The Knicks just went up 3-0 on the Cavaliers and I am sitting here in my apartment in Queens trying to remember how to breathe.
121-108. In Cleveland. Per the box score, this was not close. The Knicks shot 55.8% from the field. The Cavaliers shot 29.3% from three. Donovan Mitchell, Cleveland’s whole entire plan, went 9-of-21 with five turnovers. James Harden — who is somehow on the Cavaliers now, which I still find very funny — also had five turnovers, his second time this series doing exactly that. This is not a series. This is a mercy killing.
Ten wins in a row. A +225 point differential over those ten games — the largest 10-game span in NBA playoff history. Nine of those ten wins by double digits, tied with the 2016-17 Warriors and the 2012-13 Heat for most in a single postseason ever. I need you to understand: those are the goddamn comps. The Knicks. The team I watched miss the playoffs for years and years and years. Those are the comps.
https://x.com/JoshDubowAP/status/2057665016359170514
I have been watching this franchise since I was a kid. I watched Patrick Ewing get hurt before the 1999 Finals and the Knicks lose to the Spurs anyway. I watched Sprewell choke the coach. I watched Isiah Thomas run the whole operation into a ditch while somehow getting worse at it every year. I watched Carmelo Anthony — genuinely one of the best scorers who ever lived — win exactly one playoff series in a decade in New York. I am not someone who gets to have nice things. My entire sports psychology has been built around disappointment as the default state.
And Jalen Brunson scored 30 points going 0-for-4 from three.
That is the part that breaks my brain open. He went 10-of-19 from the field, 10-of-12 from the free throw line, and scored thirty points on a mid-range jumper diet like it’s 2003. He doesn’t need the arc. He operates in this weird pocket of the court that shouldn’t exist for a guy his size, and defenders just… watch it happen. Six assists. Forty-one minutes. “Keep chipping away,” he told reporters during this run. “We’re not gonna get it back in one possession. Most importantly, sticking together.” That is the most boring, correct, championship-brained thing a human being has ever said.
Then there was Landry Shamet, a man whose Wikipedia page probably describes him as a “journeyman guard,” hitting three consecutive three-pointers in 99 seconds in the fourth quarter to put it at 105-94 and formally end the Cavaliers’ evening. Landry. Shamet. Brunson has said throughout this run that “he’s up to any task you put in front of him” and you know what, I believe it, because I just watched it happen. This team goes fourteen deep and everyone is making shots and I don’t understand the rules anymore.
Mikal Bridges had 22. OG Anunoby had 21. According to ESPN’s recap, the Knicks are one win from their first NBA Finals appearance since 1999. Twenty-seven years. Game 4 is Monday in Cleveland, which means the Knicks can close the sweep on the road, in the Cavaliers’ building, in front of their fans, and I will absolutely be watching this from my couch with my heart rate at dangerous levels.
No team in NBA history has ever come back from 3-0.
Something is wrong. It is working perfectly. I cannot take much more of this and I refuse to stop.
