Conference Finals Set

Today we take one more look back at a monumental series win before we fully turn the page to Indiana.

Good morning! I hope everyone took the time to led Friday’s achievement sink in this weekend. Moments like this don’t come around often. As for this week, today we’ll take one final look at the Boston series before I reveal my top questions for the next round tomorrow. On Wednesday, I’ll be answering your questions for a conference finals mailbag. Let’s do it.

News & Notes

The conference finals are set.

With the Thunder’s brutal dispatch of the Denver Nuggets in yesterday’s Game 7, we now know that the 2025 NBA champion will hail from either Oklahoma City, Minnesota, Indiana, or yes, New York.

It is not the final quartet anyone had on their board, with three of the top four seeds eliminated and two 60+ win teams already on summer vacation.

In other words, every one of the remaining teams should view this as a golden opportunity.

For Oklahoma City, they may feel like they sent home their stiffest remaining competition yesterday. With 17 more wins than anyone else still alive, the likely MVP, and one of the greatest regular season net ratings in NBA history, they should be feeling fantastic about their chances.

For Minnesota, what was supposed to be a gap year has suddenly transformed into something much more. Along with OKC, they have an offense and a defense that ranked inside the top 10, which is a long standing hallmark of the eventual champ. Their defense has only gained steam as the playoffs have moved along, and they have a precocious superstar who will (not unreasonably) believe he is the best player in any series.

For Indiana, they have as much confidence in their approach at both ends of the floor as any team remaining. Like the Wolves, they have dropped just one game in each of the first two rounds, and they go into the conference finals with an effective field goal percentage that would rank as the highest in NBA playoff history. Maybe that means a regression is coming, or maybe it means they cracked the code for how to win it all in an offense-first league.

And then of course, there are the Knicks. Their talent has never been in question, and over the last week, they’ve played their two best games of the season. It could be a sign that the consistency we’ve long waited to see, with a level of execution on par with the gravity of the moment, is finally here. Their opponent, while equipped to present very unique and very real challenges, is far from a powerhouse. They have home court and the best player, which is usually a winning combination this time of year. Most of all, they have the memory of losing to this very team just 12 months ago.

We’ll get into the specifics of this matchup over the next few days, but suffice it to say that the Knicks haven’t had this good of a chance to win a ring in over 30 years. That year, 1994, also saw them beat the Pacers in the East Finals thanks in part to home court advantage and the best player in the series.

The urgency has arrived, maybe before any of us expected.

Opportunities like this don’t come around often.

Time to seize the moment.

💫 Stars of the Series 💫

Every time I thought about doing Stars of the Game for Game 6, I kept running in the same two-fold issue: everyone played well, and this was as much a team win as any they’ve claimed in the Thibodeau era. For that reason, I decided to go bigger picture and award Stars of the Series, detailing who were my top three performers and what set them apart. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

⭐️ Mikal Bridges: Before we get to the big debates, let’s take a moment to talk about Deuce McBride.

It would be an understatement to say that Deuce came into the Boston series on a cold streak. In the 11 games he’d played since returning from injury (five in the regular season, six against Detroit), McBride was 28-of-81 overall and 16-of-51 from deep. By the end of the Pistons matchup, he was borderline unplayable. It was telling that in a series begging for a spark, Thibs played him under 16 minutes a night. He wound up averaging just 3.8 points per game - a far cry from the 11.3 points he put up in the first round vs Philly a year ago.

What changed between Game 6 in Detroit and Game 1 in Boston we may never know, but the Knicks are awful lucky McBride returned to form. In six games against the Celtics, Deuce sported a 69.7 effective field goal percentage. Among players who appeared in every game of the second round, only Luke Kornet was more efficient. On top of that, Deuce had the second best on/off numbers on the team, behind only Mitchell Robinson and comfortably ahead of third place Jalen Brunson.

So why isn’t he in genuine consideration for the last star? For one, he averaged just eight points per game, and while starring in your role is vitally important and scoring isn’t everything, this was a series in which points felt so hard to come by at times that the heavier lifters deserve more of a nod. Second, it’s hard for me to disentangle his robust impact metrics with the fact that he played nearly three quarters of his minutes with Mitchell Robinson, who was such a force at both ends of the floor. Even with no star though, McBride’s bounce back deserves every bit of our gratitude and admiration.

