News & Blogs
Knicks’ Mitchell Robinson: Limited in Game 1 victory – CBS Sports
Knicks display full team effort in Game 1 win over Hawks: ‘Everybody stepped up and contributed’ – SNY
Mike Brown delivers for the Knicks under immense win-or-else pressure – The New York Times
Playoff Game Thread: Knicks vs. Hawks, Game 1, April 18, 2026 – Posting & Toasting
Knicks 113, Hawks 102: “We have the better Jalen” – Posting & Toasting
Karl-Anthony Towns Reveals His Diet, Meal Plan and Snacks Ahead of Knicks’ Playoff Series vs. Hawks – BleacherReport
Knicks Playoff Notes: Mike Brown passes first test; Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns producing good results – SNY
Knicks TAKE Game 1 vs Hawks 🔥 Brunson & KAT DOMINATE – Knicks Fan TV
Josh Hart SHOCKS NBA world with INSANE defense! #shorts – Knick of Time
The Run.down Knicks vs Hawks R1G1 Postgame Show – The Strickland
Knicks vs Hawks (Game 1) Morning After REACTION! | KFS Playoff Hangover | Knicks Film School – Knicks Film School
YT News
65 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.04.20)”
G’mornin’, all!
Expected Lineup
PG CJ McCollum
SG N. Alexander-Walker
SF Dyson Daniels
PF Jalen Johnson
C O. Okongwu Ques
MAY NOT PLAY
C O. Okongwu Ques
C J. Landale Out
Expected Lineup
PG Jalen Brunson
SG Josh Hart
SF Mikal Bridges
PF O. Anunoby Prob
C K. Towns
MAY NOT PLAY
F O. Anunoby Prob
If Okongwu cannot go, that would be pretty impactful. If I had to pick an overall best player for the Hawks this past Saturday night, it would be that guy.
Hmm. Is there any way in which Okongwu sitting helps the Hawks? If they have no centers, a wing will be guarding KAT at all times. And we still haven’t solved that problem. Katz wrote about it today:
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7210295/2026/04/20/karl-anthony-towns-knicks-hawks-offense-nba/
Wendell Carter Jr., of all people, led the Magic last night. Wemby is seeming kind of inevitable at the moment.
With all of the caveats of “I don’t want to win just because an opponent is injured” in place, I think that we’d figure out the wing-on-KAT issue better than we’d figure out how to contain Okongwu (and his threes). KAT is feeling very confident right now.
And I think we win tonight either way. Just think it would be tougher if Okongwu was in.
There’s now a 70 percent chance Orlando will win that series.
Knocking out Detroit would be huge. Obviously we’d still have to get through Boston and probably Cleveland, but if Detroit does get bounced, our chances of getting to the finals increases immensely.
Dare I say that if the Pistons get bounced, it would have been an easier road for us if we had fallen to that part of the bracket. We do things the hard(er) way, but we still tend to win when we should.
Oh definitely. If we take care of business vs. Atlanta, Boston is going to be an insane series. I do think we can beat them. Even if Tatum was 100%, I think they’re a little bit weaker than last year and we’re a little bit stronger and we are built to beat them. But we also got very lucky in the first two games of last year. We don’t play as well on the road as we did under Thibs and Boston will be super motivated to beat us after we upset them last year. That series has the potential to be one for the ages.
Thinking about hack a mitch…it seems short sighted to employ that strategy early in a quarter where you end up getting your team in the penalty early, no? Atlanta did that but Boston did it last year too and I feel like it kind of backfires. You then sub out Mitch, put KAT back in and you potentially can live at the FT line with KAT and JB.
“Dare I say that if the Pistons get bounced, it would have been an easier road for us if we had fallen to that part of the bracket. We do things the hard(er) way, but we still tend to win when we should.”
Maybe, but it could also be argued that we would have to get through the Celtics either way, so if getting to the finals is the goal and anything short that is abjectly disappointing, then there really isn’t an “easier” scenario.
“There’s now a 70 percent chance Orlando will win that series.”
Those kinds of odds after game 1 are pretty meaningless.
Agree that Hack-a-Mitch is a bad strategy by other teams against us. Let ’em keep doing it.
The wing-on-KAT thing would be vastly offset by the impact on their rebounding (if they decide to go small) and the spacing in their offense, I’m sure. Imagine having Daniels AND Kuminga/Bradley on the court together. Johnson would be in a phone booth all night long.
