NEW YORK — With the sting of a Game 5 beatdown still fresh, the New York Knicks needed to gather.
The day after Wednesday’s 25-point defeat, a could-have-been elimination game that extended the Boston Celtics’ season a superfluous 48 hours, Knicks players (and only the players) met at the team’s practice facility in Tarrytown, N.Y. That’s where the locker room leaders presented a message: Performances like the one in Game 5, when the Celtics outplayed, outhustled and outthought the Knicks, were unacceptable.
The dud didn’t come out of nowhere. Various people inside the Knicks mentioned that even before Game 5, the mentality heading into the evening wasn’t focused enough. New York had rocked the Celtics in the second half of Game 4, its most impressive two quarters of the season to that point. Just before the final buzzer, Boston’s best player, Jayson Tatum, ruptured his Achilles.
From the win on Monday to tipoff Wednesday, the Knicks lacked the necessary intensity. And it showed that night, when the Celtics sliced their series deficit to 3-2. So on Thursday, the Knicks talked it out.
They discussed the communication issues that plagued them, why guys weren’t picking up the right Celtics in transition, and why the defensive execution, which had been clean for much of their second-round series, turned into a mess for one night at TD Garden.
The gist of the discourse?
Get it together and compete.
One day later, the Knicks competed in a way they hadn’t this season, this decade, or maybe even this century.
On Friday, they dismantled the defending champions, 119-81, clinching their first Eastern Conference finals berth since 2000. The troubles from Game 5, the ones with communication and effort, either stayed in Boston or evaporated during Thursday’s meeting.
Every Knicks rotation player contributed in Game 6. Their energy engulfed the Celtics.
During the season’s most important moment, the Knicks reached their greatest form.
“The whole day of Game 5, it just wasn’t us,” team captain Jalen Brunson said. “And we knew that. We reflected on it, and we came back and we said, ‘We need to be ready. We need to be better.’ The way we prepared, the way we talked out there, the way we made it an emphasis to have each other’s back and to continue to cover for each other … focus on the little things, and we did that.”
It was overwhelming.
This is the gear the Knicks believed they could ratchet into when the front office put together this team, a squad that has progressed during each of the past four seasons: From not making the playoffs in 2022 to losing in the second round in ‘23 to a harder-fought, second-round defeat that persisted even after half the roster got hurt in ’24 to the conference finals, where the Knicks will take on the Indiana Pacers.
If New York’s Game 6 performance was indicative of what’s to come, the team may not be done playing for a while.
“We just went out there with a different type of energy,” point guard Miles “Deuce” McBride said.
Brunson was Brunson.
Josh Hart, never the problem when it comes to effort, set the tone early, chasing after rebounds and rushing the basketball upcourt to get the Knicks into their offense with pace. When the Knicks reach a crossroads, as they’ve done various times this season, Hart goes into facilitator mode. With 10 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists, he finished with the first postseason triple-double for a Knicks player since Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s in 1972.
Mikal Bridges knocked down shots from the beginning and fought hard on the perimeter. OG Anunoby bolted back on defense at every opportunity. He clogged up driving lanes from all angles. Karl-Anthony Towns battled down low, posted up more and prioritized getting 3-pointers in transition, a clever way for him to toss up deep shots, which had been lacking against Boston.
The Knicks’ bench, even if it was mostly two guys, outplayed the Celtics’.
A game after transition defense led to their demise, McBride leapt for the block of New York’s season on a fast break, soaring with his head nearly above the rim to pin a Derrick White layup against the backboard, which led to a Hart and-1 on the other side.
Mitchell Robinson played 14 minutes, scored only one point, didn’t take a shot and somehow owned the Celtics. His best play of the night, as great a possession as he’s ever had, also came in transition.
Robinson backed to the paint, taking away a layup on a Celtics fast break. When the ball swung to Boston guard Jrue Holiday at the top of the key, Robinson rushed at him, eliminating the 3-pointer. He didn’t leave his feet. When Holiday drove, Robinson stuck to him. When Towns helped off Jaylen Brown in the left corner and Holiday swung the ball to the seemingly wide-open All-Star, Robinson then flocked to Brown. Once again, he didn’t jump. His arms were long enough, his feet quick enough, to deter the 3-pointer anyway. All Robinson did next was extend his infinite limbs out, cutting off any chance for Brown to move and deflecting a pass to himself for a miraculous steal.
Tom Thibodeau deserves credit, too. The veteran coach revamped the Knicks’ defensive identity during the Boston series, engineering a defense that switched far more than it had all season. The change in style confused the Celtics in Games 1 and 2, which included a couple of 20-point Knicks comebacks. Boston rarely looked comfortable in this series, in part because of how physical the Knicks have become.
Few people outside the Knicks’ locker room expected this outcome. They lost all eight of their regular-season games against the East’s No. 1 and 2 seeds. A month ago, they looked like a cute, 51-win club with a predetermined future.
Their playoff destiny seemed obvious. They would handle the Detroit Pistons in Round 1 and then lose to Boston.
But this is why they play the games.
The Knicks are evolving. They are not the same team today as the one that couldn’t beat the Celtics during the first 82. They defend. They don’t care if they’re down big, as they showed through this series. They trailed by at least 14 points during each of the first three victories against Boston.
On Friday, they controlled the game from tipoff.
There was no vast celebration after the final buzzer. A dap here, a hug there, but not much more.
“There’s more to go,” Bridges said. “We’re not done.”
The reaction, or lack thereof, was a sign of another change from earlier this week.
After the Knicks locked up Monday’s eight-point victory, which handed them a 3-1 lead in the series, Brunson set up for his postgame television interview. About to field questions, he turned behind him to teammates whom he deemed too giddy for the moment and told them to get off the court.
“It’s nothing to celebrate,” Brunson said.
The Knicks still required one more win to down Boston and nine more to accomplish an ambitious goal that, for the first time in decades, seems realistic for this franchise.
After the Celtics blew out the Knicks in Game 3, reducing New York’s series lead to 2-1, Brunson mentioned in a news conference that the team may have been “subconsciously satisfied” with winning the first couple of games of the series. A similar malaise overcame them leading into Game 5.
But on Friday, this was not a satisfied team. There was no cloud above them. No one rested on laurels or depended purely on talent.
The Knicks led by 27 at halftime. The advantage later ballooned to 41. You know it’s a true spanking when a losing team empties its bench during the third quarter of an elimination game, as the Celtics did in Game 6.
This was dominance, the type of performance that could make even a detractor believe the Knicks have a chance to win eight more times this season.
“You have that fundamentalist belief that you’ll never lose … (If) you wanna go deep into the playoffs, you gotta have that,” Towns said. “And we showed it this series. I think that was really special for us.”
(Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)