On Not Giving Up the Game, Or Even the Possession

While the New York Knicks might not win a championship this year, they’re currently meeting the base requirement to make basketball history in a great basketball town, Ian O’Connor wrote in a recent article for the Athletic. And that’s to play championship-level ball.

The Oklahoma City Thunder are still the heavy betting favorites to win it all. If waiting on the other side of the NBA Finals, they’ll be more than a handful, O’Connor said. And fixing to go back-to-back.

But right now, the way the Knicks are playing defense and running what coach Mike Brown calls “an equal opportunity offense,” it’s hard to see them losing in the Eastern Conference Finals to the Detroit Pistons. Assuming Detroit, a team defined by a singular force in Cade Cunningham, gets there.

In Friday night’s Game 3 of the conference semifinals against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Knicks won their sixth straight playoff matchup. This one by a 108-94 margin. Despite the home team scoring the first nine points and taking a 12-point first-quarter lead.

Many Knicks teams over the decades would have punted in this situation, O’Connor says. With a 2-0 series lead, the Knicks could or should have said the hell with Game 3, especially with forward OG Anunoby sidelined by injury. And waited to take control of the Sixers on Sunday.

But these Knicks don’t give away possessions, never mind games, O’Connor says. They fight for everything as if everything depends on it.

Despite the team’s recent success, Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson has actually described them as something of a work in progress. Stating that they “still have a lot of room that we can grow.”

But if the Knicks keep getting better and better, they’ll frighten whoever they see in the next two rounds, OKC included, says O’Connor.

Even with the team sharing the ball like mad, Brown also understands Brunson will be the one who makes the team’s first title in 53 years possible. Saying that if he’s Linus, “Jalen’s my blanket.”

A comparison that perhaps shows some of the underlying tension beneath a team whose current success seems to rely in large part on “equal opportunity,” in a league often defined by “singular forces.”