That said, I think Okongwu is very likely to play. Coaches love to create doubts with the injury announcements.
I will say that I didn’t see Okongwu get injured at any point. If I remember correctly, he finished the game just fine, right? I also imagine that the Knicks have enough sources in the right places to probably sniff out whether or not it is simply a smokescreen. We’ll know later today.
Alan, Fred Katz noted that the Hawks had some success in 4th quarter putting Dyson Daniels on KAT and that may happen again even if Okongwu plays.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7210295/2026/04/20/karl-anthony-towns-knicks-hawks-offense-nba/
No they aren’t. Specifically, teams that do not have home court advantage but win game one have a 70 percent chance of winning the series.
It’s not meaningless.
I love Katz, but I find it hard to look seriously at the sample of what happened after the Knicks were up 19. To me, they made a pretty concerted effort to run prevent offense (which I really hate). They were not going to force potential turnovers by, say, letting KAT iso against Daniels. I wouldn’t read too much into that small sample.
Obviously, NY’s offense is much worse with a wing on KAT. But if the Hawks are going to do it, it seems weird to do it with Daniels, which probably will just let Brunson exploit the NAW matchup when he wants. It will also make it easier for Brunson to get a switch onto CJ, as NAW is not as good a screen navigator as Dyson.
To me, it feels like one of these overcorrections that you only do when you are desperate, and the Hawks shouldn’t be desperate just yet. The Knicks have too many counters to it – including by playing 5 out.
Also an encouraging thing for me is that the Knicks have been much better at getting switches off-ball. Brunson did this a lot on Saturday, and they can do the same with KAT (as they did against the Celtics).
“No they aren’t. Specifically, teams that do not have home court advantage but win game one have a 70 percent chance of winning the series.”
How about teams that do not have home court advantage, lose Game 1, but then win Game 2? (Not that it’s going to happen here.)
Detroit is still going to beat Orlando but what Game 1 proved is that Detroit is not your typical dominant 1 seed which everybody basically knew already.
Towns has had issues against smaller defenders this year, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Just exploit other defenders and let KAT go nuts on the boards.
“It’s not meaningless.”
To me it is. The better team almost always wins a 7-game series. It is probably the case that the team that wins game 1 is the better team 70% of the time and the team that loses game 1 is the better team 30% of the time. But we don’t have any reason to believe that Orlando is the better team yet. We have plenty of reasons to believe that Detroit is the better team.
I have always felt that the most important game of the first 4 in a seven game series is game 2. I think we beat Boston last year because we beat them in game 2, and Indiana beat us because they beat us in game 2. Obviously this is just my opinion.
A couple of things that worried me from Saturday: the Knicks shot a really poor volume from deep. 25 attempts (vs 37 from the Hawks) is probably not going to do it.
The other thing is that the Knicks had a number of defensive breakdowns in very simple offensive actions from the Hawks (their very first basket is an example, the uncontested Gabe Vincent layup in the 3rd or 4th is another one). They really need to clean that up, even if their defense was good overall.
Any strategy is situational. It’s not a bad strategy, for example, if they are up 5 points with 20 seconds to go in the quarter. Or if they are down 5 points. It is a poor possession where the Knicks are almost certain to score under their average rate.
It is a bad strategy is there is a lot of time left in the quarter and it puts the Hawks in the penalty. Take out Mitch, other players shoot free throws on non-shooting fouls – that’s bad.
But in many situations it makes sense.
I truly believe that if the Knicks play their game, the Hawks don’t really have a chance against us. We are a significantly better team than they are. To me, it’s not much different than the other first round series where one team is clearly better than the other.
The only series where the teams are somewhat close based on expectations going into the season and how things stand now are MIN-DEN, LAL-HOU, and DET-ORL. All of the other 5 shouldn’t be very competitive.
Swifty, if you have a series where the better team wins game 1 (like OKC, like us, like Boston, etc), then of course they go on to win the series. It just means the better team wins game 1 the majority of the time. It is a fairly worthless stat.
I see hack-a-Mitch being more of a thing with Boston, as it is clear that Mazzulla is 100% committed to it. He is probably less concerned about his team being in the penalty, as they have smart defenders who don’t send guys to the line a lot. He also has fouls to burn with guys like Walsh, Garza, Hugo, and Harper Jr. to bring in situationally.
