Knicks Morning News (2024.05.01)

Well guys, I have no thoughts on Games 6-7 because in my mind the series is over. We had no business winning any of the games against this team but we’d stolen three and were about to steal a fourth running on fumes. That was our chance. There won’t be another Embiid migraine game, and Maxey’s confidence will only grow now that he’s realized that with Embiid as he is, he is the clear best player in the series. Their role players have started contributing and if Embiid is more than 50% they will start blowing us out.

Needless to say, I don’t expect to win the next two games or even be competitive. I’m dreading that they will even be played. I thought we had done a nice neat seppuku, but the situation we’re in now is much worse as we we are bound to collapse in slow motion for all the world to see. There’s a scene early in the same show, Shogun, where one of the western characters is casually boiled alive in a hot cauldron — volunteering to play the Sixers is looking more like that. Seppuku, it turns out, was too optimistic.

No point rehashing the mistakes that led us to this eminently avoidable disaster. Everything that had to happen, happened. Dolan’s Razor willed it, and so it was done. The Iron Law of Knicks Fandom stands: everything good that happens, like the G2 ending, is only to set up an even more crushing disappointment.

For me this was the worst moment of my 32 years as a fan since Ewing’s G7 finger roll in 1995. It’s worse than Miller 8 in 18 seconds because that was anyone’s series at that point. This collapse directly turns a massive achievement, beating a superior opponent in 5 games, into the ignominious disappointment of blowing a 3-1 lead. There simply isn’t any coming back from this. Bet it all on Sixers in 7 while the odds are still good.

Are we forgetting Game 2 already and how the Knicks stole that game?

That was one game early on in a series that was still wide open, and it happened due to multiple well-documented officiating mishaps in our favor.

Last night was infinitely worse. No team in the play-by-play stat tracking era has ever lost a playoff game when up 6 with 30s or less to go. No refs to blame here, this was a pure 100% choke-job setting up the most gut-wrenching playoff series collapse in NBA history. This one sequence was worth three playoff wins by itself. It’s the difference between a triumphant gentleman’s sweep and a first-round exit blowing a 3-1 lead. I can’t think of any single 30-second sequence as calamitous in the last 30 years, for ANY team, other than those involving catastrophic injury.

I’m honestly beside myself because I couldn’t have imagined such a perfectly tailored letdown. Even I believed we had it won on the Deuce jumper! A basketball movie ending this way would be hackneyed and implausible. It was just so perfect in its terribleness.

Things like this honestly makes me wonder if I live in a simulation — these kind of events are just too unlikely for an indifferent universe to spawn them randomly with such perfect timing. The other possibility would be that, contrary to everything else I’ve ever observed in other areas of life, there is a God. And His most salient attribute is that He absolutely fucking HATES Knick fans.

LOL, so this series loss will be worse than the GSW in 2016? The team with the most wins in the regular season in league history going up 3-1 only to lose the finals?

Yes. They lost because of non-basketball things first and foremost, Draymond Green’s stupidity. If we lost the series because OG Anunoby punched Maxey in the balls it’d be funny, but not a choke job.

And frankly, I could tolerate the worst playoff collapse in NBA history a lot better after our back-to-back MVP had led us to a championship just the year before than in the current context, where it’s been the NBA’s boot stomping on our collective faces for 30 years.

Brunson became the 3rd player in NBA history (MJ, LeBron) to score 125+ pts with 25+ asts in span of 3 consecutive playoff games.

This would be a nice moral victory were Maxey not a mortal lock to match or exceed this achievement by Game 7.

As others have pointed out, the 1997 team was screwed by the league, they didn’t choke on the court. They were also not as great as their record: 10th in SRS (3.31) with an expected record of 50-32. This year’s team is actually significantly better — we’ve had 6th in SRS at 4.36 with 53-29 expected record.

Either way, it’s pretty cavalier to think we’d have gotten through the 61-win Heat, let alone the ’97 Bulls who destroyed them in 5.

The Knicks won games 6 and 7 after Reggie’s 25 pt quarter in 1994.

Not comparable. Reggie played great, sure, but that was a game we were trailing basically the whole way. We didn’t collapse, we just lost. This is the only scenario you list that ends happily.

The Knicks forced game 7 and had a Ewing finger roll to win it in 1995.

This is the closest. Miller stole our soul in game 1 and we had to play out the agonizing string for six more games only to come up just short. If we had won Game 1 there is no Game 7 and no Ewing finger roll. This is the outcome I expect in this series: Game 7 at best lost by inches with us bricking a game-winner, or giving one up to Maxey-Embiid. Another likely alternative is us never even being competitive in either of G6-7.

The Knicks and Heat were both distant runners up to the Bulls in 1997 regardless of the brawl.

Correct, but the Heat were so odious that beating them was its own reward, kind of like the Sixers now. Still, this was far more screwjob than chokejob.

This 2024 version feels relatively benign so far.

That’s because you haven’t yet processed our inevitable losses in G6 and G7. Once you do, it’s gonna sting.