The Knicks might be on the best nine-game run in NBA history as they handle business in the weak East

The New York Knicks blasted the Cleveland Cavaliers on Thursday night, 109-93, to take a 2-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference Finals. This is no great surprise. The Knicks are a better team than the Cavs in every area. The Cavaliers let Game 1 slip through their fingers by squandering a 22-point lead with seven minutes to play. The odds of them picking themselves off the mat after that kind of emotional gut punch and rallying back to win Game 2 were very low. 

So the Knicks won the game, and they are probably going to win the series to advance to their first NBA Finals since 1999 in search of their first championship since 1973. It’s good stuff. This is a very good team when clicking, and to say the Knicks have been clicking would be an understatement. 

Thursday’s win was their ninth straight in these playoffs. That does not happen often. After going down 2-1 to the Hawks in a first-round series that appeared to have all the markings of what would have been a disastrous upset, the Knicks closed out Atlanta with three straight wins, swept the Sixers, and have now gone up 2-0 on the Cavs. 

Over that stretch, they have outscored their opponents by 212 points. That is the most lopsided point differential over any nine-game stretch for any team in NBA history. Not just for the playoffs. For any nine-game stretch. That is legitimately crazy. 

To the nines

Best point differential for a team over any nine-game stretch (regular season or playoffs) in NBA history

And here’s how those games break down.

New York’s nine

Look at those numbers. These are blowouts. Against playoff competition. It’s arguably the best nine-game stretch in NBA history.

And yet, the question has to be asked: How much of this do we attribute to the relative weakness of the Eastern Conference?

I understand I’m not going to be a popular man among the New York faithful for even asking this question, and I want to be clear I do not know the answer. I’m just wondering. That’s all. We all know the East has been weaker than the West, by an appreciable margin, for decades. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole, it just is what it is. LeBron James does not go to eight straight Finals in the West. That’s all there is to it. 

That said, having a couple viable championship contenders, or even just one of them, can create the illusion of conference balance. And maybe the Knicks are that team. They certainly have the look of a team that could win the whole thing. They’ve had a lot of talent for years. But now that talent feels, I don’t know, somehow sturdier. Built to withstand the postseason rigors. A team that erases huge leads rather than coughing them up. 

Jalen Brunson is a total beast. Karl-Anthony Towns is doing everything. Mikal Bridges has gone from a guy who was hardly playable early in the Atlanta series to averaging 18.7 points on 68/50/100 shooting splits. Josh Hart defines a winning player; the Cavs dared him to beat them on Thursday, and he obliged with 26 points and five 3s. OG Anunoby is healthy and basically a perfect playoff player. 

They’re deep. They defend. They shoot. They dominate fourth quarters. Over these past nine games they are shooting 53.6% as a team with a 61.7 effective field-goal percentage. That first number is the best over a nine-game stretch since the 1987 Lakers. The second number is the best ever. You have to seriously squint to find anything that even closely resembles a true weakness on this team. 

And yet, they’re doing it in the East. The Hawks are not any sort of honest gauge for a contender. The Sixers were a play-in team. The Cavs needed seven games to get past the Raptors, and are only here because they played an offensively challenged Pistons team that counts Tobias Harris as its second-biggest weapon and should’ve lost in the first round to the Magic. Perhaps Boston would have given the Knicks a genuine fight in the second round, but they couldn’t hold a 3-1 lead against the play-in Sixers. 

I know how it works, that you can only play who’s in front of you and all that, but I’m looking at a team like Minnesota that is going to be totally forgotten about because they had to play the Nuggets and Spurs in these playoffs. This simply isn’t equitable. I have long believed conferences should be a thing of the past as we move to a 1-16 postseason bracket. It would open up all kinds of fresh matchups. It would get rid of the imbalance.

That’s not going to happen. I get it. And so we are left with trying to evaluate the legitimacy of these Eastern Conference teams through a relative lens. Take last year’s Pacers. They turned out to be an awesome team. They probably would’ve beaten the Thunder had Tyrese Haliburton not blown his Achilles. But that’s not really the point. Once you get to the Finals, anyone can win one series. It’s the path there that I’m wondering about. 

Right now I’m watching the Spurs and Thunder beat the hell out of each other over in the West, and I don’t think there’s a reasonable NBA fan anywhere outside of New York right now that wouldn’t agree that whoever makes it out of that series is going to have a lot more wear and tear on their bodies than the Knicks will have after the way these last nine games have gone. The Knicks are on easy street right now. 

Perhaps that’s a credit to how good they are. I’ll say again, they look awesome. I just don’t know how much to trust the competition. I assume they’ll make it to the Finals, and that’s when we’ll find out for real.