Maybe he won’t do it in the first 3-4 minutes of a quarter, but I doubt that he’s worried about being in the penalty as much as Snyder rightly should.
Now if Mitch can get into some kind of rhythm and hit 50+% from the line, that will be the best way to nullify the strategy. The other thing is that similar to Atlanta, Boston is very good in transition, and the take-fouling kind of slows the game down, which probably helps us.
But Mazz is surely gonna employ it until it backfires.
I think Swift’s stat is reasonable. He didn’t say anything about who is the better team. He just referred to the team with home court advantage.
The other thing is that Mitch is not “guaranteed” to be a one-man wrecking crew on the offensive boards when he’s in there. Queta has become very, very good and has the size to deal with Mitch. Boston also has very good rebounders across the lineup, even Sheierman and Prichard are plus rebounders for their size. Boston is 4th in the NBA in DReb%, and is a better rebounding team overall than they were last year.
Atlanta is a fine team but they don’t really have true advantage-creators on their team a la Maxey, Tatum/Brown, Cade, or even Trae Young. IMHO they probably need to play a nearly perfect game AND have the Knicks fall asleep in transition to win. I’ve been generally underwhelmed by Jalen Johnson every time I’ve watched him play. And Dyson Daniels is the second coming of Anthony Roberson but not (yet) much more than that.
I am quite nervous about a potential Boston matchup, but these teams have seen each other so much that I think it’ll be a dogfight 50/50 series — assuming we make it past the Hawks. Not counting chickens!!
Hey, look! A book!
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/alan-sepinwall/serling/9781538773888/
Awesome. Thanks, Alan!
I agree that the stat saying whoever wins game 1 is meaningless, because it doesn’t account for strength of team.
For instance if I say in a street fight, the person who gets the first punch in wins 70% of the time, does that mean if I pick a fight with someone stronger & faster than me, I just need to get the first punch in and I’m good? No. It means that 70% of the time the better fighter gets the first punch in.
That said the odds of flipping 6 coins and getting at least 3 heads are 66%. So if the two teams were equal strength, the team with 1 win has just increased their odds from 50% to 66%. Actually that initial 50% is lower if you consider home field advantage in the NBA, and they were the road team.
Am I the only one who gets a nostalgic chuckle every time Mike K pops in with the Pringles D’Antoni avatar?
“…assuming we make it past the Hawks. Not counting chickens!!”
The only reason I am all for counting chickens is because the thought of losing to this mediocre (hi Bruno!) Atlanta team is so comiclly tragic that I refuse to let it enter my consciousness.
The stat does account for the stronger team, though. That 70 percent stat applies to teams that do not have home court advantage but win game 1. If they don’t have home court advantage, they’re by definition the “weaker” team.
A 30 percent chance of still winning the series is not nothing, so if that’s what you mean by meaningless, then I guess you’re right. But it’s not meaningless that Orlando took away home court advantage from the Pistons and are now up 1 game.
If only the kid in Dazed and Confused had known this at the keg party, he wouldn’t have sold himself on the “just punch first” strategy and wouldn’t have wound up getting his ass kicked. (Which I guess was a bit of a life, rather than probabilities, lesson.)
I’m going to let the following series breathe before making any serious judgments or evaluations:
MIN/DEN
TOR/CLE (*)
ORL/DET
NYK/ATL
HOU/LAL
I don’t need to see anymore of the other three. They’re done.
(*) Yes, even this one. RJ played well, but both Ingram and Barnes were meh and have more to offer and there are still some personnel moves the coach could make and he seems ok with doing it.
OK but these are really bad examples because in both cases the team also won game one, lol. We didn’t win game 2 in Boston to tie in 1-1. We won game 2 to go up 2-0. And Indy won game 1 to go up 2-0.
So in both instances, my stat about the team without home court advantage ultimately winning the series was true!
NBA SERIES PRICE – Bookmaker
04/22 16:00
Orlando Magic + 189
Detroit Pistons -218
My model is giving the Piston a 57% chance of winning the series with a fairly large adjustment for Orlando being better than they looked all season given they’ve had outsized injuries and are now healthy.
It would 74% with no injury adjustment (which imo would be wrong)
It would be 66% with a more moderate adjustment (which could be right).
