Knicks bring defense and love from fans back to Garden for Game 3 against Celtics
The parties in the street outside Madison Square Garden last year seemed like a thing of the past, celebrations of a love affair between a team and a city that was enamored of the effort and heart of the overachieving 2023-24 team.
Summer work by the front office put together a talented group with high expectations, and while it got them one more win in the regular season than last year, the team had to prove itself. With two wins in Boston in the second round of the playoffs and a style that suddenly is echoing the long-lost Knicks of the ’90s, the party will be on Saturday afternoon if the Knicks are up to it.
It hasn’t just been the last-second shots by Jalen Brunson that have put them up two games to none in their best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal series against the Celtics. The common denominator of the two wins has been what Knicks fans want to see most. Long before “Bing Bong” or the profane chants of Pistons fans in Detroit, the refrain at Madison Square Garden was “Dee-fense!”
In 82 regular-season games, the Knicks held opponents to 100 or fewer points only 10 times. In this series, with the crowd going wild in Boston, the Celtics managed only 100 points in regulation in Game 1 (and only five more in overtime) and 90 in Game 2. In two second halves plus an overtime period, the Knicks allowed 84 points.
The Celtics were second in the NBA in offensive rating in the regular season and scored 125 points per game against the Knicks in four meetings. Suddenly, the teams started to bring back fond memories of Charles Oakley, Patrick Ewing and the rest of the Knicks teams that engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
While the Knicks brought in Karl-Anthony Towns, who is the best offensive big man they’ve had since Ewing, the rest of the team was built on defense, pairing Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby as a wing duo with an eye on Boston’s talented Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. The two game-ending plays haven’t been Brunson shots but steals by Bridges.
“I think both teams have made each other miss shots,” Towns said. “Defense has been played at a high level. The intensity is at a high level. It’s just one of those things where both teams were very locked in trying to get a W, rep their city. The game goes that way sometimes. It’s not gonna always be 120, 125. The game just naturally plays itself out. Both teams are trying to win, so maybe it’s a 90-point win. Maybe it’s an over-100 game. You never know.”
It was a different game in the 1990s. In the Knicks’ 1994 postseason run to the NBA Finals, they played 25 games against the Nets, Bulls, Pacers and Rockets and allowed the opposition to reach 100 points only once — coincidentally Game 3 of the second round, a loss to the Bulls. In the Knicks’ last trip to the NBA Finals in 1999, they played 20 postseason games and didn’t allow the opponents to hit triple digits once.
Tom Thibodeau, who was an assistant coach on that 1999 squad, has always insisted that the playoffs are different from the regular season, that the goal from the start of camp is to get a little bit better and be playing your best at the end of the season.
What the Knicks showed over the regular season provided little hint of what has come so far, as they went 0-10 against Boston, Cleveland and Oklahoma City. But the opening-round series against Detroit provided an opportunity for growth, playing in front of hostile crowds and with officiating crews that seemed to be using playground rules of no blood, no foul.
“I think every game is different,” Thibodeau said. “Sometimes it ends up — you anticipate high-scoring and it ends up low-scoring. And I think the big thing is have the understanding that you have to win games different ways. Whether it’s a high-scoring, low-scoring, medium-scoring, just find a way to win the games.”
While the Celtics’ struggles from three-point range, a strength of the team, have been focused on, if you think Boston coach Joe Mazzulla isn’t focused on the Knicks’ defense, just consider his odd plotting to force defensive anchor Mitchell Robinson off the floor.
“I feel like it’s a mixture of a lot of things,” Brunson said. “But the game of basketball is unpredictable, and no matter what you prepare for, there’s gonna be things that happen that you’re not really ready for, so you’ve just got to go out there and figure out how to attack it as best you can regardless of what the situation is.”
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.
