So here we are 62 days from our championship, and I’m still watching Knicks playoffs highlight reels. I think I’ve watched the game 4 comeback so many times I can recite every bucket we made in the 3rd and 4th quarter.

Still doesn’t seem real….

That’s better than watching baseball, which is all that’s on this time of year.

I still watch highlights of Game 1 vs Cavs and each win against the Spurs several times a week before I go to sleep.

I’m still waiting for the official hour plus HBO sports/espn documentary about the entire season starting with them losing last year to the pacers and firing Thibs/hiring Mike Brown.

Edit: apparently stiller is working on one with A24 and HBO and it’s going to be a multi-episode series that covers multiple eras and culminates with this championship season. No official release date has been announced though. Can’t wait for that though!

Game 1 against the Cavs gets slept on IMO. It was a much crazier comeback than game 4.

Game 4 was 29 points, but with like 20 mins to play.

Game 1 was 22 point in 7 minutes 19 seconds.

For comparison, the Knicks had already cut the Spurs lead to 12 with 7 minutes to go in game 4.

Also Sam Merrill’s shot to end game 1 is insane. That thing was 80% down and came back out.

Game 1 vs Cleveland also might be mike brown’s best game as a Knick.

And lastly that Mikal Bridges 3 over Mobley might be the second most impressive bucket of the entire postseason (the first being Brunson’s layup on Wemby in game 5).

If you guys really want to have some fun go deeper. I don’t mean Atlanta and Philly, I mean go back to 2024 & 2025! I’ve been watching Knicks-Sixers round 1, Knicks-Celtics round 2, even a little Knicks Pacers ECF because it doesn’t hurt any more. It’s actually kinda fun to watch bc if you go back and watch this team under Thibs after getting used to watching it under Brown the difference is so stark.

Hold on. OG’s tip in has been relegated…?

lol not at all. I mean impressive in the sense of how hard it was to do.

This is an insane shot with an incredible defender draped all over him…

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1ti8ifi/highlight_mikal_bridges_dribbles_dribbles/

Fuck ‘dem picks.

This one might be #3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zipTLJ95cM

Those are three of the best defenders in the NBA! Wemby, Mobley, Dyson Daniels. And they got abused.

Boy were we peaking.

The KAT 3 in that jerk Keldon Johnson’s mug while getting assaulted is up there as well…

I’m pretty sure if you check out the game thread in game 5 against Atlanta, when I first said the Knicks were going to win the championship, it was right after that play. That was the moment I believed (and more importantly, the moment I bet! The Knicks were still +2000).

That actually might be a fun exercise for a slow weekend…

when did you believe? Not that we could win, that we will win. I entered the postseason a vocal skeptic, but I was all in after game 5 vs the Hawks.

The KAT 3 in that jerk Keldon Johnson’s mug while getting assaulted is up there as well…

Good call!

#4 for me is either that one or this one from KAT a few minutes later:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1u2nf28/highlight_karlanthony_towns_scores_the_tough/

Let’s just call it a tie.

The Day The Cavs Quit was immensely satisfying.

My wife is from Detroit and we had watched the Cavs-Pistons series intently. Probably watched every second of it. And my takeaway from that was that even though the Cavs squeaked out the series, that they weren’t shit. That they’d fold against us.

We got ahead 2-0 and then went to Cleveland, and by the end of that game the Cavs just tapped out. The game was actually still in reach for them at the end in terms of the score, but mentally they had quit. They stopped contesting plays on defense and looked like they just wanted their season to end. In game 4 they didn’t even try. Just played out the string like it was game 82 of the regular season after they had won 31 games and missed the playoffs.

I’ve watched these clips so many times I love that I know what plays you mean without even watching video.

JK did you watch vincoug’s video the other day? It actually does a good job showing how the Cavs tried so many different things up until that point and the Knicks had an answer for everything, and it presents that as the moment they knew they had nothing left to do.

