Monday night, beating the Cavaliers 130-93<\/a> \u2014 and extending its winning streak to 11 games.<\/p>\nKnicks coach Mike Brown deferred all the credit to the players.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re just great, great human beings and they\u2019re obviously fantastic basketball players,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n
The Knicks beat the Hawks in six games in Round 1, then swept Philly in Round 2 and Cleveland for the East title.<\/p>\n
And now, the Knicks wait for either Oklahoma City or San Antonio. The Western Conference champion won\u2019t be crowned until Thursday at the earliest, and the winner of that Thunder-Spurs series will play host to the Knicks in Game 1 of the NBA Finals next week.<\/p>\n
An 11-game streak going into the Finals<\/p>\n
The Knicks, who haven\u2019t lost since April 23 (they actually trailed the Hawks 2-1 in that first-round series after back-to-back one-point losses), are now in a very small club of teams heading into the title round on this kind of winning streak.<\/p>\n
Only three other teams \u2014 the Los Angeles Lakers in 1989, the Lakers again in 2001 and Golden State in 2017 \u2014 have been on postseason winning streaks of at least 11 games going into the NBA Finals.<\/p>\n
The Lakers went 11-0 in the first three rounds of the playoffs (the first round was best-of-five then) in 1989 before getting swept by Detroit in the finals. The 2001 Lakers also were 11-0 in the first three rounds, then lost Game 1 of the finals to Philadelphia, then swept the rest of that series on the way to the title.<\/p>\n
And Golden State was 12-0 in Rounds 1-3 in 2017, then won the first three games of the finals against Cleveland \u2014 getting to 15-0 for the playoffs \u2014 before falling in Game 4 of the finals and finishing it off in Game 5.<\/p>\n
The biggest point differential in an 11-game span<\/p>\n
New York isn\u2019t just winning. It is winning big. Really big.<\/p>\n
The Knicks have outscored opponents by 262 points in this 11-game winning streak. It\u2019s the most lopsided 11-game span in NBA history \u2014 regular season or playoffs.<\/p>\n
Boston outscored teams by 243 points in an 11-game stretch in 2024. Milwaukee had 11-game spans where it outscored teams by 230, 231 and 236 points (with some overlap during two of those streaks) in 1970-71.<\/p>\n
Those Celtics and those Bucks went on to win NBA titles in those seasons.<\/p>\n
The Knicks\u2019 average point differential in its pre-Finals playoff rounds this season was 19.4 points per game. The previous best in all rounds combined before the title round was a 16.3-point differential per game by Golden State in 2017.<\/p>\n
Most dominant road playoff run … ever?<\/p>\n
The Knicks have won six consecutive road playoff games by double digits. No team in NBA history has ever had such a streak in the postseason.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve won those games by a staggering 161 combined points.<\/p>\n
The previous mark for consecutive double-digit road playoff wins was five, done twice \u2014 by Miami in 2013 (by a combined 75 points) and Golden State in 2017 (by a combined 88 points). Both of those clubs won NBA titles in those seasons.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP NBA: https:\/\/apnews.com\/nba<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NBA Finals won\u2019t start until June 3, so the schedule will do something that the Atlanta Hawks,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[208,7,193,3357,6,446,1220,11,1136,7295,191,578,16,586,310,207,969,66,2098,582],"class_list":["post-800613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba-playoffs","tag-atlanta-hawks","tag-basketball","tag-cleveland-cavaliers","tag-mike-brown","tag-nba","tag-nba-basketball","tag-nba-finals","tag-nba-playoffs","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-knicks","tag-oh-state-wire","tag-ohio","tag-ok-state-wire","tag-oklahoma","tag-philadelphia-76ers","tag-san-antonio","tag-sports","tag-texas","tag-tx-state-wire"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117016390755370013","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800613","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=800613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}