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2023-24 Game Thread: Knicks vs. Celtics, Let’s Get 50 Opener, which is still a thing

It is time for the Knicks to make another statement and beat the Celtics at home to…

A. Keep 50 wins alive
B. Keep #2 seed alive
C. Put some doubt in the Celtics’ minds
and, perhaps most importantly…
D. Beat the stupid fucking Celtics

Let’s go, Knicks!

208 replies on “2023-24 Game Thread: Knicks vs. Celtics, Let’s Get 50 Opener, which is still a thing”

Can’t wait for the Celtics PA guy – “Jayson Tatum….threeeeeeeeeee” 🤮

I have the most begrudging, reluctant respect for how good Porzingis has become

Josh seemed to be in a lot of pain but has played well since and even hit a nice looking shot?

Mitch is getting to most of the balls we’re used to him getting to…but can’t seem to hold on to any of them

Playing such a high volume, excellent 3pt shooting team is so freaking annoying. Go up 8 looking good then you blink for a second and back to back 3s has the lead down to 2.

Horford would be the greatest 3 point shooter in NBA history if he only played the Knicks

Hubie, he was clutching his wrist like it was pearls and grimacing. Been perfectly fine since.

Glad Deuce has the mane out again.

I admittedly didn’t see it closely but that foul call on Mitch against Tatum seemed week, love that we’re hustle bunnying these guys to death though

I like the announcers ragging on Tatum for being a crybaby. Hope he gets T’ed up.

The foul on Mitch was legit. He’s actually lucky they didn’t call a flagrant for landing in Tatum’s landing area. I really think that Mitch needs floor time. He’s obviously slightly off. OG is looking better.

Al Horford is great st three points shooting. It’s crazy
So is Bogey at least

Horford’s eyes must light up when Mitch is on him cause he knows he’s gonna get a ton of wide open 3s.

I love Deuce, but this matchup might be terrible for him. The Celtics are just too damn big at every position and too damn good at recovering on shooters.

Horford really is unbelievable. I once said that you could replace Randle with him and not lose too much. I don’t think that was crazy.

That was quite a flurry. Bogey is really an enigma. You have to have heart rooting for him.

Watching Bogey cook KP with that reverse lay made me feel unspeakable amounts of glee.

Bogey annoyed me by missing that wide ass open 3 but he made up for it with that crazy reverse layup!

I’d love to know what the delta between Brunsons defense with and without charges is….

Knicks came to play tonight. They look like contenders so far tonight.

Terrific basketball.

Crazy lineup, too…

Brunson
OG
Bojan
Precious
Hartenstein

Good work, Thibs!

We’d be up by 20+ if Precious wasn’t trying to win his rotation spot back in a three-minute stretch of bad offense.

OG!!!!

I called this yesterday btw. I said I wanted their best team tonight so this could happen. I’m a fucking optimist baby!

LET’S GO

I’m sure nothing was meant by it…but I reeeeeally don’t like Tatum grabbing OG’s elblow

It’s January in New York and the weather is gorgeous

Who’s the bigger whiner – Tatum or Luka?

I’ll answer my own question- Tatum

Josh Hart with a double-double at the half, 13 pts and 10 rbs. Plus 4 assists. What a gamer.

You can get 37-1 for the Knicks to win it all on Fanduel. That’s a quality number.

Need a big push to start the 3rd to get them to wave the white flag early.

If this is the Bogdanovic we get in the playoffs, aggressive, taking it to the rim and making shots, the league is FUCKED.

Let’s go

Obviously we only go as far Jalen “better than Jayson Tatum” Brunson takes us, but we’re a totally different team when we get the Bogey we were promised

The Hart Foundation was pretty amazing too

It is incredible how we run every chance we get. There was a solid 15 years or so when we avoided transition opportunities like they were gonorrhea.

Also, having a lot of good players around an actually great player? Not a terrible strategy.

Listening to Kennie, Shaq, and Charles salivate over each of the Knicks on national TV is like ear ambrosia.

“Jalen Brunson is the best player in the East.” Stuff like that.

Anyone still think we overpaid for OG?

Well, it’s a known factual fact that we could have gotten him just for a few draft picks

Fuckin’ nice to have the best player between these two teams

Halftime chuckleheads: “Brunson has been the best player in the East, by far.”

I starting to think that there is a rational argument on the side of “we’re better without Julius” narrative.

It’s semi-coherent when Bogey is playing like Bogey

Man this is the stupid kind of game where someone gets hurt. Both teams need to empty the benches.

Yeah, Mitch looks like he just got taken out of mothballs and isn’t right yet

Mitch is so slow

He couldn’t even move to catch a ball that was passing nearby

Mitch is moving like he has cement on his shoes, but I guess that’s to be expected, he’ll have to play himself into shape at this point.

