The 2026 New York Knicks don’t add up. Except one way they really add up.
This is a team that can rip off a winning run for weeks that implies they can beat anyone, anywhere, anytime. Other times they’re less Larry O’Brien, more Larry, Curly and Moe. Last year they went 1-13 against the Thunder, Celtics, Pistons and Cavaliers, yet beat Detroit and Boston when it mattered most. This year they were 0-5 against the Thunder and Pistons. Will the Knicks turn it around again? Will history repeat itself?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Thanks to an inside connection at league offices, Posting & Toasting can reveal — exclusively — how the Knicks will do this postseason. The answer lies below. And has a verrrry 1994 vibe.
Back then, the U.S. was led by a recidivist sex criminal friend of Jeffrey Epstein. The most powerful people on Earth — many friends of Epstein — were aware the planet was warming to the point that humanity was becoming an endangered species and kept smiling through the blood. The world’s most popular sport held its big finale in one of America’s most diverse metropolises. The NBA aired on NBC. Angry cishet men, the beneficiaries of privilege passed down millennia after millennia, were ready to revolt after maybe a dozen years of strictly de jure equality. What a world that was!
Anyway, on to the crystal balling:
ROUND 1
In ‘94 the Knicks faced an up-and-coming Eastern . . . “power” is too strong a word. “Up-and-comer.” The 45-win New Jersey Nets, led by fourth-year power forward Derrick Coleman and guards Kenny Anderson and Drazen Petrović. This year the Knicks face 46-win Atlanta, led by fifth-year power forward Jalen Johnson and guards Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Dyson Daniels. Those Nets were 13th and 10th in offensive and defensive ratings. Today’s Hawks? 14th and ninth.
New York handled New Jersey with ease, winning the best-of-5 in four. Don’t expect these Hawks to take more than a game, either. Trading Trae Young may have been addition by subtraction, but the Hawks are still a move or two away from mattering.
ROUND 2
In ’94, the Knicks faced a long-hated rival in round two who’d lost their best player the year prior. Michael Jordan didn’t tear his Achilles, but he spent about 20 months playing baseball, a memory I grow more and more fond of as I age. What kind of kinesthetic genius do you have to be to compete at the highest levels on Earth as a basketball player, then stop on a dime, drop into Double-A baseball and not only land on your feet, but show improvement — after turning 30. Good grief.
Scottie Pippen stepped up in MJ’s absence, doing more of literally everything en route to a third-place MVP finish. With Jayson Tatum back, we may never get the chance to see Jaylen Brown sulk his way out of a last-second shot he’s pissed wasn’t called for him.
After losing the first two games, the Jordan-less Bulls gave the Knicks all they could handle, winning three of four to force Game 7. They were only down four entering the fourth quarter, but eventually the weight of replacing MJ with Pete Myers proved too much.
The 2026 Celtics are really good, pro’ly one of the league’s handful of best teams. I see them giving the Knicks fits. See them scaring the s#@% outta Knick fans. But eventually, no matter how pleasantly surprising Neemias Queta has been, he + Nikola Vučević + Luka Garza =/= Kristaps Porziņģis, Al Horford and Luke Kornet, and those three =/= KAT and Mitchell Robinson. The series goes the distance, and Game 7 is squeaky bum time to the very end, but the Knicks prevail.
ECF
In 1994 the top-seed in the East wasn’t, as many expected, the Knicks. Nor was it the other expected heir to the throne, the Cavaliers. Despite all Pippen’s heroics, neither was it the Bulls. By virtue of a tiebreaker over New York, the East’s top team was Atlanta, who were upset in the second round by a team that’d had literally ZERO playoff success — and won it all three times.
The Indiana Pacers won three ABA championships and reached that league’s finals five times in their nine years. Had they maintained that pace after the merger, by the time they met the Knicks in ‘94 the Pacers would have won six NBA titles. Instead they’d gone their whole 17-year NBA history without winning a single playoff series, going 4-17 all-time in playoff games. Keep that number in mind. 17.
The Cavs then were the Cavs now: nice guys, probably one of the better plane flight/dinner table teams in the Association, a more talented frontcourt than most (but not a title-winning one), a southpaw point guard sporting a move years ahead of his time (Mark Price splitting the double-team, James Harden’s stepback), coached by a Long Island native. Nice guys don’t finish last, but in this case they don’t sniff first.
Like the Pacers in ‘94, a new power rises in the Midwest. The Detroit Pistons haven’t won a playoff series in . . . you guessed it, 17 years. The ‘94 Pacers had the physically-imposing-but-not-as-good-as-the-Knicks’-big big man in Rik Smits; today Jalen Duren plays the understudy to Karl-Anthony Towns.
Indiana then was led by a star with a star skill years ahead of his time — Reggie Miller routinely made the same deep 3s then that draw oohs and ahhs today. Detroit is paced by Cade Cunningham. In a league that’s always selling you fool’s gold about how sexily positionless it is, Cade’s the genuine article. In 2036, when 80% of us are dead but elite athletes still make a good living ‘cuz the toxically rich offer them unimaginable comforts, every team has one or two guys who can do everything Cunningham can. But they’ll still be rare.
