Saturday was billed as the biggest Knicks home game in the past 25 years. It ended up being a big letdown.
The Celtics built a 16-point lead in the first quarter; it ballooned to 31 points in the third quarter. The Garden crowd erupted when the Knicks cut the deficit to 20 with 10 minutes to play, but there was no miracle comeback on Saturday.
Poor energy/offense doomed the Knicks early, and the Celtics’ hot shooting was too much to overcome in Game 3.
In some ways, what happened on Saturday was the worst-case scenario for New York.
The Celtics found a rhythm behind the arc and looked way too comfortable on the Knicks’ home floor. At times, it looked like a replay of the regular season, when Boston thoroughly dominated the Knicks.
“They got some clean looks early, and they see it go in. That gives them confidence and it’s hard to shut them off,” head coach Tom Thibodeau said after the game. “We have to have greater awareness. We can’t allow missed shots to take away from defensive tenacity.”
Another issue brought up in the postgame locker room? The Knicks’ low-energy start to the game.
“They just came out with more urgency,” Mikal Bridges said.
“I don’t think we came with the mindset of being satisfied, but I think it was subconsciously satisfied with being up 2-0,” Jalen Brunson added. “But it’s not what we need to approach the game.”
If you read these quotes and wonder how a team in the Knicks’ position can start a game without good energy, you’re probably not alone.
Sometimes players use the “we didn’t have good energy” excuse as a cliché to describe a loss. In this case, it didn’t seem to be a throwaway line. Several players felt the effort on defense was influenced by what happened on the other end of the floor.
“We can’t let makes and misses affect how we’re playing on the defensive end. When we’re not making shots, we’ve got to make it tough for them,” Josh Hart said. “We’ve got to fly around more. We’ve got to rebound the ball, we’ve got to deny them of second chance points. We’ve got to do more things. We know this was far from our best game. We’ve got to regroup and get back to it Monday.”
It’s easy to see how the Celtics can carry their strong shooting on Saturday into Game 4. Boston has won a lot of games behind strong three-point shooting. They were 25-for-100 from beyond the arc in the first two games of this series. What happened on Saturday made that look like an aberration.
I didn’t get the sense that the Knicks felt particularly deflated or worried after Game 3. I get the sense that they still feel they can compete against Boston and be in a position to win these games by executing in the clutch. They talked a lot about using Sunday and Monday morning/afternoon to identify their Game 3 mistakes and correct them. They’ve been able to do that at different times over the course of the season.
If they can execute that plan and turn things around in Game 4, they will have a clear path to the conference finals for the first time in 25 years. But if Monday is anything like Saturday, it’s easy to see this series slipping away from the Knicks and their season, yet again, ending in the second round.
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