Today marks five days without Knicks basketball, as a week-long wait to determine their opponent in the Eastern Conference Finals slowly draws to an end. Whether it’s tonight in Cleveland or Sunday in Detroit, the Knicks will know their opponents soon enough.
But who should Knicks fans want to face with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line? Well, with a massive Game 6 just hours away, let’s break down the pros and cons of both potential opponents as we creep closer to the Knicks finally getting back
on the hardwood.
Why they should want the Pistons:
✅ Lack of ballhandlers around Cade Cunningham: The worst-kept secret around Detroit’s offense is their lack of creating offense when Cunningham sits or doesn’t have the ball in his hands. St. John’s product Daniss Jenkins has served as the team’s secondary ballhandler, but has been extremely inconsistent. There have been times when, if Cunningham is held under wraps and is turning the ball over, their offense grinds to a halt.
✅ Limited 3-point shooting: The Knicks’ defense has been one of the best in basketball since late January, but they’ve still struggled in one key metric. Defending the perimeter has been a massive problem all season long, and they’ve allowed teams to grill them from beyond the arc many times, including the Pistons themselves. That said, the law of averages seems to suggest that a team that was 17th in 3pt% and 29th in 3pa per game isn’t much of a threat behind the arc.
They’ve actually shot it pretty well overall in this series against Cleveland, but they continue to attempt under 30 per game. A team shooting 10/25 from three is less impactful than a team shooting 14/35, even if both are 40%, so the Knicks won’t have to worry about Celtics-esque barrages even on good shooting nights.
✅ Jalen Duren’s struggles: You know what’s interesting? Of the 12 games Duren has missed this season, three of them were against the Knicks, so he hasn’t played them since Game 6 of last year’s first-round matchup. Even though we didn’t see him live, he put up an All-NBA caliber season and truly emerged as one of the league’s premier centers.
And then the playoffs started. For some unbelievable reason, he’s been utterly putrid through 12 games, averaging just 10.1 points and 8.3 rebounds on 50% from the field, all massive drops from the regular season. He’s looked timid at the rim and is getting benched late in games for Paul Reed. Unless he can find something in the next two games, you’ll be looking at Detroit’s second-best player entering the series as a startled mess of himself, giving Cade even less help.
✅ Cade’s turnover woes: Speaking of Cade, he cannot stop turning it over. The Knicks thrived off turning over Tyrese Maxey and the Sixers in the four-game sweep in the second round and they suddenly face someone who’s rewriting the record books with turnovers.
In Cunningham’s 18 career playoff games, he’s averaging over five turnovers a night. He’s had three games of at least eight turnovers, five games of at least seven turnovers, and nine games of at least six turnovers. He’s never had a game with fewer than three, and his playmaking impact is similarly diminished as his assist-to-turnover ratio plummets. On a team with not many secondary scorers and playmakers, the scrutiny on the head of the snake becomes all the more focused.
Why they shouldn’t want the Pistons:
🚫 Regular-season struggles: The regular season does not matter in the playoffs; we know this from years of trial and error, but it’s at least a datapoint ahead of any series. The Pistons went 3-0 with a +84 point differential in three meetings with the Knicks this season. For about 10 out of those 12 quarters, it looked like a contender playing a G-League team. The Knicks’ offense, which was 4th best in the sport all season long, was held to 90, 80, and 111 points in three meetings.
Of course, these meetings took place between January 1 and February 20. These teams are very different from what they were in that snapshot of the season, and there are injury factors on both sides. That said, the Pistons would enter this series with a feeling of “we punked these guys all year long” rather than the feeling of last year’s defeat.
🚫 No home court advantage: If the Knicks played the Cavs, they’d get to play four out of seven games at the World’s Most Famous Arena, a place where they’re 34-11. If they played Detroit, they’d have to travel to Little Caesars Arena for a true road game, not like we saw in Atlanta and Philly.
🚫 Ausar Thompson and a hellacious defense: What makes the Pistons an extremely tough team to play is the utter devastation of their defense. Their bigs play physical, they have guards and wings who are willing defenders, and, of course, they have Ausar Thompson. There are not many players in the NBA that I think can properly stick with Jalen Brunson, but the Thompson twins are two of them. No team gave this offense more fits than Detroit this season.
🚫 Revenge factor: Despite dominating the Knicks in the regular season, the Pistons will have a sour taste in their mouths after losing an incredibly competitive first-round series a year ago to a very similar Knicks team. We saw these guys play with a level of fire and desire that you rarely see in the regular season during the three meetings, and with a spot in the NBA Finals on the line, I cannot imagine the intensity would drop one bit.
Why they should want the Cavaliers:
✅ Lack of a Brunson stopper: Jalen Brunson would rather be guarded by another VJ Edgecombe or Kelly Oubre Jr. than by Dyson Daniels. The Cavs have Dean Wade and Max Strus as their primary options to guard the Knicks’ captain, and while both are bigger and more formidable than Edgecombe, they lack the level of sheer smothering that Ausar can give. The key to winning any series is a great series from Brunson, and he’s more likely to do that against Cleveland’s defense.
✅ Overall defensive concerns: Donovan Mitchell and James Harden aren’t two abysmal defenders, but both are relatively small and will be hunted by the likes of Brunson and a hopefully healthy OG Anunoby on switches. Cleveland isn’t the most stout defensively, even if they roster a former Defensive Player of the Year winner.
✅ Turnovers: No team has been more turnover-prone than Cleveland in this postseason (well, except the Lakers) with 16.6 a game. They’re also allowing a playoff-high 22.1 PPG off turnovers, something that plays directly into the hands of a Knicks team that has feasted off turnovers (18.6 points off 14.6 opponent turnovers).
With the on-and-off nature of Mitchell and Harden in this postseason, it seems like there will always be one of them to target and turn over to get easy points in transition.
✅ Mitchell Robinson: Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley are still recovering from the PR hit from how Robinson victimized them in the postseason three years ago and both have been heavily scrutinized whenever they underperform in the playoffs since.
With Mobley being shockingly absent on the boards over the last few games even with Duren’s disappearing act, you have to imagine Mike Brown is licking his chops at the possibility of deploying Karl-Anthony Towns and Robinson together against Cleveland’s double big lineup.
✅ Home court advantage: No matter if the series ends tonight or on Sunday, the Cavs will have to travel to New York to play just two days later. If they close it out tonight, they’d have to do so with an even shorter turnaround, playing at 3:30 on Sunday.
Why they shouldn’t want the Cavaliers:
🚫 More creation and scoring: Cunningham is the only guy on Detroit who can create his own offense, something it makes their offense easier to gameplan against. With Cleveland, they have two perennial All-NBA guards who are both capable of scoring 30 on any given night and will absolutely look to hunt a Brunson mismatch at any opportunity.
🚫 Challenging defensive assignment: How would you manage to match the starting five with Cleveland’s? Sure, you put Mikal Bridges on Spida, Anunoby on Harden, and KAT on Allen, but after that?
Is Josh Hart able to stick Evan Mobley and impact him the way he did Jalen Johnson? Are we sure Brunson against Strus or Wade won’t lead to problems? Against a team like this, the lineups may need to be more flexible. Could Robinson start?
🚫 Significantly more shooting: Duncan Robinson, Kevin Huerter, and Javonte Green are the biggest perimeter threats for Detroit. When you compare that to Harden, Mitchell, Jaylon Tyson, Sam Merrill, and Strus/Wade for Cleveland, it’s a significant difference. They can grill you with both volume and efficiency.
Game 6 between the Cavaliers and Pistons is set for 7 p.m. ET in Cleveland, with the Cavs holding a 3-2 series lead.
