2020-21 Game Thread: Knicks @ Hawks

I love the idea of road trips in the era of COVID where there are no crowds and thus home court no longer really exists.

Anyhow, the Knicks head to Atlanta to take on the Atlanta Hawks, who just lost to the 4-2 Cleveland Cavaliers, whose fans at Cavalierblogger, I am sure, are also convincing themselves that the Cavaliers are for real. In any event, according to the transitive property of team ass kicking, the Knicks beat the Cavs and the Cav beat the Hawks, so this means that the Knicks will beat the Hawks (“But wait, Brian!” you might annoyingly shout, “The Cavs beat the Sixers and the Knicks lost to the Sixers, so shouldn’t that mean that the Knicks beat the Sixers, too?” To which I would respond, “SILENCE!”).

Getting to play against Trae Young and Cam Reddish also allows us for the always (never) entertaining game of “Wait, maybe the Hawks did win the Doncic trade?” (they didn’t).

The Hawks like to score, so it will be interesting to see the Knicks match the Hawks on the offensive end. The Knicks are probably going to need to shoot a lot more threes tonight, so let’s hope that they’re up to it.

No Burks, so we don’t have to see yet what Thibs will do with the rotation when he returns.

As I noted in the Raptors game, the Knicks haven’t been over .500 after New Year’s Day since Jason Kidd was on the team, so this would be nice to see (yes, they were over .500 33 games into the ill-fated 2017-18 season, but the vagaries of COVID meant that that was all before January 1st while now, Game 7 is after New Year’s).

Let’s go, winning record Knicks!