Off We Go...

The Knicks start the preseason on a high note.

Good morning! Let’s get right to our first postgame newsletter of the ‘23-24 season, featuring a (slightly) new format I’m hoping to stick to for the rest of the year.

Preseason G1: Knicks 114, Celtics 107

Hey hey, the Knicks played a game.

And damn if it didn’t feel like seeing your college buddies after a long summer at home.

There’s nothing quite like getting a new season kicked off, and all in all, last night was a jovial affair (even if it featured a lot of players who won’t be making a huge impact for either team once the real games begin). No, it doesn’t count, but the results were reassuring nonetheless.

Most importantly, the Knicks are back.

And off…we…go…

In a New York minute…

A lot of the air was taken out of the balloon when Boston announced it would be resting its top six rotation players on the second night of a back to back. The Knicks didn’t quite go that far, but Thibs took it relatively easy on his main guys, resting Josh Hart and playing Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle and RJ Barrett a combined 35 minutes. Even without much court time from those three, the Knicks had more than enough to beat the C’s C-squad. To their credit, Boston hung around for most of the game after New York’s starters raced out to an early advantage, but the Knicks were ultimately too much for the end-of-the-bench Celtics to handle.

Three Things

1. Continuity wins the day. Last week, I wrote about a strange phenomenon we were about to experience this season.

The franchise that has undergone more consistent roster turnover than any team in the NBA was going to bring back its top eight players for the first time in nearly a quarter century. While we don’t have definitive proof that continuity leads to success, there was something here worth getting excited about.

Well, it didn’t take long to see the proof in the pudding.

In a game that didn’t produce many rock solid takeaways, the comfort level in New York’s starting five was evident from the start. Picking up where they left off last season, we were reminded why the Brunson/Grimes/Barrett/Randle/Robinson unit outscored teams by nearly seven points per 100 possessions.

There was no “getting to know you” phase. No questions about roles. No wondering about who gets the rock and when. Everyone knows their job, and against Boston’s C squad, they did it pretty well.

Blink and you might have missed it, because after Brunson went to the bench six minutes into the first quarter with NY up 18-11, that was that. It didn’t matter. After years of the bench being the best thing about this team, the starters did enough in half a quarter to remind us that those days are over.