Call it Detroit between 57% and 66%.
I think the mistake that kid made was thinking that all he had to do was throw the first punch. He wasn’t prepared for it to go any further than that.
oh yeah…happy weed day 😃
Is there really such a thing if one smokes weed every day?
Swifty, can I ask where the 70% stat came from? All playoffs? Only round 1s? Only 1 v 8 round 1s? Only road teams winning game 1s? Only 7 game round 1s, or including 5 game round 1s (or even the stupid 3 game round 1s way back)? There definitely is something more than meaningless in the stat…
you got a good point there sir…
after realizing today was 420, thought to myself I should get high for the day and you know appropriately celebrate…
at that point suddenly remembered I already had about a half hour earlier…
Let’s take the example of a normal person fighting a professional boxer. Whoever gets the first punch in wins 100% of the bouts. It’s my turn to fight Mike Tyson. Should I aim only to get that first punch in, because doing so would mean assured victory for me?
The 70% of teams that win the first game win the series are filled with data from 1v8 matchups where that 1 seed is vastly superior to the 8 seed.
If the 2016 Warriors (73-9) lose the first game against the Houston Rockets (41-41), does that mean the Rockets now have a 70% chance of winning the series?
You live in a simulator where you can replay series over and over again. You give the Rockets game 1 of that series, and play 100 series between the teams. How many series would you expect the Rockets to win?
(If your answer is not 70, the stat is meaningless in this context).
My same gambling model gives the Knicks an 85% chance of winning the Atlanta series from here.
NBA SERIES PRICE
04/20
16:01
Atlanta Hawks +425
New York Knicks -519
Its all 7 games series, all match ups. With the road team winning game 1 of the series.
Admittedly, i did not factor in the match ups (1 vs. 8, etc.). It’s a raw stat.
But I think we can all admit the Magic have increased their odds of winning the series, no?
“But I think we can all admit the Magic have increased their odds of winning the series, no?”
I mean, duh.
But your defending of the odds seemed intended to suggest that Orlando should be favored.
And I’m not even disputing that!
My take is that we don’t yet know who is the better team, and game 1 in and of itself only established that the regular season probably doesn’t mean all that much in making that determination.
I will also say that in the very few cases where a #8 seed beat a #1 seed, it was usually due to things like bad injury luck in one of two ways:
1) the #8 seed had injuries all year and finally got healthy at playoff time: this could definitely be applied to the current situation, and I think it applied to when the Knicks did it way back when. (and I think Philly would have been a strong #7 if not for the freaky appendicitis thing.)
2) the #1 seed had significant injury problems that impacted the series. That happened to the Bulls with Derrick Rose, and more recently to the Bucks when losing to the Heat a couple of years ago.
So I think Orlando has been dogged by injuries to key players the entire year and are finally reasonably healthy (and Jonathan Isaac might be back during this series at some point) so it’s possible that they might indeed be the “better” team. But it’s just as likely that the Pistons got caught flat-footed and needed a wake-up call. That’s why I say that the game is not really a good indicator of who is better, and in that sense is meaningless. However, game 2 is a different animal. If either Boston or the Knicks could have rebounded from devastating losses in game 1 and won game 2 on their home floor, they would have been able to shake off the game 1 loss and just won one of two on the road a the better team likely would have. Instead, the team that wins 2 on the opponent’s floor to start the series has a very strong argumen for indeed being the better team.
Which is why I said:
Not to pick on you, it’s just I can’t help it when I see a logical/statistical fallacy. Yes it does increase their odds. What those odds are depend on how you gage the relative strength of those two teams at this moment.
In the example that each team is equally matched, it increased their odds in the manner I described above. However if you weigh the Pistons as the strong team, adjust that number from 66% downward.
Guys, it was just a stat I found fun and interesting. No need to get so worked up about it, lol.
Injury report unchanged as of yet. OG still probably; Okongwu still questionable.
Here’s the crazy part. Going back to that Warriors/Rockets scenario, even if the Rockets win game 1, based on their regular season record, you’d expect the Warriors to win 99 out of 100 series.
Why? Using Bill James’ formula, the chance the Warriors win any 1 game vs Rockets is 92%. So extrapolate that to coin flips where GS has to win 4 out of 6, it is still overwhelmingly a near certainty for the Warriors.
I did not expect that, but it would seem logical if you think about it.
