With each passing day, there’s only one thing that crosses my mind whenever I think about the Knicks.
What the hell happened in the locker room after Game 3 in Atlanta?
The Knicks have won six consecutive playoff games. That hasn’t happened since 1999. They’ve never won seven in a row, which they’ll look to do in tomorrow’s first sweep opportunity
in 13 years.
They’re breaking point differential records.
Their fans are invading home arenas and making proud sports cultures look pathetic.
(Granted, I firmly believe Philly fans are fairweather in everything but football but…)
It’s just so different than years past. Every Knicks team of this era of revival has had an identity.
In 2021, they were a gritty defensive team that rode a spectacular individual season from Julius Randle to motivate a city out of COVID.
In 2023, they were legitimately 10-deep and played with fervor, but didn’t have the high-end talent.
In 2024, they were shorthanded, gritty dogs that the city fell in love with, even as injuries held them back from their ceiling.
In 2025, they compiled the high-end talent and had to overcome self-inflicted adversity, rallying back from huge deficits to conquer demons that threatened to swallow them.
What is their identity this year? That book isn’t written yet, but this is by far the most Terminator-esque I have ever seen from a Knicks team.
The Sixers started Game 3 with a flurry as they tried to save their season. It was 9-0, 20-8, 29-20. They wanted to punch the Knicks in the mouth early and make a team missing its best defender and arguable playoff MVP lick their wounds and prepare for Game 4 early, the same way Philly did four nights earlier.
As we know, that didn’t happen. I do wonder what was going on in the heads of the Knicks during the early timeout or during the stoppages on the floor. Was there coaching going on? Probably.
But in the way they responded, all you can imagine them thinking was,
“That’s it? That’s their best shot?”
These guys haven’t been fazed by absolutely anything since their hearts got ripped out in Game 3 against the Hawks. Any run, any push, any attempt for their opponent to get physical. It’s like they spend shootaround every day playing videos of media talking heads calling them soft and weak-willed.
The times they look disjointed or confused are abbreviated. They bully their opponents into submission every other second of the game.
They told Jalen Brunson he was the third-best player in this series. He’s one more 30-piece and a win away from getting crowned “King of Philadelphia” at Xfinity Mobile Arena by Pope Leo like Charlemagne was in 800 AD.
They called VJ Edgecombe the Brunson stopper. The only thing he’s been stopping is his team’s chances of winning in every fourth quarter.
Someone called Paul George the best wing in this series. He mimicked your drunk uncle who passes out at 8 pm.
They said Joel Embiid would cook Mitchell Robinson. Instead, Mitch turned Embiid into a Noa Essengue imitator.
They said MSG East (Philly is geographically southwest of NYC, btw) wouldn’t happen again. It did.
Alright, enough of my anti-Philly rant. Let’s talk about basketball. What’s the real difference between this team and teams of the past?
The biggest difference is that they’re balancing high-end talent and depth in a way that I don’t think many of us saw coming.
For years, you’d worry about guys like Hart, Brunson, and Anunoby running on fumes late in playoff games. Instead, they’re reasonably rested as Tyrese Maxey is gasping for air, Embiid grabs some Patrick Ewing icepacks, and
Anunoby didn’t play in Game 3, yet you couldn’t tell from how the game went after the first quarter. They made up for his absence with Mikal Bridges stepping up to be a two-way beast and Landry Shamet coming off the bench.
How about Shamet, by the way? He was out of the rotation at the beginning of this series and stepped up to outplay every single Sixers role player. The Knicks are 10-deep playing a team whose sixth man went scoreless through three quarters. There are levels to this.
Ever since CJ McCollum went out of his way to hunt Brunson on the defensive end, the Knicks have done a fantastic job of keeping him away from the action. When people were picking the Sixers to win this series, they assumed Maxey and Edgecombe would abuse this mismatch often. Turns around, only Kelly Oubre Jr. can.
We’re now running on six games of stifling Knicks defense, usually coupled with potent offense. Even with some inconsistent three-point shooting, they’re shooting a baffling 64% from inside the arc over the last six games. It’s unprecedented paint dominance.
I’m not old enough to know what the Knicks looked like in the 1990s, but I’ve seen many P&Ters who lived through it say that what this team is doing feels even better than what those teams accomplished, making multiple NBA Finals.
Every time you look up, they’re doing something they haven’t done since 1973.
Maybe that means they’ll finally end the drought.