And that to me is the most amazing thing about this team when you compare it to previous years (and I think it would be awesome if we could talk about this peacefully without anyone getting angry)…

This year’s team was famous for being able to solve everything! Whatever anyone threw at us, if it worked, we figured it out, and it stopped working. Then we figured out the next thing. And the next thing. It got to the point where we were calling the Knicks expert problem solvers.

But think about that for a second. That’s brand new!

Thibs’ teams were famous for not being able to solve anything! Whatever anyone threw at us, if it worked, we kept running once more into the breach, doing the same thing expecting different results.

Thibs had a saying about adjustments he was known for: before you adjust, check and see if the effort is there, check and see if the execution is there. But his fatal flaw was he always saw the potential for more effort.

I know there are folks like Owen and Jowles who think coaching is overrated and almost meaningless, but I find it very hard to buy that when we just got a front row seat to one of the most dramatic turnarounds I’ve ever seen.

BTW I’m sitting an airport waiting for my delayed flight to board so forgive me for spamming the board on a Saturday.

Apropos of nothing but I played my first game of pick up basketball in a long time here in Greece last night and the major takeaway is that the Portuguese play basketball like the Argentinian play soccer

I ask again: do people have favorite highlight compilations? Always on lookout on new ones. They’ve replaced action movies as my best treadmill entertainment.

I just open YouTube and consume what the algorithm gives me.

I never actually had a YouTube account before so I have no history other than Knicks which makes it pretty easy.

I had already seen and loved the video that vincoug posted. More than once. Great stuff.

I had a back and forth going with my best friend from high school, who was giving me a line of “I hope the Knicks beat the Spurs but I think they’re gonna get swept” and my response was that he was looking at the Knicks through the wrong lens. That this was not the Thibs Knicks, and that this Knicks team played a beautiful brand of team basketball on both ends, the likes of which I had never seen in 30+ years of following the team like a religion.

It’s palpable when you watch games from the playoff run. We run so many actions, so many counters, fill in the gaps so well. Mike Brown coached at an elite level.

TBH I first suspected we might eon the championship about a week after we won the championship. Still haven’t ruled out it being rescinded at some point and retroactively awarded to Wemby

I watched a YouTube video right before the playoffs started about why the Knicks could possibly win a championship and I went in truly believing we were being slept on.

Definitely had my doubts and freak out after we went down 2-1 to Atlanta. It’s wild
to think that we were actually down in the first round.

I think I started to believe when we went up 3-0 against Philly. After we came back against Cleveland in game one I knew we were going to win it all. That win felt like an exorcism of game 1 against Indy last year and when we won that game I just felt like the team knew they could win.

Good one, Pags.

I hope the Knicks beat the Spurs but I think they’re gonna get swept

This was such a common perception it was hilarious. Never in my life was I more convinced that a mainstream idea was being regurgitated without any critical thinking.

Knicks v Spurs was men v boys. It was one of the easiest mismatches to ever see coming. All people had to do was look and see how many Thunder players we’re injured in the WCF.

And if it weren’t for some of the most one-sided officiating ever in games 2 & 3 it would have been 4-0 with a healthy MOV.

I ask again: do people have favorite highlight compilations? Always on lookout on new ones. They’ve replaced action movies as my best treadmill entertainment.

Alan this is a really cool compilation of Knicks players celebrating, gives me goosebumps every time

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8WYXtRq/

“Thibs’ teams were famous for not being able to solve anything! Whatever anyone threw at us, if it worked, we kept running once more into the breach, doing the same thing expecting different results.”

It’s impossible to have an intelligent discussion with someone who has such simplistic all-or-none views.

Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Thibs was an excellent coach for the Knicks, and Brown was even better.
2) Thibs beat two teams that were better than any they faced in the EC playoffs this year, and lost to a better team (and a much better coach) than these Spurs (and Mitch Johnson).

That video was cool and all, but it neglects to mention that our offense kinda sucked vs. San Antonio. Our eFG% was .495 for the series, yet you would think from watching that video that we were some kind of offensive juggernaut. The Thunder had a .497 eFG% against the Spurs basically without two of their starters!

