Last year showed that regular-season results often aren\u2019t the greatest indicator of how playoff matchups will go. The Knicks went 1-3 against the Pistons and 0-4 against the Celtics and later eliminated both in the first and second round, respectively. Conversely, they went 2-1 against the Pacers, who eliminated them in the conference finals.<\/p>\n
The playoffs are a whole different animal.<\/p>\n
The Knicks went 2-1 against the Hawks in the regular season, winning a nail-biter in their final meeting earlier this month. Notably, though, the Hawks have been a completely different team following the first two matchups after trading away Trae Young and changing their team identity.<\/p>\n
For their own part, the Knicks showed differing versions of themselves as the regular season unfolded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year showed that regular-season results often aren\u2019t the greatest indicator of how playoff matchups will go. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[208,7,6,11,56381,191,66,196],"class_list":{"0":"post-712788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba-playoffs","8":"tag-atlanta-hawks","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-nba-playoffs","12":"tag-nba-playoffs-2026","13":"tag-new-york-knicks","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-sports-plus"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116422656035658557","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}