominated with the volume he was capable of against a smaller Hawks roster.
By Games 4, 5 and 6, when the Knicks pulverized the Hawks three consecutive times, earning each victory with an even more throttling punch, a previous, yet unfamiliar offense had emerged. The Knicks were running off-ball actions they tried earlier in the season. But back in November, they didn’t deploy them nearly as effectively. They were placing Towns in the high post, funneling the attack through him and allowing an All-Star who spent most of this season feeling “uncomfortable” in his role, to use his terminology, to find the coziest spots on the court.
Towns churned out two triple-doubles over the final three games of the series. The Knicks won Game 4 by 16, then Game 5 by 29 and then a historic Game 6 by 51. This was not the group that had crumbled in Games 2 and 3. It was something new.
“I gotta give Atlanta credit and Quinn Snyder,” Brown said. “They forced us to put our thinking caps on, and they forced us to play different, find ways to make the game easier for our players while putting them in their strengths, while trying not to hinder them. So, we changed what we’d done offensively, but again, it was because we were pushed to do it.”
The comments sounded familiar, not because Brown had repeated them but because they echoed a sentiment from last season’s Knicks, the ones who took the franchise to its first Eastern Conference finals appearance in 25 years. Despite 51 regular-season wins, that group was also thought of as inconsistent (and deservedly so) heading into the playoffs. It was a combined 0-10 against the teams with the NBA’s three best records: the Oklahoma City Thunder, Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers. It was flawed, easily exposed on defense with Towns and Jalen Brunson sharing the floor, and too vulnerable on offense.
Worries, at least on the outside, didn’t dissipate after a first-round playoff victory over the 44-win Detroit Pistons, a young collection of scrappers who made the series too close for comfort, mostly because of their physicality. But a similar thought process to Brown’s current one bubbled inside the Knicks. The Pistons had jabbed a fist to the Knicks’ grills, and with two missing teeth, a bloody tongue and a chipped cheekbone, the Knicks won the fight anyway. They believed.
They believed when then-head coach Tom Thibodeau revamped their defensive schemes in the next round against the defending champion Celtics, a similar shift to Brown’s offensive demands against Atlanta. They believed when they fell 20 points behind during Game 1 in Boston, then won anyway. They believed when they plummeted to the same deficit in Game 2, only to speed to another win.
Moments after going up 2-0, after Bridges grabbed the basketball away from Celtics star Jayson Tatum, his second consecutive buzzer-beating, game-saving takeaway, Bridges’ good friend and teammate, Cameron Payne, sat at his locker. Payne, like the rest of the Knicks, appeared more exhausted than rejuvenated. Roaring back from massive deficits night after night inflicts a mental strain. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his head nearly between his legs, and with a hint of glee and a sprinkle of relief in his tone, blurted the line that exemplified what the Knicks had just survived.
“Thank God for Detroit,” he said.
The Pistons had changed the DNA of the Knicks, who eventually upset the Celtics. On Monday, when New York begins the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Philadelphia 76ers, this year’s squad could show it took a similar lesson from yet another six-game, first-round grind.
“When you go through a playoff series and you find a way to win, you’re moving on, you see where you’re pushed. You see where you have to get better. You build off that,” Brunson said. “I think we found a way to build off the two losses that we had. Even going back to Game 1 (of the Hawks series), the way we finished that fourth quarter was how we lost Game 2. When you lose, it’s all about how you evolve and adjust to get better.”
The Knicks will face a different sort of pressure this May than they did when they traveled to Boston last spring. Back then, at least in the minds of everyone else, they were supposed to lose. The Celtics owned the better regular-season record and were favorites to come out of the East for a third time in four years. New York won anyway.
This time, Boston took the upset a round earlier, coughing up a 3-1 series lead to the seventh-seeded Philadelphia 76ers in Round 1. The postseason meetup that most basketball fans considered inevitable, a rematch of last season’s second-round barnburner, never materialized.
New York is now the favorite to move on to the conference finals and possibly the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years. The Knicks own home-court advantage. They are fully healthy. The 76ers, injury history and all, must accommodate their bodies to a format that now produces games every other day, which won’t be cushy for former MVP Joel Embiid or for a team that leaned on a tight six-man rotation in its closeout victory Saturday over the Celtics.
But it’s not like the Sixers present a cakewalk. Soon-to-be All-NBA point guard Tyrese Maxey is a destroyer of men, as the Knicks learned firsthand during a 2024 playoff series against Philadelphia. Maxey is only better now, and New York still employs no ideal defender for him. Paul George is grooving. Embiid hobbles each play but still finishes with 30-something points whenever he pleases.
The inconsistent version of the Knicks, the one that played with its food against bottom-feeders like the Brooklyn Nets and Utah Jazz during the regular season and played up to its competition only when it saw fit, may not beat Philadelphia. But the evolved rendition of this team, the one that readjusted its identity, that changed its schemes, that ran its actions to near perfection against the Hawks, might just continue to play into the end of May. And — who knows? — maybe even later than that.
