Kristian Winfield: Knicks outlast Celtics, 112-106, after Jaylen Brown demands revenge
· Yahoo Sports
NEW YORK — Jaylen Brown wants all the smoke. The Knicks have it, and more, for the Boston Celtics.
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It’s been roughly 11 months since the Knicks and Celtics met in the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs last season, a series ending in disaster for the Celtics, who were favored to beat the Knicks before blowing consecutive 20-point leads to open the semifinals. That series ended with a ruptured Achilles for superstar forward Jayson Tatum, and a battering ram taken to the extremities of a Celtics core that had claimed an NBA title just a season prior.
The Celtics traded Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday, integral pieces of their championship run, then traded Anfernee Simons (the haul in the Holiday deal) to the Chicago Bulls for Nikola Vucevic, ushering in what many believed would be a gap year in championship contention as Boston patiently awaited Tatum’s return from Achilles surgery.
Gap year where? Tatum is back — far sooner than anyone envisioned — and no game cemented his healthy return more than his first game back at the scene of the crime: his first game back at Madison Square Garden since the injury that jeopardized his All-NBA, likely first-ballot Hall of Fame career.
And the Knicks better be ready, ready for the Celtics to attempt to exact some revenge for the way things ended a season ago. New York survived Boston’s attempt at vengeance on Thursday in a 112-106 victory, marking 52 on the year, one more than the mark Tom Thibodeau set last season.
They did so, however, against a Celtics team missing Jaylen Brown, their leader, floor general and captain while Tatum had been out due to injury. The very player challenging the legitimacy of their playoff series win on a recent podcast stream with his teammate Jordan Walsh.
“I said it felt like death. The Knicks are a pretty good team. But to blow two 20-point leads, like how does that happen?” Brown said. “We blew two 20-point leads, and just the energy was off, and we lost. We did it to ourselves. Can’t be mad at it. But this year is a different story. We might match up with the Knicks again, and we’ve gotta be ready to slide. We’ve got our young killers right here [Walsh].
“Sometimes you’ve gotta spin the block. You gotta run it back.”
Hart hears it
Josh Hart heard Brown’s comments about “spinning the block,” getting revenge against the Knicks for the way things ended last season. He doesn’t want to address them: “I don’t really wanna talk about that,” he told the New York Daily News.
Hart will, however, address the pair of 20-point comebacks the Knicks pulled off en route to the conference finals for the first time in a quarter-century, a sequence of bizarre events many called a fluke.
“I think you can finagle coming back down 20 points once,” he said. “If it happens again, separate times, I don’t think it’s a fluke. But that was last year.”
There were no 20-point comebacks on Thursday night, but the Knicks did build a 13-point lead in the third quarter, only to watch the Celtics run off a 19-4 run and take a two-point lead with a few ticks left entering the fourth quarter.
Without Brown, Tatum nearly triple-doubled and finished with 24 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists. He shot 7 of 22 from the field, 2 of 10 from 3-point range and turned the ball over six times in 40 minutes. The Knicks outscored the Celtics by 16 in Tatum’s 40 minutes on the floor, by far the worst plus-minus of any player on Boston’s roster on the night.
Meanwhile, Jalen Brunson turned in another masterpiece: 25 points and 10 assists to just one turnover on 10-of-19 shooting from the field. Josh Hart shot 5-of-7 shooting from deep and scored a game-high 26 points on 10-of-15 shooting from the field, and Karl-Anthony Towns added 16 points and 12 rebounds.
All five Knicks starters scored in double figures, and the Knicks got 22 points from their bench. The bench could be the difference in a series should the two teams meet again, because it was nearly the difference between a win and a loss on Thursday.
Pritchard problems
The Knicks are going to have to get a handle on Payton Pritchard.
In a game Boston’s All-Star scorer and playmaker sat with an injury, Pritchard came off the bench and put up 23 points and six assists on 10-of-20 shooting from the field.
The Knicks had no answer for the Celtics’ sixth man, who cooked Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart and Miles McBride alike on Thursday night.
The Knicks held Derrick White to just eight points on 2-of-10 shooting from the field but allowed Baylor Scheierman to score 20 points off the bench on 7-of-8 shooting from the field.
The Knicks, as head coach Mike Brown said ahead of tipoff, have their dedicated nine-man rotation set for the playoffs. Mitchell Robinson, Jordan Clarkson, Landry Shamet and Miles McBride were the backup corps against the Celtics, in a playoff-like environment.
The Knicks won on Thursday, but only by six, in a game Boston played without their best player (this season).
They need to ready-up. The first round will come and go. When Round 2 arrives, the Celtics will be ready, likely whole. And they won’t have forgotten how things unraveled in the second round last year.
The Knicks are banking on it.