Is this the best Knicks team ever? 'They got a lot of work to do'
NEW YORK — Analytics have taken kind of a beating in these 2026 NBA playoffs, thanks to Kenny Atkinson’s well-intentioned commentaries on shot quality eventually becoming the stuff of memes and Josh Hart getting Comedy Cellar laughs for recycling Villanova coach Jay Wright’s line about analytics, lampposts and drunks.At base, though, “analytics” is just information: a way of taking a closer look at something, seeing what you turn up, and figuring out how that can help you make sense of things. What you really need is someone who can help you understand those numbers — an expert who can contextualize the data and arrive at a conclusion.Advertisement”The statistics right now,” rap legend/podcast host/quantitative analyst Fat Joe tells me, “are saying this is the greatest New York team ever.”Joey Crack tells me this at the Knicks’ Sunday practice on the eve of Game 3 of the 2026 NBA Finals (8:30 p.m. ET, ABC), which will be the first Finals game contested at Madison Square Garden in 27 years. He tells me this because he’s one of millions of New Yorkers swept up in the hysteria surrounding a Knicks team that currently holds a 2-0 lead over the San Antonio Spurs in the best-of-seven set, having taken the first two games of the Finals on the road in Texas. And he tells me this because, analytically speaking (shouts out to Kenny), it has the ring of truth.You’ve likely seen the numbers by now, but they bear repeating. The Knicks have won 13 straight playoff games, the second-longest postseason winning streak in NBA history, trailing only the 2017 Golden State Warriors. They’ve won those games by a combined 273 points — the highest plus-minus in any 13-game stretch in playoff history, and just behind the 1970 Bucks (+279) for the most lopsided 13-game stretch of all time.AdvertisementTheir +17.6 average margin of victory in these playoffs is the highest of any team to play at least four playoff games (shout out to the 1956 Minneapolis Lakers). They are the first team in NBA history to win three closeout playoff games by 20-plus points — and they won them all by 30-plus. They own the postseason’s No. 1 offense and defense, and their net rating — +18.1 points per 100 possessions — is on pace to blow away every team in the play-by-play era, which stretches back to the 1996-97 season, with only the Shaq-Kobe 2001 Lakers (+13.4) and the Year 1 Durant-era Warriors (+12.9) even coming within spitting distance.You’ve got to admit: Those are some pretty compelling numbers.”So when you say — what we got, 13 (wins) in a row?” Fat Joe says. “Look, we’ve had a little bit of bad luck in the past …”At this, his podcast partner and fellow New York hip-hop legend Jadakiss interjects, “A little bit?”Advertisement”… so everybody’s, like, tentative,” Fat Joe continues. “But if you really compare these stats, this team’s looking like … I don’t even wanna tell you. Do you see the numbers? Let’s just wait ‘til it’s over. But right now, if you analyze the numbers, we might be looking at the greatest team ever. If you analyze the numbers. I’m not making this up.”(Hayden Hodge/Yahoo Sports Illustration)He’s not making it up — just like he wasn’t making up the line about seeing “Hasidic Jews breakdancing with Black kids outside the stadium.” But not making something up doesn’t necessarily mean something is true, and it’s reasonable to pump the brakes a little bit — “a little bit?” — on crowning this the best Knicks team ever just yet.For one thing, the regular season counts for something, too. These Knicks finished 53-29, the ninth-highest win total in franchise history, and with a winning percentage of .646, which is 10th-best. (Joe Lapchick’s squad won 67.1% of their games and made the Finals back in 1952-53, years before the league went to an 82-game schedule.) They’re looking up at a pair of 60-win teams (1969-70, 1992-93), three 57-win groups (’93-94, ’72-73 and ’96-97), the 55-win ’94-95 squad, and two 54-win units (1968-69, Red Holzman’s first year on the bench, and 2012-13, the Mike Woodson/Carmelo Anthony at the 4 year). These Knicks finished third in the East, a full seven games behind the Detroit Pistons; they didn’t even win their division, finishing three games behind the Boston Celtics in the Atlantic.AdvertisementYou are within your rights not to care about seeding and division crowns! Even just adjusting for performance on the court, though, this season’s model has some stiff competition atop the all-time New York leaderboard.According to Jared Dubin’s adjusted efficiency metrics at Last Night in Basketball, which measure how much better or worse a team’s offense and defense were than the league’s average unit in that season, the 2025-26 Knicks had a net rating 5.6 points per 100 possessions better than league-average this season. That ranks third among all Knicks teams in Dubin’s database, behind the Patrick Ewing-led 1993-94 squad (+7.1) that went to Game 7 of the NBA Finals before falling to Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets, and its 1992-93 predecessor (+5.9), which lost a six-game heartbreaker to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals.According to Basketball-Reference’s Simple Rating System — a metric “that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule” — this