By the time Karl-Anthony Towns bulled his way down the lane with a minute left in the first half, finished the play and got fouled and made the shot, it was already 61-34 for the Knicks. A few seconds later Miles McBride made a 3 from the right corner. Now it was 64-37 and then it was halftime and the Knicks and the Knicks were about to land back to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in this century as easily as if they’d just come down a slide.
It was a lot. It was a lot for them, for Knick fans watching inside the Garden and outside the Garden and wherever they were watching. All those years of bad basketball, between what feels like the end of Patrick Ewing and the beginning of Jalen Brunson had produced a team like this and a night like this and a chance like this to win a title.
They had been outplayed for so many of the playoff games they had won before Friday night, first against the Pistons and then against the Celtics, including the seven games they had won and especially the seven games they had won to put themselves on the threshold of the conference finals. It no longer mattered that they had lost four games to the Celtics during the regular season because now they were on their way to the 4th win against them they needed in May.
All season long, through losses to the Celtics and Cavaliers and Thunder and Lakers, we had talked about how they didn’t show up against the best teams in the league. That has all changed now. On Friday night, the Knicks were one of the best teams in the league, at a time when there are only about to be four left.
Now they are going to get a chance to be the very best if the team that couldn’t get past two rounds can win two more rounds. Of course no one saw this coming. But so often you don’t see the best stories coming. Here they are, anyway. For now this does still feel so much like ’99, when the Knicks came from being the No. 8 seed in their conference and went all the way to the Finals against the Spurs.
The Celtics are gone now. The Cavaliers are gone. Somehow the Knicks are not only the ones in the conference finals, they are the ones with homecourt advantage. If you want to use another sport, this really is starting to feel like the run the Giants got on back in the 2007 pro football season, when they got hot the way they did at the end of the regular season, and got on that roll, and finally took out the 18-0 Patriots in the Super Bowl.
The Knicks aren’t there yet. They had been spoiling for two years for this series against the Celtics, but it is the Pacers who took them out of the second round of the playoffs last year, the Pacers they are about to face starting this week. We still romanticize Knicks vs. Celtics, but the fact is that Knicks vs. Pacers used to give us memorable playoff series back in the ’90s and into 2000 and again last year. Now those two teams get ready to do it again.
Friday night it was the Knicks who got the big lead in the second quarter, and never gave it up. The Celtics had thrown the one big shot they were going to throw after Jayson Tatum got hurt, last Wednesday night in Boston. Then they came to New York for Game 6 and started missing all the 3-point shots that had put them in the big hole from which they never really climbed out. And there was no chance on this night that they were coming back on the Knicks the way the Knicks had come back from 20 against them in Boston.
They were something more than the Second Round Knicks, at last. Now they have as much chance to win it all as anybody still playing. They were on their way to going up three games to one even before Tatum went down in the late innings of Game 4. Friday night they finished the job in grand style.
Two minutes into the second half it was 69-40 and it looked as bad as Game 3 of Pacers vs. Cavs when it was Pacers leading 80-39 at halftime. There had never been a closeout game quite like this at the Garden, over all the years, and certainly not against the defending champs. For so much of NBA history — apart from those two glamorous and notable and wonderful exceptions in 1970 and — the Knicks have wanted what the Celtics had. Wanted to be the Boston Celtics. Just not this time.
“We haven’t been here since my dad played,” Brunson said on the court when it was over about the conference finals.
The Knicks hit them at the end of Games 1 and 2 and then did what they did to them all night long in Game 6. It is how they have put themselves in position to write one of the great New York sports stories ever written, and not just in basketball. It won’t be easy. The Knicks didn’t do easy until they got home Friday night. By the second half, the crowd inside the Garden and the one outside on Seventh Ave. seemed to have become this one crazy, happy unified place, as their team was putting itself eight wins away from a title that really would put them with the most famous teams we have ever had around here.
The Pacers are young and deep and talented and athletic and know they came into the Garden last May and shot the lights out and turned out the lights on the Knick season. They just did to the Cavaliers what the Knicks just did to the Celtics, and did it in five games. This has a chance to be a tremendous series, one that will likely go the distance again. The Pacers aren’t afraid of the Knicks. But the Knicks aren’t afraid of anything or anybody right now. Brunson didn’t even have to be great Friday night when the Knicks were doing what they were doing to the Celtics. Once again they had four starters who scored 20 or more, same as in Game 4. And the glue guy, Josh Hart, was everywhere on his way to a triple-double.
My oldest son was in the Garden the night Larry Johnson made his 4-point play against the Pacers back in ’99. As Friday night’s game moved into the fourth quarter he said, “Josh Hart is still chasing loose balls like we’re losing.”
He is one of the guys who have turned this into a team Basketball New York loves. Long before Tatum got hurt the Knicks went into Boston Garden and hit them twice and the Celtics never recovered. The Knicks won just about all the big moments and finally won the series. This time they’re not done and dusted in the middle of May. It’s because this time they’re thinking about June.
A BRONX CHEER FOR JUAN, ROSE DESERVED THAT BAN & GIANTS TAKE ANOTHER LOSS WITH NFL SKED RELEASE …
I couldn’t tell in the 9th inning at the Stadium while the Knicks were rocking their house – but did Yankee fans enjoy Juan Soto making the last out of the game?
Brock Purdy, the 262nd pick of the 2022 draft, just signed a contract with the 49ers worth $265 million and that is just one of the best stories to come out of the draft since Tom Brady — whatever happened to him? — was drafted by the Patriots in the sixth round.
Here’s the deal on Pete Rose, someone I loved watching play and someone with whom I loved talking baseball:
His circumstances haven’t changed now that he is off the ineligible list.
He did exactly what Bart Giamatti said he did.
And deserved what he got for gambling on baseball.
We are all being blown away, of course, by what Aaron Judge is doing on this coast, but through Friday’s games that Ohtani guy had one more home run than our guy.
My math may be slightly off, but I’m thinking that the Red Sox have lost somewhere around 50 one-run games so far and they’ve only played 46.
The only way the Giants schedule could be any meaner or rougher is if the NFL was making them play some doubleheaders.
Seth Meyers continues to do one of the smartest shows on television.
It was after Duke upset UNLV that time in the Final Four, during that time when Jerry Tarkanian’s team won once and was described as a potential dynasty that John Wooden was walking off the court and said “A lot of teams have won one in a row.”
The Celtics are just the latest.
Finally today:
My dear friend William Goldman, the great William Goldman, wrote “The Princess Bride” and “Marathon Man” and won Academy Awards for “All the President’s Men” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
The world knows him that way, and might even know he skipped the Oscars in 1970 — when he won his first Oscar for “Butch”— because the Knicks were at Madison Square Garden playing the Bullets in the playoffs.
But then all of us who knew and loved him knew how much he identified himself as a Knicks fan, as much of a Knicks fan as anyone I’ve ever known.
He came in with Clyde and Willis and Bradley and DeBusschere, and Dave DeBusschere would become one of his best friends.
Bill had tickets under the basket at the Garden for over 50 years, rarely missing a game until he passed away in 2018.
Even when there were so many losing nights over the last decade-and-a-half of his life, he was still there, convinced someday there would be another Knicks team like the ones he remembered.
Maybe this is that team.
All I kept thinking about Friday night is that I wish he were there.
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