Mitch has been eating too many Po Boy sandwhiches while he was out. He fat and slow.

I feel a huge Celtics run coming on. They will end q3 within 12

Cue the Debbie Downer music….

I feel a huge Celtics run coming on. They will end q3 within 12

This has to be a bit right?

Just about the only thing I hate about the Knicks is their inbounds plays. They’ve sucked at it for years now.

I know he is not there yet, but Mitch is starting to get his offensive rebounds.

Feels like this is the best a Knick has played since Clyde in the Finals

When Melo had his scoring runs he never made it look this easy

Yeah Brunson seemed to tweak his ankle on that last foul so just sit him rest of the game especially since they play tomorrow.

My favorite Knick games are the ones where they take a nice early lead and then pour it on and pull away.

Brunson is Bernard King level. That’s very high praise. I wouldn’t go above that because Bernard was that good.

But for those of you that are too young to remember the Bernard King era, that’s how it felt. The dude was the man.

I starting to think that there is a rational argument on the side of “we’re better without Julius” narrative.

There’s no way we are better without Julius.

But I’ve been saying for awhile that J-Hart gives us most of the boards and assists with better overall defense than him. So it mostly comes down to making up for Julius’s scoring. Randle is not one of those super efficient high scorers. So if you up Brunson’s usage a bit and get some help from OG and DDV who are both more efficient than him, even of the net of those 3 taking extra shots is not super efficient, it’s not a disaster relative to Randle either.

Where we miss Randle most is when we need extra size and just to take the never ending stress off these guys to perform at such a high level every single damn night. If we had Randle he would take over some games and ease the burden on others and also reduce their minutes.

We are not better or even as good without Randle, but he’s easier to replace than you would intuitively think and definitely easier to replace than Brunson when you don’t even have a backup PG.

Honest question for Hart detractors: have you come around?

I remain concerned that teams won’t guard him in the postseason but there’s no doubt he’s had a great year.

Jalen Brunson is by far the greatest Knick guard since Clyde … and it isn’t even close.

I think the argument for the team improving without Randle is that Hart is less turnover prone and more switchable on defense.

I remain concerned that teams won’t guard him in the postseason but there’s no doubt he’s had a great year.

He really thrives in the type of offense they are running, and it hides his shooting deficiencies. I do love what he brings.

The Hart conundrum is a lot like the one Marcus Smart presented to the Celtics: a heart & soul guy and a huge reason for their success. Yet he always killed them when they got deep in the playoffs bc he couldn’t/wouldn’t shoot.

Answer to this morning’s poll question- who would you rather play in the first round?

I don’t care who it is, we’ll fuck them up

Hey Mazzula, put Queta in, because i only watch the Celtics when they’re playing the Knicks.

I def wanna see the whole team with Randle back, but I do wonder what will happen to the team passing and “flow.”

Right now almost everyone makes the “right” pass. Not so much in The Before Time, whatever the reasons.

I remain concerned that teams won’t guard him in the postseason but there’s no doubt he’s had a great year.

Agree.

He doesn’t have to be be great from 3. He just has be good enough and willing enough to have to guard. If he’s wide open and afraid to shoot or bricking in those circumstances, then we’ll have an issue.

Maybe we should pay attention to the guy whose season average on threes is almost 43%.

After this 4th quarter Thibs might play all 5 starters 48 mins the rest of the season.

I love Thibs, but there’s literally no other coach in the league that would be losing his mind the way he is.

The Celtics were shooting 29% from 3 when the starters left the game. They are now shooting 37.5%. New York is winning by 16 and they are not outshooting Boston for deep. It’s pretty cool.

It must have been so hard for Thibs to not put his starters back in the last 2 minutes

Sorry guys, misinterpreted the basketball gods there. Turns out they were warning me that Brunson was about to get hurt, a far worse outcome. There I go again with the undue optimism!

Hahaha. Jesus. Bit of a different post game locker room after that …

Apparently this is the first Celtics home loss to an Eastern Conference team since the IQ game last March.

This has been a great week. The team didn’t really have any real signature wins since Randle went down. Now they’ve got two. And even though they will miss Randle it doesn’t feel like we’re shorthanded any more.

Their bench shot 61% from three (11-18). Glad the game’s only 48 minutes long…

Bulls clinched the 9th seed tonight so they should be sitting their best players on Sunday. Knicks take care of business tomorrow they’ll get 50 wins. A bit worried though that tomorrow might be tougher game than it should be.