year’s Knicks were 6.05 points better than league-average. That’s the fourth-highest finish in franchise history, behind 1969-70 (+8.42), 1993-94 (+6.48) and 1972-73 (+6.07).AdvertisementThere are some important caveats. For one thing, those are just regular-season numbers, meaning they don’t account for the quantum leap into the stratosphere that the current Knicks have taken over the past two months. For another, Dubin’s numbers only go back to the ABA-NBA merger in 1976 — meaning they don’t include the Holzman-era teams that won 52 or more games four times in five years, and that captured what remain the only two NBA championships in franchise history.Holzman’s Knicks teams operated according to two rules — on defense, see the ball (all five players connected on a string with the movement of the ball rather than focused on their individual matchups) and on offense, hit the open man (swing the ball to create cleaner looks rather than going one-on-one) — as Knicks role player turned legendary championship head coach (and, um, less successful Knicks lead executive) Phil Jackson detailed in his 2013 book, “Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success” …”On a good team, there are no superstars,” Red insisted. “There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don’t matter; how they play together does.”… which sounds an awful lot like what head coach Mike Brown has been preaching ad nauseam to and about his charges all season long.”You can’t tell me that (’70) Knicks team and that ’73 Knicks team wasn’t a thing of beauty,” former Knicks point guard, Warriors head coach and ESPN color commentator Mark Jackson said in the 2018 book and documentary series “Basketball: A Love Story.” “The way they moved the ball, the way they were united, the way they orchestrated victories, the way they needed each other, the way they followed a great leader in Red Holzman. It’s a thing of beauty when done the right way, at its purest form.”AdvertisementSounds sort of like this:While the iconic 1970s Knicks teams were defined by playing the beautiful game, their 1990s successors operated on the other side of the street. Or, more frequently, in the gutter beneath it.”In the temple of Madison Square Garden, the Knicks are permitted to win only one way: as they played in the 1990s,” wrote Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo in their 2021 book, “The Joy of Basketball: An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game.” “The godheads are Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy; the war deities are Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley and Latrell Sprewell; light pours from a stained glass window depicting John Starks dunking over Michael Jordan and Horace Grant. (…) The Knicks reflect the self-identity of the New Yorker — past and present. It is basketball funneled through Fran Lebowitz, wearing Lugz boots and shivering a bacon, egg, and cheese into her maw while smoking a loosie.”Advertisement”When Patrick slams, when Anthony Mason grabs a rebound and knocks somebody on their ass — it’s Coltrane, man. ‘A Love Supreme,'” jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis told Chris Smith for a May 1993 cover story in New York magazine. “The Knicks have that vibe, that aggression. This team is tailor-made for New York.”The Riley-Ewing-Oakley-Mason-Starks-helmed squads represent the longest, most consistent stretch of championship-contending basketball in the lifetime of many Knicks fans. When the game reached the highest levels, though, running up against eternal weapons like Jordan and Hakeem, those Knicks lacked quite enough offensive firepower to get to the top of the mountain.”To me, the Knicks were that boxer that just pummeled at your midsection,” Hall of Fame journalist Harvey Araton told Chris Herring for his 2022 best-seller, “Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks.” “They never could beat Michael, but they always administered some pain. And you always felt they were one big left hook away from winning.”The Ewing-Oakley-Starks Knicks had sustained success, but never won the title. (Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images) (Nathaniel S. Butler)Which is why, for as much winning as they did — more regular-season and playoff victories throughout the 1990s than any Eastern Conference team besides Jordan’s Bulls — they could never deliver that final blow. By the time they returned to the Finals in 1999, fueled by a more modern offensive model led by guards Sprewell and Allan Houston, with a 36-year-old Ewing missing the bulk of the last two rounds after rupturing his Achilles and Larry Johnson shooting four 3-pointers a game as sort of a proto-stretch 4, they did so as a lightning-in-a-bottle miracle — a 27-23 eighth seed that caught fire at the right time, but that never really had the goods to go toe-to-toe with a Tim Duncan-led Spurs team that discarded them in five games.Advertisement”I don’t have any bitterness,” Ewing said when he was traded away to Seattle in 2000, according to the New York Daily News. “The only regret I have is that I didn’t bring a title to New York. I’ll carry that regret with me the rest of my life, more than any fan.”While the ’70s teams, the Riley-era squads of the early-to-mid ’90s and the late-decade JVG crews differed