Knicks believe they have grown since season-opening loss to defending champions
New York Knicks' Karl-Anthony Towns, right, looks to pass the ball past Boston Celtics' Jayson Tatum, left, during the second half of an NBA basketball game, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in New York. Credit: AP/Pamela Smith
BOSTON — If you remember the very first game of the season, you can pick apart the reasons the Knicks found themselves humiliated in the first test of the team that was built to chase the Boston Celtics.
The Knicks were just a few weeks into putting the roster together at that time, as Karl-Anthony Towns’ arrival was not finalized until after training camp had begun. Roles still were being sorted out. They waited in the TD Garden locker room while the Celtics were feted for the championship they’d won months earlier. A lengthy ring ceremony was conducted, the Knicks fell behind by 35 points and the 132-109 score could be blamed on any of those things.
But the Knicks chose not to look back, at least not in that way, as they readied to face the Celtics in Game 1 at TD Garden on Monday night. Look back and learn, yes, but believe that and the three other losses to Boston in the regular season meant anything more than a learning opportunity, no.
“They played better than us,” Jalen Brunson said bluntly. “For sure, for the first three games. I think Game 4, we played a lot better, made it a game. I think that’s a growth, obviously. But obviously, we still lost all four games.
“The best way to go about that is to see what we did, know what we did wrong. How can we be better? Where have we got to now versus where we were then? Just take it one possession, one game at a time at this point. You can’t really focus on the past and think, ‘It’s going to be the same.’ We can’t have that mindset at all. We got to be different. We got to be ready to go. We got to go out there and compete from just the jump.”
If the Knicks had looked back at those games as some sort of precursor to the present, they might not have shown up for this series. However, the belief is that after 82 regular-season games, a hard-fought first-round playoff series against Detroit and nearly seven months since that opening night, they are a different team, a better team.
“It’s the regular season,” Josh Hart said. “It means nothing. There’s some pieces you can take from it, but at the end of the day, the series is 0-0.
“We lost three games to one in the regular season against Detroit. The playoffs is a different game. So we can’t think too much about the regular season . . . because at the end of the day, that’s the team you were weeks ago, months ago, and I think we’re a different team.”
“It’s obviously a great opportunity,” Deuce McBride said. “Any time you touch the second round of the playoffs, it’s a special opportunity for your team and you just want to go out and represent our franchise the best we can.
“Kind of what we’ve been doing all season. Be resilient. Figure out how to win. No matter what is going on throughout a game, through a series, we just stuck together. It felt like we had the team to continue to make improvements when we lost and even make improvements when we won. So I feel like that says a lot about our character.”
That is a mantra for Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau: Get better every day and be playing your best at the end of the season. And while the Knicks squad that had to scrap through every minute of the opening round to survive the overachieving Pistons may not look like a championship contender yet, they’re willing to bet that it was another opportunity to grow and learn.
The focus for the Knicks is limiting the Celtics’ ability to bomb away from beyond the arc and from all angles while hoping that the combination of OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Hart can contain Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
While the Knicks may have learned about themselves in the first round, they also know that the challenge is far different. While they went into that series focused on containing Cade Cunningham, the Celtics present a roster in which any one of the five starters — or about four reserves — could come up with a game-changing performance.
“I think every series is different,” Thibodeau said. “Every game is different. So each game teaches you something. But the challenge, I think, of the playoffs is to reset. After every game there’s a lot of emotional highs and lows. You have to navigate all that. You got to get through that. And you got to reset. You got to get ready for the next one. And then you take them one by one. You don’t play the series. You play the game. What’s it going to take to win this game? That’s where the focus should lie.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