That brings us to the battle of the wings. The Knicks went out and paired Mikal Bridges with OG Anunoby to win this exact series. In that sense, mission accomplished. The only question is which guy was more instrumental to the result.

In Game 1, Anunoby was definitely better than Bridges. As I wrote that night, it wasn’t “loud” enough for us to remember it as the OG Game, but if we had to rank the top individual performances throughout the series, Anunoby’s Game 1 would rank second behind only Brunson’s Game 4 masterpiece, which is among the greatest games in franchise history. Meanwhile, Bridges hit some big shots late and came away with the game’s signature play, but turned in a stinker through the first three quarters.

Mikal tilted the scales in his direction with maybe the most important five-minute stretch of the series in Game 2, while Anunoby delivered the first of two consecutive no-show outings. Both guys stunk in Game 3, along with pretty much everyone else. After Game 4, the two wings were in a dead heat following Mikal’s epic fourth quarter slightly besting Anunoby’s overall strong effort that was punctuated by a 4-for-8 showing from deep. Like Game 3, we can toss Game 5 in the trash for both guys, although Bridges was the lesser of two evils there.

Which brings us to Game 6. Their scoring totals were almost identical. Ditto for the plus/minus. Anunoby was a monster on defense and did his best board work of the series, pulling down nine rebounds. Bridges, meanwhile, was an offensive fulcrum throughout the night. He unquestionably put more pressure on Boston’s defense during the relevant portion of the game than he had in any other non-fourth quarter performance of the series. In the moment, I felt like some of his early midrange misses would come back to bite them, but not as much as OG’s errant deep ball, which didn’t get going until the game was essentially decided.

I think between the slight Game 6 edge and the extra weight of some big fourth quarters, Bridges has to get the nod. Maybe if Anunoby had been more consistently excellent on the defensive end, I’d have gone in the other direction. Either way, he gave them just enough to win.

Now that that’s out of the way, we do need to have one more conversation about one Josh Hart.

For the series, Josh Hart averaged 14.5 points, 8.3 rebounds and 4.5 assists. The only other players to hit all of those marks in the second round were Nikola Jokic and Jayson Tatum, albeit with significantly higher scoring outputs. After McBride, Hart was also the second most efficient Knick, with a 54.8 effective field goal percentage that was significantly higher than either of his wing teammates. They don’t win Game 1 or 2 without him, and his energy was perhaps the galvanizing force behind the closeout victory. Individually, Hart couldn’t have been better.

And yet…

With Hart on the court, Boston outscored the Knicks by 5.2 points per 100 possessions while they outscored the Celtics by 15.5 points per 100 without him. That’s the second largest negative on/off discrepancy of the series behind OG Anunoby, and the Anunoby on/off numbers deserve an asterisk. Without OG, New York’s defensive rating plummeted to 95.1, but I wonder how much of that has to do with his minutes aligning so closely with Tatum’s over the first four games.

In 73 minutes without Hart however, New York put up an offensive rating of 120.3, whereas they scored just 107.2 points per 100 possessions with him. The reason for that is reflected by a meteoric rise in efficiency when Hart sat, with an eFG% that jumped from 48.6 in the 220 minutes he played to 57.5 in the time he sat. The eye test backed up the fact that on a majority of possessions, good shots were simply easier to come by when Josh wasn’t in the game, even if his individual numbers were stellar.

That’s not the same as saying they were incapable of generating efficient offense with Hart on the floor. Look no further that Games 4 and 6 for evidence of that. At the same time, the Knicks offense was stuck in the mud for large swaths of the other four games, largely because Hart’s man was mucking things up in help defense.

In the strictest sense, I believe that Hart delivered the better performance in this series, not only because of the affirmative actions that were in his control, but because he gets too much of the blame for the offensive issues that transpired on his watch.

Even so, Bridges gets my star. He was instrumental in some way, shape or form in all four wins, and for the most part, he delivered on the exact reasons Leon Rose traded five first round picks to get him, give or take some makable misses throughout the early parts of all of these games.

Before we move on to the top two, you can tell by process of elimination that I have Karl-Anthony Towns as the least effective Knick of this series. Indeed, if we go by Stars of the Game through games 1-5, everyone else has at least three stars. KAT has a goose egg. If I was doing stars for Game 6 alone, he’d have been in contention but wouldn’t have been a sure thing either¹.