And let’s dispense with the myth that the Spurs were some kind of all-time great defensive team. Their defensive rating was only slightly better than ours during the regular season, and not as good as the 2025 Celtics that was beaten by Thibs, whose team posted an eFG% of .508 in that series.

It was actually on defense that Brown made the most difference. We lost to Indiana becuse we couldn’t stop them from scoring. Against the Spurs, we held them to 18 points in the 4th Q of game 5, 16 points in game 4. 23 points in game 3, and 19 points in game 1. We almost blew game 2 by giving up 29 points, but thankfully, Wemby passed the ball to Castle’s back.

The fact is that the three teams we played in the EC playoffs were not good, and all were not well coached. The Spurs were bad on offense and ware also not well coached. Thibs lost to two teams in the three years leading up to his firing: Carlisle and Spo. Two of those teams went to the finals and one had the lead against a fully healthy Thunder team on the road in game 7 before Hali’s achilles gave out.

There’s a great youtube compilation of ex-players and pundits and so on all waxing eloquent about how Jalen might have actually been the MVP this year and is one of the best players ever and is arguably the best player right now and even Draymond Green apologizing for saying Jalen was not 1A tier. Some of it feels like a bit excessive, but after all the Becky Hammond-type talk before the playoffs and even during some of it, warms my cold little heart to see him getting serious props.

It’s titled “NBA Legends & Players Explain Why Jalen Brunson Is Better Than Them” (I’d link but apparently bad things happen when I do that).

There’s also a lot of great videos of nba players & legends hating on Wemby.

But the Brunson stuff is the biggest reason to think we can repeat. We might just have a guy no one can beat right now.

There’s something about the tone of Becky Hammon’s voice in the “he too small” clip that’s infuriatingly annoying. “You need a dude.” I mean, sports punditry these days is perhaps dumber than ever, which is saying a lot, but sweet Jesus is that woman annoying.

Thibs’ reputation as a defensive coach was really based on his work with the Bulls in a completely different era of the NBA. His Knicks teams ranked 3rd, 11th, 19th, 10th, and 14th in defensive rating, and that team that ranked 3rd seemed quite fluky. The Thibs Knicks were usually not a BAD defensive team, but were usually surprisingly mediocre given their personnel and his reputation.

Mike Brown was given mostly the same personnel as the 2024-2025 team, and from the second half of the season through the playoffs they were a genuinely elite defensive team. It did take Brown a half season to figure it out, but once he did figure it out the team played its ass off on defense.

Yeah I also thought Thibs’ defensive chops were pretty overstated here, and a large part of it was just player selection. For example, in his early years, he’d bench Obi Toppin to play TaJ Gibson next to Mitch or Noel. That makes your defense better but it’s not exactly good coaching. In later years he’d do the same thing with Precious next to Hartenstein.

Mike Brown deserves a lot of credit but some of the most impactful stuff he did wasn’t exactly galaxy brain shit. Stuff like “give Brunson an outlet”, “don’t wait til there’s 10 seconds on the shot clock to start the action”, & “play 4 shooters when you ISO Brunson”, was all very basic stuff that Thibs consistently left on the table for reasons only he ever knew.

Game 1 v Cleveland was the perfect example of why I think Thibs was actually a very bad postseason coach for the Knicks. Josh Hart was killing us in that game, so Mike Brown went to Landry Fields and it flipped the game. Thibs would always come up with reasons why Josh Hart could never come out of a game, and it’s unclear if he knew Landry was even on the team.

It’s hard to imagine this team adjusting against the Hawks if Thibs is the coach. And I think that’s the most damning indictment you can make of him. A championship team conceivably could have lost in the first round bc of a coach who never adjusted.

I agree, with the caveat that none of the team he faced in the playoffs were particularly good offensive teams. The Spurs had a good offensive rating in the regular season, but that was kind of a mirage, it was pretty obvious that they couldn’t really shoot from the perimeter and didn’t have a reliable closer. Less true about the Cavs, but they were not particularly hard for a team like ours to defend and it didn’t help that they were mediocre on defense and were exhausted after playing two grueling 7-game series with only a day of rest before playing us. But the team defense was great no matter how you shake it, and Brown deserves a ton of credit for that. Even the eye test confirms that he made players with bad defensive reputations look good.

