The New York Knicks are into the East Finals after beating the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 4 to complete a franchise-record seventh straight postseason win. They did it while looking less like a team surviving the bracket and more like one controlling it.
That seven-game streak came with an average margin of 19.4 points through the first two rounds, the best differential for any team through two rounds since the playoffs moved to a 16-team format in 1984. New York scored nine more points per 100 possessions than the Atlanta Hawks allowed in the regular season in the first round, then 14.7 more points per 100 possessions than the 76ers allowed in the conference semifinals. The Knicks and the Oklahoma City Thunder were the first two teams in 30 years of play-by-play data to score more than 120 points per 100 possessions in each of their first two series.
Jalen Brunson has been the face of the scoring push, leading the Knicks with 27.4 points per game in the playoffs. But Karl-Anthony Towns has become the more unusual piece. For the first time in Brunson’s four years in New York, including the regular season and playoffs, Towns led the Knicks in assists. He averaged 6.6 assists in 28.5 minutes per game in the playoffs, up from 3.0 assists in 31.0 minutes per game in the regular season.
The shift started to show in Game 4 of the first round, when Towns had 10 assists after totaling 10 in the Knicks’ first three playoff games. Beginning with that game, New York used him more as a high-post hub, and the change became even clearer in the conference semifinals, when he had the ball for 9.0% of his minutes on the floor, his highest rate for any of the 11 playoff series he has played in. That usage has not turned the Knicks into a pass-heavy team — through Thursday they ranked 15th in the playoffs in passes per 24 minutes of possession and 14th in miles traveled per 24 minutes of possession — but it has given them another layer when defenses try to crowd Brunson.
That is the story of this Knicks schedule now: a team that has reached the conference finals again, and one that is doing it with a broader offensive shape than it showed in the regular season. Towns is making his third trip to the East Finals, but this run has made New York look deeper, faster and harder to pin down than a team simply riding one hot scorer. The question heading into the next round is not whether the Knicks have been impressive. It is whether anyone can slow them before the margin finally comes back to earth.
