Barbara Barker: Knicks turnaround is keeping fans' heads spinning
Knicks head coach Mike Brown during Game 5 of an Eastern Conference first-round playoff matchup at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Credit: J. Conrad Williams Jr.
OK, this is for real.
The Knicks did it again. In a week where the rest of the elite teams in the Eastern Conference have been struggling, the Knicks have given two dominant performances, the kind that make you feel that they have finally figured things out, that maybe they actually are a team that can go deep into the playoffs.
The Knicks just didn’t beat the Atlanta Hawks Tuesday night, they crushed them, 126-97, to take a 3-2 lead in their first-round playoff series.
They are now just one win away from advancing to the second round, where they would meet either the Boston Celtics or the Philadelphia 76ers, who find themselves in a surprisingly tight series after the 76ers staved off elimination with a win on Tuesday to narrow Boston’s lead to 3-2.
What a weird and wacky couple of days it’s been for the elite of the Eastern Conference.
The top-seeded Pistons have lost two games in a row and could be eliminated from the playoffs by an Orlando team that finished the regular season as the eighth seed. No. 2 seed Boston is struggling to put away a team some thought they would sweep. And No. 4 Cleveland lost two in a row to Toronto as the series moved to 2-2.
The Knicks? After opening 1-2 against the Hawks in three close games, the Knicks have beaten them by 16 and 29 points.
I don’t know if the Knicks are sending a message to the rest of the league, but they seem to be on much firmer footing since bottoming out in their Game 3 loss of this series when Jalen Brunson was smothered and turned the ball over on the final possession of the game.
So many times during this first season under coach Mike Brown, the Knicks have seemed like a collection of highly talented players who were still figuring out how to be a team. Yes, there were moments where they looked unstoppable, dating all the way back the NBA Cup win over San Antonio in December. But there were also significant stretches of struggle.
Falling behind Atlanta is now looking to be some kind of wakeup call. The Knicks, as Miles McBride has said, realized that they were playing for their lives. And they weren’t ready to see it fall apart so soon.
“They’re resilient,” Brown said. “We talked about it throughout the course of the year. You gotta go through some adversity throughout the course of the year to see what you’re made of as a group, see how you’re gonna respond. You just gotta keep fighting, and our guys have been through a lot so far this year, and they continue to go through it. But they’ve been through it as a group. And there’s nothing that will deter the group.”
What’s in front of them right now is a possible closeout game in Atlanta on Thursday. If these last two games are any indication, the Knicks — who play particularly well on the road — have a good chance of ending it in six.
There was a plethora of encouraging takeaways from Game 5.
Leading the list is the fact that the Knicks are now consistently running their offense through Karl-Anthony Towns and the Hawks seem to have no answer for him. Three days after notching the first playoff triple-double of his career, Towns produced 16 points, 14 rebounds and six assists on Tuesday.
Brunson, who had struggled at times with Atlanta's swarming defense, was back to being Jalen Brunson, scoring a game-high 39 points to go along with his eight assists.
And finally, OG Anunoby has continued to be the team’s most consistent player in the series, averaging 20 points and nine rebounds on top of playing killer defense.
This is the kind of team Knicks fans thought they were going to see at the beginning of the season when many picked them to finish with the best record in the East. A lot has transpired between then and now. Heck, a lot has transpired in just the last four days.
Said Brown: "They're a veteran group that knows what they want and how to go get it, no matter what’s in front of them.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
