7th Heaven
The Knicks keep rolling in DC as trades shake up the landscape around them.
Good morning! Yesterday was quite the day in the National Basketball Association as five, count’em five former All-Stars were traded. The Knicks, well…they’re still biding their time, but we’ll get into all that below.
Knicks 132, Wizards 101
32-18 (W7); 12-12 on the road
Here’s all you need to know about last night’s game:
With 6:35 remaining in the first quarter, OG Anunoby hit a 3-pointer to make it 19-7, giving the Knicks a double digit lead that they would never relinquish. According to ESPN’s win probability tracker, that basket upped New York’s odds for victory to 95.0 percent. Those odds would not drop below 95.0 percent for the remainder of the evening.
Now win probabilities aren’t the be all, end all, as we know. If you need proof of that, just go back and check New York’s odds in this game with 41.1 seconds remaining, but only if you want your day ruined.
Thankfully, the 2025-26 Wizards are very much not last year’s Pacers, but that shouldn’t completely diminish this win. If anything, it should give it a little extra shine. With Denver and Detroit coming up on the schedule, it would have been very tempting to look past a 13-win team and try to coast to a victory on talent alone. Goodness knows we’ve seen them try to pull that off before (and succeed, in fairness).
This wasn’t that. The Knicks came out meaning business, and from the opening tip, they left no doubt about how the evening would go. They dominated in nearly every way a team can dominate, dishing 34 assists, putting up 132 on a night when both Jalen and KAT went 7-of-16 from the field, and allowing Washington to cross 100 only because the scrubs gave up 20 points in the final five minutes. More importantly, the main rotation guys built up enough of an advantage that Mike Brown was able to play the end of his bench for essentially the entire fourth quarter. On the first night of a back to back, only Jalen Brunson topped 27 minutes, and did so with 31.
That said, it wasn’t a perfect night.