The 2025 Pacers had a 2.2 net rating during the regular season and a 2.1 net rating during their lucky postseason run.

Apropos of nothing but I played my first game of pick up basketball in a long time here in Greece last night

Kalo Dekapentavgousto!

Brown definitely made the difference coachingwise in these playoffs and deserves his flowers but before putting him in a list of all time greats he needs to show consistency and if not repeat at least go far in the 2027 playoffs again.
Coming back from “Hell” and win games that seem lost is the one side of the “comeback” coin.
The good side.
The bad side is allowing your team to dig Big fkn holes frequently.
It’s a game of runs but there’s no need to jeopardize games and having to be the Harlem Globetrotters every 5 days.
And Not all opponents are stupid or unlucky or unable to win after getting 20+p leads.
Nomatter how thrilling and satisfying those Wins are This dig/comeback shit should be fixed imo.

Seems harsh, KYN. I didnt see Brown “allowing his team to dig big holes frequently.” They were in a big hole in game 4 bc the refs took KAT out of the game in 60 seconds and the Spurs hit like 75% of their threes in the first half. In game 1 against Cleveland they just missed all their shots bc they were rusty.

Found this one while googling:

#The Knicks had the #1, #3, and #5 biggest comeback wins in Finals history all in the same series#

Is this wrong or are we nba’s Goat molediggers?

Biggest Comebacks in NBA Finals History

1. 2026 Knicks Game 4 – 29 points
2. 2008 Celtics Game 4 – 24 points
3. 1995 Rockets Game 1 – 20 points
4. 2026 Knicks Game 5 – 16 points
5. 2011 Mavs Game 2 – 15 points
6. 2026 Knicks Game 1 – 14 points

16p and 14p comebacks may seem nothing for regular season and early playoffs but for the finals seem to be BIG HOLES and they’re not a sign of controlling the game. They can easily send you home …

29 FKN Points !
This ain’t a Big Hole !
This is the other side of the planet!!!
Send 2 rings to Mitch Johnson Now!!!!

KYK – it’s also possible that part of the strategy was to wear out Wemby, which meant not worrying too much about the first quarter. I am sure they didn’t want to go down 20+ points, but I’m also sure they did all they could to run Wemby all over the court, because they were more focused on taking him out of the game than anything else. Which given the splits in the second half seemed to be pretty smart.

Mitch Johnson could have countered, but he never did. He and the Spurs seemed to think it was a fluke that we kept coming back over and over when it was superior conditioning and less reliance on one player (and their own inability to hang in without Wemby on the floor).

I don’t put any of that on brown or the Knicks, KYN. The Spurs were a ferocious 1Q team. IIRC they started a game vs the Thunder 15-0 and lost by 15.

1. 2026 Knicks Game 4 – 29 points
2. 2008 Celtics Game 4 – 24 points
3. 1995 Rockets Game 1 – 20 points
4. 2026 Knicks Game 5 – 16 points
5. 2011 Mavs Game 2 – 15 points
6. 2026 Knicks Game 1 – 14 points

16p and 14p comebacks may seem nothing for regular season and early playoffs but for the finals seem to be BIG HOLES and they’re not a sign of controlling the game. They can easily send you home …

Counterpoint:

I can almost count on one hand how many games we trailed in the playoffs — those 3, G1 v Cleveland, G3 @ Philly, G3 @ Atlanta.

That’s 6 major deficits in four rounds, and we went 5-1 in those games. We won three of them by double digits.

I don’t see a problem.

it’s also possible that part of the strategy was to wear out Wemby, which meant not worrying too much about the first quarter.

I can’t believe there’s a strategy that puts you in a hole during the finals.
It’s WAY TOO RISKY to Need to return in the most important bball games in the world.

I don’t put any of that on brown or the Knicks, KYN. The Spurs were a ferocious 1Q team.