Here’s something else you may not know about following your team in a postseason when they’re expected to win at least three series — it’s no fun! The ’94 Knicks were HELL to watch that postseason. I mean “HELL” as nuanced, you know, no pain without pleasure, hell by way of the Marquis de Sade. Lotta pleasure in that run. My father the minister never cursed (not in English; the rules were somehow different for Spanish), and when he cursed it was never from joy. But when Ahmad Rashad interviewed Patrick Ewing moments after the Knicks’ Game 7 win over the team that’d eliminated them five years earlier, three years earlier, two years earlier and the year before, the good reverend was moved to profanity (albeit one only I could hear, not my mother and sisters).
As low as the low got after Miller’s Game 5 fourth quarter put the Pacers up 3-2, Derek Harper’s heroics late in Game 6 and the Knicks’ second-half comeback in Game 7 were as high, as highs. This is the first season I’ve had the same expectation of them I did in ‘94. When there are eight possible outcomes (lose in the 1st round/2nd round/ECF/Finals; win each) and only one, maaaaybe two are kosher, the tension mounting minute after hour after day after week after month has a way of d r a g g i n g.
You know how players say you can’t win a game in the first quarter, or half, but you can lose it? Magnify that to a whole-ass postseason and there’s your emotional funnel for the next 1-2 months. From now to mid-May, there’s nothing the Knicks can do to secure their primary objective. If they beat the Hawks up and down for four games, who cares? The Hawks are no heavyweight. If they struggle with Atlanta, in any way, we’ll hear ad nauseum that doesn’t bode well for the Boston matchup.
If they beat the Celtics, Jayson Tatum will have been struggling more than we knew. The morning after the series ends, gossip columnist Shams Charania will bust out 3000 words on how actually things couldn’t look brighter in Beantown, that it was all a blessing in disguise ‘cuz Tatum underwent some dark matter enrichment procedure in an unnamed country and his heel’s twice as strong as before the tear, ‘cuz Brown carrying the load all year gives them two alphas instead of 1.5 and Pritchard, Queta et al doing the same is all one big turbo-charged Boston boost.
And if the Knicks struggle with them, we’ll hear ad nauseum to struggle so much with a team they entered the series having beaten 7 of 10 times doesn’t bode well entering a conference finals versus a Piston bunch that TKO’d them every meeting this season.
Indiana wasn’t quite ready for prime time in 1994. Outside of Smits and Miller, there wasn’t much in the way of shooting or creativity. A physical team, tough as hell, whose players extracted every drop of energy possible from their bodies and their wills. Not a one averaged 20 a game, but six were in double-figures. If their point guards had been lawyers, their firm would have had the GOAT name: Fleming, Workman and Pooh.
Cunningham is the only Piston posting 20+ in this supercharged offensive age we live in. After he and Duren, their next-leading scorer is Tobias Harris. Then Duncan Robinson. They’d smoke the Davis boys in a 3-point contest, though Antoino and Dale would grind them into a fine paste down in the paint. When the ‘94 Pacers got to the dying seconds of Game 7 of the conference finals and needed one basket to win, everybody knew the ball was going to Miller. The other four Pacers may as well have been mannequins watching the Knicks pressure Miller into an airball. After Cade, who does Detroit trust?
FINALS
Cartoonishly evil super-villain James Dolan says the Knicks should “absolutely” win the East. They didn’t raise no banner after winning the NBA Cup. You think Lucky Sperm Jim was feeling his oats in December after a nice regular-season run? Imagine the chutzpah if the Knicks reach the Finals. The press will jump all over it, braying none of it matters unless the Knicks win it all. That’s one end of the insanity spectrum.
One Wednesday years ago, I worked at a Chinese take-out joint. Guy walks in, tosses a to-go box on the counter. Wants a refund. Says his chicken wings were no good. Ask him when he got ‘em. Sunday. I open the box. Inside, no skin, no meat, no sauce. Nothing but bones.
I used to think a man thinking he could bring chicken bones to a restaurant 72 hours after ordering them and eating them asking for a refund was weird. No. Knick fans spitting Giannis trade talk before the playoffs have started: that’s weird. We’re all family here at P&T. Blood is thicker than water. But fam, don’t be so thick.
As for what the crystal ball reveals about this year’s Finals: just like in 1994, the Knicks face a Texas team led by an international, generational center. The teams are pretty evenly matched. With the series even 2-2, the Knicks play their best ball all year in the second half of Game 5, blowing out the Spurs at MSG. Unfortunately, nobody outside the 19,763ish there live see it, as all 19 platforms that cover the NBA are locked on chopper footage of a Cybertruck driven by a mescaline-enhanced Aaron Rodgers leading police on a low-speed chase through Desert Valley. This time the Knicks close the deal in San Antonio on a Game 6 buzzer-beater. Who hit it? Stay tuned. Got a piece dropping soon where we can get more into it.
If me spoiling the next two months of Knick basketball does your blood pressure some good, you’re welcome. If you watch anyway, despite knowing the outcome, try to look surprised at the good bits.