Does this mean he was bad against Boston? I wouldn’t go that far. The dude put up 20 & 13 with under three turnovers per game. When you factor in his free throws, his true shooting percentage of 56.0 was far closer to Jalen (57.5) than either OG (50.2) or Mikal (48.4). When they needed him to defend in must win Games 4 & 6, he delivered both times. That matters.

But if there’s one guy we know the Knicks will need more from if they want to advance to their first Finals since 1999, it’s Karl-Anthony Towns.

⭐️ ⭐️ Jalen Brunson

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Mitchell Robinson

I looked at this choice like I’m sure a lot of MVP voters viewed the decision between Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander this year.

There’s no question who the better player is. For some, that’s enough to decide who was is valuable. I’ve never looked at it quite so simply.

The big difference between this decision and the one facing league MVP voters is that Mitch and Jalen occupied wildly different roles. For one, Brunson played nearly twice as many minutes in the series. By that metric, was Robinson’s positive impact at least twice as significant as that of his starting point guard? Of course not. On a per minute basis, Mitch was better in his role than Jalen was in his, but that only gets us so far. Brunson had to do so much heavy lifting for almost every second he was on the court. JB’s 28.4 usage rate was seventh highest among rotation players who played at least two games in the second round. Robinson’s was eighth lowest.

The “being a star in your role” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but even that doesn’t get us to Mitch over Jalen. As the primary offensive engine of the Knicks’ attack, Jalen Brunson was awesome. He scored 26.2 points, dished 7.2 assists and committed just 2.5 turnovers a night with a 52.1 effective field goal percentage. New York’s offense also evaporated into a puddle when Brunson took a seat, going from 115.3 rating to a 92.7 rating in the 65 minutes he sat. Defensively, he held up about as well as anyone could have expected.

Most impressive of all, despite a robust load of 38.1 minutes a game, he scored 16 points in clutch situations across three games in the series - as many as the rest of his teammates combined. For as incredible as he has been in his Knick postseason career up to this point, when you factor everything in, this was his best showing.

And yet when I look back on this series in a month or a year or several decades from now, I won’t remember it as the Jalen Brunson series.

Up until now, the first round against Cleveland in 2023 has been the bout with Mitchell Robinson’s name tattooed across its chest. It now has company.

Robinson dominated in ways both now and old. Like he did against Cleveland, Mitch owned the offensive glass to the tune of 3.8 offensive rebounds a game. That was a few hundredths of a rebound behind Aaron Gordon for tops in the conference semis, but Robinson blasted Gordon and every other rotation player on a per minute basis in this category. His 14 total rebounds per 36 minutes was also tops among players to see at least 100 minutes of action in the second round (KAT, we should note, was second at 13.5). His pick and roll defense never slipped, not even a little.

But Boston presented a far different challenge than the Cavs did two years ago, when Mitch needed simply to rely on his bread and butter of drop coverage. The game plan against the Celtics required Robinson to switch, which resulted in him spending ample time on the perimeter. On nearly every one of those chances, he held up. It got the point where the defending champs stopped targeting that matchup, no longer seeing it as a mismatch.

It all adds up to one defining number that ultimately gets Mitch this spot at the top: 89.

As in, an 89-point plus/minus difference between when Robinson was on the court (plus-46) and when he was off (minus-43). Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the presumptive MVP, led the Thunder with a difference of 74 points in the conference semis. Jaden McDaniels topped the Wolves with a 60-point differential. The only player in the second round with a bigger plus/minus difference than Mitch was Tyrese Haliburton at 95 points, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Hali’s teammate, Pascal Siakam, was a relatively close second with a difference of 67 points. Meanwhile, the closest Knick was Deuce McBride, whose plus/minus differential amounted to just 29 points, or less than a third of Mitch’s figure.

Never were his efforts more vital than in Game 2, when the Knicks outscored the Celtics by 19 points during Robinson’s 22 minutes in a game they won by a single point. He scored just six points that night, but it might have been the most impactful game of his career.

When the Indy series tips off, we’ll be a month away from the seven-year anniversary of the day the Knicks drafted Mitchell Robinson with the 36th overall pick in 2018. They made a bet that for whatever flaws he might never be able to overcome, Robinson’s prodigious talent would shine through when they needed it the most.

In all that time, they never needed him more than in the last two weeks.

Boy, did he ever deliver.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. I’d have probably gone Brunson, Hart and Deuce in some order.