One cannot draw serious conclusions from this game as the Celtics were not 100% into it, which is understandable. We did beat their starters handily though, and this tells me we won’t be an easy out should we meet in the playoffs at some point. Our defense was at stretches problematic and we gave them a ton of open looks. Thankfully, they were missing a lot. The play of our bench still remains a glaring issue, and so is the play of Mitchell Robinson who is nowhere close to what he was before the injury. It is a little bit alarming that he has not been improving since he came back.

We just beat the Bucks and Celtics on the road and Charles Barkley out here predicting Knicks lose in first round to the Indiana Pacers.

After listening to Shaq, Barkley, Earnie and Smith for 5 minutes I feel dumber. It was 5 wasted minutes of my life.

One cannot draw serious conclusions from this game as the Celtics were not 100% into it, which is understandable.

The Celtics were playing hard for the first 20 minutes of the game. Then the Knicks went on a 14-0 run and that was that. The Celtics were playing hard. But let the Celtics use their excuses. We’ll see them again in the conference finals. I can’t wait.

The best part is before the game Shaq begrudgingly said Knicks were 2nd best team in the East but after the game agreed with Barkley that Indiana would beat the Knicks.

Also last week Shaq said Orlando would easily beat the Knicks in the 1st rd which Jamal Crawford and even Candace Parker strongly disagreed with.

If we win and Bucks lose tomorrow Sunday will be must see TV. It would be excellent to have home court guaranteed in the first 2 rounds.

New magic numbers [(—) owns the tiebreaker]:
Knicks: — BKN, CHI
Bucks (MIL): 4 @OKC, @ORL
Magic (ORL): 1 @PHI, MIL
Cavs (NYK): 1 IND, CHA
Pacers (IND): 1 @CLE, ATL

I truly wonder whether PHI would rather avoid us and might factor that in to their thinking. I think they would rather avoid the play-in no matter what, but they might go all out to get to the 5 seed.

Magic-Sixers and Pacers-Cavs tomorrow will be fun for scoreboard watching.

Edit: tiebreaker rules are laughable at times. So in a three-way tie between Cavs, Bucks and Knicks, the Knicks end up in 4th!? Come on now.

Looks like Bucks are going to punt tomorrow’s game at OKC, gonna be really interesting to see what they do Sunday at Orlando.

I’m all for a 50-win season and a 2nd seed. Again, if we wind up facing the Sixers or Heat, it’s bad luck, but whatever, run with it. There is no easy route to the conference finals.

BTW, I’m wondering why the minutes police aren’t expressing outrage at the C’s playing their starters tonight. What if one of their starters got hurt, or if the game got close and one of the starters played 30+ minutes and got hurt?

The minutes police criticism of Thibs relative to other coaches over the last couple of weeks has been really stupid.

BTW, I’m wondering why the minutes police aren’t expressing outrage at the C’s playing their starters tonight. What if one of their starters got hurt, or if the game got close and one of the starters played 30+ minutes and got hurt?

Because we’re not Celtic fans and we don’t care if their coach is a moronic, but yes it’s stupid they were playing.

“Because we’re not Celtic fans and we don’t care if their coach is a moronic, but yes it’s stupid they were playing.”

Or alternatively, it’s a common practice and Thibs should not be considered an outlier (not to mention the possibility that the entire premise is dumb because any coach who didn’t think that way at all times would be a loser over the long haul…)

Mazzulla with the weak sauce after the game: it didn’t matter because the Knicks were desperate and they weren’t. Loser energy.

Are the Bucks trying to escape the Sixers?

Sounds like a good idea to me.

finished up Fallout today…those 8 episodes went pretty darn quick…

fantastic voyage it is…sooooooo many flashbacks to when I played the game…

really enjoyed them using the same composer as Westworld…their music is brilliant…

Mazzulla with the weak sauce after the game: it didn’t matter because the Knicks were desperate and they weren’t. Loser energy.

That’s interesting. I was thinking maybe he played his starters and wanted them to get the message they can’t take the night off against anyone, but it sure doesn’t sound like he was thinking that way.

Also, I noticed Thibs played nine guys and Burks wasn’t one of them

I was beaming for so much of this game.

I take no credit for the idea, as it was obvious, but I knew that as soon as OG was back, they would just start winning, like, every game. That’s how valuable that dude is. But it’s still amazing to actually see it happen.

I love you, OG! Take all of the money!

By Post Author

There’s a youtube channel called Awful Coaching where a guy breaks down film of NBA defenses while screaming like Sam Kinison at their mistakes. The Knicks, however, are the only team that makes him happy (and keeps his blood pressure in check.)

(His videos when critical of teams are titled stuff like: “Darvin Ham is why I could never bring a child into this society” and “Doc Rivers is proof that there is no god in this world”)

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