The Knicks, barring cosmic intervention, are headed to the NBA Finals. All that is left to learn in this series is whether or not New York will let Cleveland have a game. The 121–108 scoreline from Game 3 pretty badly misrepresents the gap between the East’s last remaining contenders. The Cavs appear physically spent and mentally boomed. The Knicks, meanwhile, haven’t lost in a month, and Saturday night they became just the 10th team in NBA history to win at least 10 consecutive games in the same postseason. Personally, I prefer a quick clean kill to a polite delay, and not only so that I can be spared any more of the sad-sack lower seed. The Western Conference will be sending an ascending juggernaut to the Finals no matter what, so it would be cool if the East’s representative is maximally tuned, primed, and in all other ways made ready for the collision.
The Cavs, poor helpless clods, deserve precisely the sort of mercy that is traditionally bestowed on the far side of a shed. They are nowhere close to the Knicks. New York spent the closing stretch of Game 1 picking on James Harden, pulling him out and abusing his defensive vulnerabilities. Cleveland’s answer in Game 2 was to warp their own defense with traps and double-teams, leading to a career night for Josh Hart and another, far more convincing, Knicks win. If Cleveland had a counter dialed up for Saturday, it was hard to pick out its contours. The Knicks were in a sweet offensive rhythm right from the opening tip, pouring in 37 first-quarter points on absurd 71-percent shooting. New York opened the game with a lightning-quick 9–1 run, and from that point until about the final 150 seconds of the fourth quarter, it felt like Cleveland’s entire basketball project had been whittled down to the struggle to merely catch their breath.
Cleveland’s guards simply cannot defend. There was a moment in the second quarter, when the Cavs had made a valiant push to draw even on the scoreboard, where Brunson came up with a loose ball deep in the backcourt and tore ass the other way, leaving Cleveland’s bigs in his dust. He also outran teammates Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges, setting up a three-on-three in transition. OG Anunoby fanned out to the right wing, drawing away Cleveland’s Dean Wade; Hart jogged along the left sideline, distracting Max Strus. Poor lead-footed Harden thus became Cleveland’s last defender. You could see Brunson and Harden realize this at about the same moment: Harden began backpedaling in what for an out-of-shape blogger counts as earnest. Brunson centered his reticle on Harden’s chest and hit the afterburners. In a very technical sense Brunson’s layup was “contested,” but he has almost certainly been more bothered in his life by a cloud of aftershave. It was the first blow of an eventual 10–1 run, dialed up as if on demand for instances of the home team showing the merest hint of a pulse.
It’s not just Harden, although I would entertain the argument that the rest of Cleveland’s defensive struggles originate with his general hopelessness as a perimeter stopper. Mitchell seemed dazed and discouraged from about the game’s third minute Saturday night. Their personnel does not get any more stout from there. Sam Merrill and Dennis Schröder are built like fawns and cannot make up for it with determination. Strus showed spirit, but mostly that took the form of giving bad fouls and then flopping his arms in disgust. Cleveland would be having a hard time with Brunson in any case, but now they may simply not have the legs for New York’s tempo and movement. Their one promising positional defensive matchup is at center, an on-paper opportunity negated too easily by New York using Towns as an elbow facilitator and floor-spacer and having all their littler dudes zoom around him in furious orbit.
Asked about all this after the loss, Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson at first turned down an opportunity to describe his players as “gassed,” but facts are facts. “I did think their physicality and energy level was much higher than ours, just call it what it is,” he said from the dais Saturday night, worn out and discouraged, his voice like history’s least-serviced lawnmower. Atkinson felt good about the opportunities produced by Cleveland’s offense, but the shots aren’t falling, and the energy expenditure of sprinting back in transition defense is wearing out his dudes. “There’s no big mystery: Our guys have played 50 percent more minutes than them. If I’m the opposing coach I’m saying, ‘Run these guys, wear ’em out, be super physical.’ It’s a good strategy.”
The bigger part of this, and certainly the part of it worth remembering, is that the Knicks are on an all-timer of a heater. They’ve now won their last 10 games, and their 13-point win Saturday night was New York’s third-narrowest margin of victory over that stretch. Since April 25, they have outscored their opponents by an astounding 225 points. It feels weird to say this about a Knicks playoff team, but their offense is outrageous: They’re shooting 52 percent from the floor and 40 percent from beyond the arc as a team, for the entire playoffs. Their victory in Game 3 was comprehensive. If anything, the Cavaliers could be accused of stat-padding, for refusing to waive the white flag and pull their starters past the point when the competitive portion of the game had ended.
Late in the fourth, with the Knicks up a dozen, Brunson cleanly beat Strus into the paint, and several defeated Cavs stood perfectly still, spectating as their season was flushed. Too late, Evan Mobley came over for a contest, which gave him a nice view of Brunson’s finger-roll layup dropping home. Cleveland responded with a nice high-low dish from Mobley to Jarrett Allen and followed with a rare stop when Anunoby glitched out in the paint. Comeback time? No. Mikal Bridges dropped home a floater amid a sequence of bricked Cleveland three-pointers, and then Brunson sauntered into a flagrantly uncontested layup, with at least three bewildered Cavs guarding absolutely no one. Atkinson called a timeout, and Mike Breen astutely noted that the home team had quit. Richard Jefferson, who stinks, insisted that he’d spotted the Cavs’ forfeit half a minute earlier, but in any case it was now unmistakable. For what feels like the one zillionth time in the last four weeks, the Knicks had run the fight right out of their opponent. Everything is working.
“You know, I think they were eight-for-nine from midrange, I think, in that first half,” noted Atkinson, by way of stressing that even when his Cavs managed to put together a complete defensive sequence, the Knicks would get a bucket. (For what it’s worth, the NBA’s shot chart says they were a mere seven-for-eight.) The East may not have the West’s depth of heavy-hitters, but these are solid basketball teams, and the Knicks are leaving them in ruin. It’s just possible to believe it all might be real, which depending upon your interest in a competitive Finals and the distress you feel at the thought of another ascendant New York sports team, is an exciting proposition. The Knicks are rolling at some sort of karmic level. Atkinson can’t deny it. “It’s like, man. That’s a juice thing. They had a lot of juice.”
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