The Knicks defeat the 76ers, 137-98, in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series to lead 1-0.
NEW YORK — The Knicks began their conference semifinals series with the Philadelphia 76ers the same way they ended the first round.
Their fourth straight blowout was a 137-98 victory in Game 1 at Madison Square Garden on Monday. The Sixers basically waved the white flag with 5:19 still left in the third quarter, when Paul George joined Tyrese Maxey and Joel Embiid on the bench.
One Philly starter (VJ Edgecombe) remained on the floor, but he checked out with a little less than 14 minutes still left in the game.
The Sixers hung with the Knicks for about seven minutes, but New York took control with a 15-4 run late in the first quarter. The Knicks led by 23 at halftime and essentially put the game away with six straight scores early in the third.
Jalen Brunson led the Knicks with 35 points on an efficient 12-for-18 shooting. OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns combined to shoot 21-for-29, including 8-for-12 from 3-point range. The Knicks finished with an effective field goal percentage of 74.4%, the third-highest single-game mark in NBA playoff history.
Here are some notes, quotes, numbers and film as the Knicks kept rolling:
1. Six trips, six scores, one play
“We got off to a decent start, defensively,” said Sixers coach Nick Nurse after his team got clobbered. “Then we had, I think, five or six mid[dle of the floor] pick-and-rolls in a row that they scored on in pretty much every way they could.”
Indeed, after scoring just once on their previous five possessions, the Knicks scored six straight times, and all of them came directly from Brunson-Mitchell Robinson pick-and-rolls.
- Robinson rolled behind Embiid, and Brunson hit him with a lob.
- Brunson took a handoff from Robinson and hit a short jumper in the paint.
- The Sixers were answering on the other end of the floor, but they couldn’t find answers on defense. Kelly Oubre Jr. got back in front of Brunson after another screen from Robinson, but Brunson got Oubre leaning with a wicked in-and-out dribble and beat him to the basket for a layup:
- The Sixers scored again, but Brunson then rejected another Robinson screen, got George’s momentum going in one direction, and then hit him with a stepback jumper.
- After another Sixers score, Embiid blitzed the next Brunson-Robinson pick-and-roll. But Brunson just dribbled around him and drained a pull-up 3 that put the Knicks ahead for good.
- After the Knicks got a stop, Quentin Grimes was able to navigate past Robinson’s screen and get back in front of Brunson, but Maxey gave Miles McBride a little too much space in the strong-side corner. McBride took Brunson’s pass and drained a corner 3.
It was six possessions where the Knicks (basically) ran the same action six times, and they resulted in 14 points. The Sixers held up for a while, but they were dusted after that.
2. Four defenders, no stops
Jalen Brunson scores 35 points, including 27 in the 1st half, to lead the Knicks to a Game 1 victory over the Sixers.
Over that six-possession sequence, the Sixers had four different defenders on Brunson. The Sixers began the game with vanilla assignments, no major cross-matching, enabling them to switch the Brunson-Towns pick-and-roll or put size on the Knicks’ point guard. Edgecombe had the assignment at the start.
They got a little funky out of an early timeout, putting Oubre on Towns. And then Oubre defended Brunson for a few possessions. When he checked out, George got a shot. Grimes came off the bench and tried to guard him, and the Sixers even played some zone.
None of it worked, and those six straight possessions in the first quarter were just the opening act. The Knicks scored on their final 10 possessions of the second quarter, with Brunson scoring the final 11 of the 23 points those 10 possessions produced.
He got Embiid switched onto him during that stretch, and he made the Sixers’ big man look silly:
Brunson now has 26 playoff games with at least 30 points, and this was his most efficient performance (true shooting percentage of 81.3%).
3. Sixers stuck in mud
As the Sixers came back from a 3-1 deficit in the first round, they held the Boston Celtics’ second-ranked offense to just 100.3 points per 100 possessions over the last three games. That was Boston’s worst three-game stretch of offense all season.
But a new series brings new challenges, and the Sixers’ defense got torched on Monday. The Knicks’ 137 points on 98 possessions were Philadelphia’s worst defensive game of the season.
“They had it going,” Nurse said. “They’re a great team, and they were really great tonight.”
“We had breakdowns tonight,” George added, “but they also shot the [snot] out of the ball.”
The only thing that seemed to disturb the Knicks’ offensive rhythm was a pair of intentional fouls on Mitchell Robinson late in the first quarter. Those actually stopped that run of six straight scores in the first quarter, with Robinson going 0-for-4 from the line.
But once Robinson subbed out, the Knicks’ offense picked up where it left off. Knicks coach Mike Brown said that his team even got 14 of the 16 “50-50 balls” in the game.
“I just feel like we were full steps slow tonight, defensively,” Nurse said. “It just seemed like we were chasing everything. Didn’t guard the ball well enough. Didn’t contest shooters well enough. They were obviously picking us apart, just moving a lot better than we were.”
The Sixers’ first adjustment for Wednesday’s Game 2 (7 p.m. ET, ESPN)? Play better.
“We were kind of stuck in mud at both ends,” Nurse said, “They put it on us.”
4. No ignoring Knicks’ dominance
The Knicks were down 2-1 against the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, but those two losses came by one point each. And they’ve since won four games by a total of 135.
They now have the second-ranked offense and the third-ranked defense in the playoffs. They have a star that can get buckets, a complementary starting lineup, and one of the best benches in the league.
Through seven playoff games, the Knicks have outscored their opponents by an average of 20.6 points per game, which would be the best point differential in playoff history.
They’re still a long way from their goal, and their five wins have come against the No. 6 and 7 seeds from the weaker conference, but the Hawks won 19 of their last 24 games in the regular season, and the Sixers just dispatched one of two teams that ranked in the top five on both ends of the floor.
No matter the opponents, dominance like this should raise some eyebrows.
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John Schuhmann has covered the NBA for more than 20 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Bluesky.
