It's Cleveland!

After all that, the East's two preseason favorites will battle it out for conference supremacy.

Good morning! Well that was a dud. Shout out to the Pistons for a lovely season, but tough to go out with a whimper on your home court. Oh well. Should be an interesting summer in Detroit.

More importantly, there are two East teams with basketball still to play, and they will meet tomorrow night at 8pm. Be sure to tune into the KFS YouTube channel for wall-to-wall preview content today, including me and Jeremy and 10am, and then me and Fred Katz for the Dean Wade Draft (featuring the real Dean Wade himself!) at noon. Giddy up.

It’s Cleveland!

It would have been a fitting next chapter regardless of last night’s outcome.

If Detroit won, we’d have gotten a rematch from last year, against the team who whupped up on the Knicks three times this season, announcing loudly and proudly that they don’t shine shoes anymore. They win games the way New York used to win games because - like the old Knicks - it’s the only option they have. It would have been a battle, and it probably would have been ugly.

But the Pistons’ carriage finally turned into a pumpkin, let down by their defense of all things when they needed it the most. Watching them get dismantled on their home court last night, it was hard to remember how or why they were ever feared to begin with. It was certainly hard to imagine that team giving the Knicks any issues.

Then again, you can say the same thing about the Cavs team that showed up (or didn’t show up, as it were) in Game 6. In fact, heading into Game 7, Cleveland had been arguably the most underwhelming team in the playoffs. Even their wins featured long stretches of stagnant offense, half-hearted defense, and a general malaise one would not expect to find in a conference finalist.

And yet, here they are, in part because - much like the Knicks did three weeks ago - Donovan Mitchell & Co decided it was better late than never to put together their best performance of the season. The difference is that New York followed up their resounding Game 4 win in Atlanta with a half dozen more where that came from, all of which evinced a team that has put the silliness behind them. It remains to be seen whether the Cavs have the same level of consistent seriousness in them.

If they do, this will be a worthy penultimate battle before the final war. Cleveland, even with James Harden putting up a classic Game 7 James Harden stat line, reminded us why they were essentially co-favorites with the Knicks to win the East back in October. Donovan Mitchell leaned all the way into his playmaking, Evan Mobley was a two-way, All-NBA caliber force, Jarrett Allen was Shaq, and Sam Merrill was Klay Thompson. They collectively defended like their season was on the line, and they passed like they had actually met each other before the morning shoot around. Their 31 assists were six clear of their next highest total in the playoffs, while their 13 turnovers were their second lowest of the postseason.

That was a real team, and indeed the team Cleveland’s front office envisioned when they made the bold move to acquire Donovan Mitchell nearly four years ago. That vision has shown up here and there over that time, never more so than last season when the Cavs marched to 64 wins behind a record-setting offense. It has also grossly underwhelmed, and never more so than in 2023, when there wasn’t a strong enough pair of sunglasses in the entire state of Ohio to shield what came their way.

We thought at the time that the five-game first round beating was a referendum on the Donovan Mitchell trade saga, which lasted the entire summer and ended with the Cavs pulling off a deal no one saw coming. That single domino set in motion everything that has since made this Knicks team what it is. It gave Jalen Brunson the runway to be a superstar, his own protestations notwithstanding. It left RJ and IQ to be shipped to Toronto for OG. It left all the picks to be used for Mikal. And perhaps most importantly, it made the acquisition of Karl-Anthony Towns more feasible on several levels, not the least of which is that New York only had one small guard to cover for on defense as opposed to two.

That fundamental issue is one the Cavs have never fully overcome, and one could argue that playing two very limited offenses in the first two rounds is the only reason they’re still alive. How the Knicks look to exploit Cleveland’s weak spots (and they usually have a couple on the floor at all times) will be one of several battlegrounds in this series, all of which we’ll get into more tomorrow.

For now though, the thing I find most fascinating about this series is how unique an opportunity it presents. Rarely does a seminal moment in league history so definitively set the trajectory for one franchise who got the guy and another franchise who didn’t. Even rarer do those teams then get to battle it out. Rarer still is a rematch that comes after both teams doubled down on their original gamble, which the Cavs and Knicks have each done by changing coaches and continuing to rejigger the roster around the core premise with which they began.

Now, four years later, we have arrived at that final moment of reckoning.

With all due respect to the Pistons, this is the most fitting ending for this year’s Eastern Conference playoffs. These are the two teams that have been circling each other for longest. These are the teams that have had the battles, including several of New York’s most memorable wins of the Brunson era¹. These are the teams that know each other as intimately as two teams can. These are the teams who know their best opportunity is right in front of them.

And it all begins tomorrow night.

The road to the Finals goes through Donovan Mitchell, because of course it does.

I have a feeling they wouldn’t have it any other way.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. My personal top five: 5. Game 3 at MSG 4. The Brunson / Mitchell duel on March 31, 2023 3. March 2024, when Jalen was injured in the first minute of the game and New York still won 2. Christmas 2025 1. Game 1 in Cleveland