in a number of ways, they all carried stylistic markers that — while admittedly not seen all that often over the past couple of decades — are representative of the ideal characteristics of “Knicks basketball.””A New York team has to have grit, you know what I mean?” Jadakiss — who’s won a championship in the Garden more recently than the Knicks — tells me. “We always need grit. You need a good point guard. You need a good big man. You need a good coach. You need a little bit of luck. You need a glue player, like Josh (Hart). You need a decent bench like we have. And you need the New York fans.”With Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Mike Brown, Josh Hart, a second unit (Landry Shamet, Mitchell Robinson, Deuce McBride, Jose Alvarado) that arguably won Game 2, the benefit of good health and opponents that have had to go the full seven games in each of the last three rounds, and the mob of mirthful maniacs that make MSG shake, both inside and out, this year’s model seems to check all the boxes. Hart agrees.Advertisement”Toughness, grit, physicality, energy, clutch plays — I think that’s what you think of when you think of Knicks basketball,” Hart said Sunday. “That’s something that we want to do. We want to come out with energy. We want to come out with physicality and be focused on the game plan. Especially with the guys that we have in the locker room, we’re going to make plays. We’re going to make big plays. We’re going to do those kind of things. That’s kind of our brand — playing fast and having fun.”Once a Knick, always a Knick: Playoff games have become a gathering of former New York players. (Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images) (Nathaniel S. Butler)Their predecessors are, too. Over the past few years, Knicks alumni from across the generations — Ewing and Starks, Bill Bradley and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Bernard King, Houston and Sprewell, Stephon Marbury, Anthony and J.R. Smith, and on, and on — have become ubiquitous at Madison Square Garden (and, increasingly, road arenas too) as a franchise often defined by its lack of success recognizes those who helped it reach this point. Representatives of golden eras and fallow periods alike are celebrated for their contributions; “once a Knick, always a Knick” means they get to share in this thrilling moment, too.”They’ve been with us, you know, my whole five years here — it’s not just showing up when we’re winning,” McBride said after the Eastern Conference finals. “They’ve been with us through a lot. So shout out to them and obviously everything they did. We just want to get the job done for them.”Advertisement”It truly means a lot, because when they’re on the sidelines or baselines or whatever, they make their presence known,” Brown said after sweeping the Cleveland Cavaliers. “They’re full of energy. That’s just who they are. They just want the best for us, and it’s a really cool sight to see. It’s an honor to play for this organization, the history it has, to see the former players around all the time, that makes it even more special.””Special” is how longtime Knicks play-by-play man Marv Albert recently described this year’s team to Jared Schwartz of the New York Post. Van Gundy, now back on the bench as an assistant with the Los Angeles Clippers after years in the announce booth, recently called this “the greatest playoff run in Knicks history (…) there’s never been a Knicks team this dominant.”But a short run of dominance doesn’t necessarily define a great team. The length and breadth of your achievements does, as Frazier reminded me when I broached the “best Knicks team ever?” question to him in San Antonio after Game 2.(I did it while he was holding court next to a giant replica of the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, and I couldn’t help thinking about how Clyde — 81 years of age, 46 years moved from his playing days — is still the coolest guy in any room he walks into. “I know that all this fame and glory is not forever,” he wrote in his seminal 1974 book, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool.” “One day I’ll fade from the scene. I’ll go back to just being plain Walt Frazier.” Verdict: false.)Advertisement”How many guys on this team are going to be Hall of Famers?” Clyde asks me.Hmm. Brunson and Towns, probably, if they keep this up. Maybe Hart and Mikal Bridges, given their collegiate success at Villanova? OG Anunoby, if he settles into a long second half of his career as a perennial 3-and-D unlocker of championship rosters?”It’s a good question,” I tell him.”So right there, that answers your question, right?” he says. “We had five Hall of Famers on the (1970) team.”That’s true: himself, Bradley, Willis Reed, Dick Barnett and Dave DeBusschere. The ’72-73 model was even more star-studded, featuring Earl “The Pearl” Monroe (Frazier’s partner in the legendary “Rolls-Royce Backcourt”) and frontcourt sniper Jerry Lucas.Advertisement”So they’ve got some work to do,” I say.”They got a lot of work to do,” Clyde replies.Step No. 1: Get two more wins. That’d make four, which would end the Finals and the franchise’s 53-year championship drought. I’m pretty sure it would, anyway; I’ll have to check with my stat guy, Fat Joe, to be sure.
Diterbitkan : 2026-06-08 16:51:00
sumber : sports.yahoo.com
