Top 10 Games of the Season

Plus, a special announcement!

Good morning! The NBA’s play-in tournament begins tonight, with Lakes Pels tipping off at 7:30 pm followed by Warriors Kings at 10. Should be a fun appetizer for tomorrow, when the Sixers and Heat face off.

On that note, let’s get into today’s edition.

Special Announcement!

Before we get to the rest of today’s newsletter, I want to take a minute to announce a very special partnership Knicks Film School has made with Autograph, the first app that rewards you for being a Knicks fan.

The concept of Autograph is simple: do the things you’re already doing as a fan (like reading and listening to Knicks Film School!) and get credit for it. It’s incredibly easy:

• Download the app.

• Enjoy Knicks content through the app like you normally would, including this very newsletter, plus KFS pods and other great stuff from a variety of sources.

• Start racking up rewards like signed memorabilia, discounted tickets, and more.

If it sounds too good to be true, you’re in good company because I thought the same thing at first. Then I started poking around the app, reading a few blog posts, and getting little trophies along the way. It's fun, easy, and maybe a little addicting.

Best of all, later this week, Autograph is going to be selling Game 1 tickets at MSG for just $24 in commemoration of the ‘24 Playoffs. I shit thee not.

So yeah…get to downloading, take a few minutes to check it out, and let me know what you think. Enjoy!

Top 10 Games of the Season

I did this column last season, but didn’t run it until after the Knicks were eliminated because there was so much to dig into the week before the first playoff game.

Things are a little bit different this time around, as we won’t know New York’s opponent until Wednesday night, so any real analysis of the first round will have to wait until later in the week. As such, let’s take a final moment to look back at what was unquestionably a special regular season.

We’ve talked about the 50 wins, about the achievement of getting the second seed, and about doing it all while overcoming approximately 140 player games lost to injury¹. What we haven’t talked enough about is how rarely this team let us down. Unlike last season, which featured utterly heartbreaking losses against the Mavs and Bulls and dispiritingly poor performances against the Thunder, Nets, Blazers and Mavs (again), we’ve rarely had much to lament over the last six months, either because of the result, the effort, or both.

Not that there haven’t been some soul-crushers. Booker’s game winner. The highway robbery in Houston. The Spurs and Thunder games, more recently. For the most part though, appreciation for New York’s effort has overshadowed the potential negativity each time.

It’s why this is a bit different from last year’s list, when two of the top three entrants were games that made me question whether our very existence was a ploy by Satan for his personal amusement. This year’s top 10 is (with a few exceptions) pretty positive.

It was also extremely tough to narrow down.

Among the games that didn’t make the cut: beating Harden in his Clippers debut (and avoiding a 2-5 record in the process)…the 116-114 thriller in Atlanta in mid-November…beating LeBron and AD in LA…destroying the Magic to end a stretch of eight losses in 11 games…grounding down the Kings’ offense in Sacramento (and then following it up with an even more impressive win in Golden State)…Donte’s crazy fourth quarter against Brooklyn…the Game 82 win over Chicago.

The two toughest cuts were both wins over the Bucks, first on Christmas Day, and then nine days ago when the Knicks overcame an 11-point halftime deficit to take it to Milwaukee in their own building.

That’s 10 honorable mentions, each of was arguably more satisfying than any single victory the franchise had from 2002 to 2009. Fun times, they were.

As I’ve said, it’s been quite a season…

10. Game 33: Knicks 112, Wolves 106 - OG’s Debut

The thing about this game we’ll probably forget a few years from now is that New York had dropped three straight and eight of 13 coming into it. Minnesota, meanwhile, was first in the West. More than that, they dominated the Knicks as thoroughly as any team had all season when the teams met previously in mid-November.

So the game mattered, even putting aside the earth-shattering trade the front office had just pulled off. That much we knew.

What we didn’t realize is that it would be the first of several performances over the month of January that would force us to consider the revamped roster in an entirely different light that we may have originally anticipated.