They don’t seem so 1qferocious against the wolves and the blazers.
Id say that they started the finals games with energy drinks but finished them with… hangovers!

#That’s 6 major deficits in four rounds, and we went 5-1 in those games. We won three of them by double digits.

I don’t see a problem.#

You don’t see it cause games turned out fine.
If we hadn’t come back in each of these holes you d see it clearly.
Comebacks are not a strategy.
Ask Messi about it who was crying like a little girl after winning by comebacks in the world cup.

If your team is better at making adjustments, then you’re more likely to make a comeback. That seems to be the case with the Knicks.

If you make the adjustments before digging the hole you won’t need to make a comeback.
The game is 48m. Facing a serious team may not give you the time to comeback.

I don’t see a problem because being down only 6 times in four rounds is
quite excellent. You can’t dominate all 16 games from the opening tip.

I’m going to side with KYN on this one. Down by 10 or less suggests (suggests) playing the long game.

Down all those points suggests we somehow weren’t firing on all cylinders until, finally, we were. If that’s a ploy then boy oh boy, it’s a risky one. It can work in cross country, but basketball is different. We won some of those games because of singularly insane plays, Wemby throwing a ball off his teammate’s back and OG with a completely impossible tip-in when he’s barely made a layup all year. That’s 10-D chess, involving worm holes and time travel.

We won a chip, for which I am eternally grateful, so whatever. But really, what a demented finals.

OG with a completely impossible tip-in when he’s barely made a layup all year

TBF KAT was standing right under the hoop and with Wemby on Brunson was absolutely going to get that rebound.

Also, I think Brunson’s shot was short because Wemby got a finger on the ball… Much like Hakeem, but this turned out a little better…

“Down all those points suggests we somehow weren’t firing on all cylinders until, finally, we were. If that’s a ploy then boy oh boy, it’s a risky one. It can work in cross country, but basketball is different. We won some of those games because of singularly insane plays, Wemby throwing a ball off his teammate’s back and OG with a completely impossible tip-in when he’s barely made a layup all year. That’s 10-D chess, involving worm holes and time travel.”

Yet some folks will tie themselves in knots explaining how this was just great coaching. Just like they explained how Brunson putting up a .536 TS% on a 37.9% usage was an offensive coaching masterpiece.

“TBF KAT was standing right under the hoop and with Wemby on Brunson was absolutely going to get that rebound.”

Sure he was. Brown drew up multiple rebounding scenarios during the TO. OG was just the first option.

Down all those points suggests we somehow weren’t firing on all cylinders

Correct. We didn’t fire on all cylinders in every quarter of every game. We went 16-3 with a net rating of 15.5, but we played 6 bad first quarters.

We were the #1 offense and #1 defense in the playoffs and were a hellacious fourth quarter team.

Seems to me it’s better to be a great fourth quarter team than a great first quarter team, because the score at the end of the fourth quarter is the one that counts.

I’m not sure exactly what dumb conversation we are supposed to be having here.

During their postseason run, the New York Knicks frequently fell into massive early deficits—forcing players like Josh Hart to openly address the team’s habit of “digging holes” and trying to climb out of double-digit traps.

Seems like Josh didn’t like it much either…

Mike Brown emphasized the need to fix individual and collective focus right from the opening tip-off rather than relying on miraculous second-half comebacks.

And even Magic Mike seemed allergic to our “miraculous” strategy…

Someone sent me a clip from IG – it’s a wife eight years in the future whose husband won’t stop talking about how the Knicks won. Hit a bit close to home but the punchline at the end is pretty funny.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaLRSzqRIuI/

Thibs had prime Noah. I think he would have given a lot of people a reputation as a defensive savant.

Sure he was. Brown drew up multiple rebounding scenarios during the TO. OG was just the first option.

I guess this is sarcasm? Except he literally was standing under the hoop, and Wemby was literally at half court after the block attempt of Brunson. That’s easily verifiable. So, your point is that Brown had nothing to do with that or something? Did Thibs draw up the play?

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