Need to work in Bayes’ theorem.
Dang, Ngongba is going back to Duke. He was probably the highest rated true center in this draft.
It’s going to be tough to find a Mitch replacement (if we need one). I like Quaintance, but he will probably be gone by #24 and is very young and has had injuries.
This is NOT that complicated.
There are two teams that have X and Y ability.
Based a reasonable estimate of how good each team is, you can calcuate the probabilities of each team winning each game (with an adjustment for home away). Then you can calcuate the chance of each team winning the series given all the possible combinations of results in a 4-7 game series.
I have an excel spreadsheet that does the calculations for me. All I have to do is plug in the team rating and the home/away adjustment for each team (and anything else that changes along the way like injuries, new insight etc..)
I gave Detroit an 85% chance of winning the series at the start based on my team ratings. Now that Orlando has has won game one, it has fallen to around 57%-66% depending on how much better you think the Magic are healthy than they were during the season.
If your ratings are little different than mine you’ll get a slightly different result, but if you don’t trust me just look at the gambling odds I posted above. It is extremely unlikely Vegas is too far off or we’d all be rich.
ALL game 1 stats are uttlerly meaningless without knowing who the better team is.
If by some miracle OKC lost game 1, does anyone in their right mind think the Suns would have a 70% chance of winning the series?
Now that OKC has won game 1, does anyone in their right mind think they only have a 70% chance of winning the series?
feel like i’m peeking in on some dungeons and dragons discussion on whether some poor scrappy wizards statistically have even half a shot against some fierce mechanical giant, it already got a deep cut on…
hell yeah the magic got a better chance today of beating the pistons in a best of seven series than they did a couple of days ago…extrapolation from a simple situation…
just gotta roll a few more nat 20’s…
But that wasn’t what I originally posted, was it? My stat was based on teams that do not have home court advantage and what their chances are of winning the series once they win game 1 and steal home court advantage from the better team. Your OKC example is meaningless because THEY ARE THE HOME COURT TEAM.
seems like what a few have suggested to refute Swifty’s, I call it, “pure data driven statisitic”…is to adjust it with “reasonable estimates” or “opponent specific attributes, like “relative strength”, where that would introduce some bias and probably not get you any better of a statistic than the 70%…to call it meaningless is not accurate…it is probably not that meaningful…but likely based on the sample size has merit…
When I first saw him post that and others respond….I reckoned that was like putting bait on the hook for Strat to enter the fray…Strat have you patented that spreadsheet?
anyway…back to celebrating 420…
It’s a matter of specific cases.
If OKC lost game 1 at home, I’d bet 100k on them to win the series at even money because they would still clearly be a solid favorite to win the series.
The only way 70% is reasonable is if the two teams are close to begin with or there was a key injury that changed game 1 and the series. Then if you lose game 1 at home, you are in a bit of trouble.
Many series are reasonably close to begin with that’s why the overall result may be 70%.
But this is the first round and Detroit was a solid favorite over Orlando. So now they are closer. We could debate the actual probability depending on how good you think the Magic really are and whether there’s a specific matchup issue, but no way is Orlando 70%.
If 70% was right, Vegas would go broke.
I have to say, the people of Boston are amazing fans when it comes to getting runners across their city. No city does it like them, funny accents and all.
Strat, but from the discussion you can tell no one believes the 70% odds for Orlando so Vegas won’t go broke. As you know, they set the odds based on what people believe to make sure there are bets on both sides.
The best analogy I can think of is card-counting.
Shocker: OG and Okongwu both in. Only Landale out.
(And Bryce Elder killing me already.)
Congrats on the book, Alan. And great topic, The Twilight Zone is amazing. I hope the book is a huge success.
You’ve got to celebrate it, Geo. 😉
If i was in Amsterdam i’d go grab a slice of Space Cake, but i’m not… too bad. LOL
I’ve been catching some sleep, and now I’m awake to watch the game… kind of half-zombie. LOL
But it’s fitting as our team seems to start the games just like i am now and then proceeds to step it up in the 2nd half. 😉
Knicks actually won something over the Lakers today. They were tied in record so there was a tiebreaker to determine who would draft first. The Knicks won the tiebreaker and will draft at number 24 instead of at number 25. LGK
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7213487/2026/04/20/nba-draft-lottery-tiebreakers-2026/
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