Top 10 Questions for Knicks vs Pacers

Plus, my official series prediction.

Good morning! We’re almost there, as Game 1 tips off tomorrow night. Hopefully the Knicks are resting up. As I’ll discuss today, they’ll certainly need it.

Top 10 Questions for Knicks vs Pacers

Many years ago, long before life with multiple jobs and multiple kids, I decided to take a yoga class on a lark.

I’d never taken a yoga class before, but my gym offered them, so I figured, why not? At the time, I was working a law job for a solo practitioner who was never around, so I practically lived at the gym and was in the best shape of my life. Still, I couldn’t get as toned as I wanted to be. The people who took yoga all seemed to have a body fat percentage in the low single digits. It seemed worth a shot.

Despite how fit those people were, I didn’t go into the class thinking it would be hard. On the contrary, I was worried that it would be a waste of time. How hard could this downward dog stuff possibly be?

45 minutes later, when I was barely able to walk out of the yoga studio on my own volition, I realized how wrong I was. What I quickly realized is that I had been forced to use all sorts of muscles I’d been completely ignoring in my regular workouts. It’s not that any of the individual activities were hard in the strictest sense, but my body wasn’t prepared for what was required to be successful.

Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson sure knows the feeling.

The soundbite containing this quote came after the Indiana Pacers’ Game 5 defeat of the top seeded Cavs. Atkinson concluded by saying that when you play Indy, “it’s a different type of game” than when you play any other top team in the league. Referring to their unrelenting pace, the NBA’s Coach of the Year admitted that his Cavs “couldn’t match it.” Now, they’re home for the summer.

Like yoga, there are ostensibly more difficult tasks than beating the Pacers. They don’t have an all-world superstar like Nikola Jokic. They don’t offer the defensive switchability of the Thunder or Celtics. There’s no one-on-one maestro who can “get you a bucket” as easily as Ant Edwards or Jalen Brunson.

That’s all true. But these other challenges are things coaches and players are more used to game-planning and preparing for than this hellacious Indiana attack. When you factor in their speed (3rd highest playoff pace; 7th highest in the regular season), how much they pass the ball (the most passes per game by far among playoff teams; 2nd highest in the regular season), how nearly their entire rotation can space the floor (TJ McConnell is the only rotation player who lives exclusively inside the arc) and most of all how well they shoot it (4th most efficient shooting team in the regular season; best by a mile in the playoffs), you can begin to see why this team dispatched the Bucks and Cavs so easily.

And that’s only talking about one end of the court. As Atkinson said (and as we saw when these same teams played a year ago), Indy will guard you for the entire length of the floor. That’s not something most teams will or should try, but when you go a legit 10 deep like the Pacers do, it becomes a viable option. In the half court, while Rick Carlisle can’t deploy any single elite stopper and doesn’t have the personnel to switch as seamlessly as other top squads, almost everyone in the rotation is at least an above average defender.

When you put it all together, if you’re not ready to play the Pacers, you’ll wind up feeling like I did after that fateful yoga class (which, I will admit, was also my last yoga class). Hell, even if you are ready, they’re good enough to get the best of you.

So how can the Knicks avoid the same fate as the one that befell them a year ago? Here are my top three questions (and answers) that will decide what happens, plus seven bonus questions to consider on top: