The hype was massive. The stakes were incredibly high. Anticipation was through the Garden’s roof.
Following back-to-back comebacks on the road from a 20-point deficit, Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals was touted as the Knicks’ most significant home game in a quarter of a century.
Friday night will dwarf that Saturday afternoon showdown.
Friday night, the Knicks return to MSG to play a monumental basketball game.
Friday night, Tom Thibodeau’s team can send the defending champion Celtics home.
They have the chance to secure their first entry to the conference finals since 2000, wrap up a playoff series at the Garden for the first time since 1999, and begin to entertain realistic hopes of reaching basketball’s pinnacle event: the NBA Finals.
When this series began, the Knicks were major long shots.
Just getting to a Game 6, most experts believed, would be a success. The first two games of the series turned that narrative on its head.
Then the Knicks rallied from a 14-point, third-quarter deficit in Game 4 and Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles tendon in the final minutes.
Suddenly, they were expected to get by the Celtics. Expectations changed.
With such high expectations, the Knicks are under tremendous pressure to steer clear of needing a return trip to Boston for a decisive Game 7 on Monday night.
The Knicks are favored for the first time in this series.
“We just gotta play desperate. I don’t think we did that [in Game 5],” Mikal Bridges said after the Knicks failed in their first shot to eliminate the Celtics on Wednesday night. “We gotta come out aggressive throughout the whole game.”
In what has been a strange postseason for the Knicks, this has been a bizarre series.
The Celtics have led for almost the entirety of it. Their two wins have come by a combined 47 points.
The Knicks trailed big in their three victories.
In Game 5, they led after the first quarter for the first time, went up nine early in the second quarter, then were crushed the rest of the way.
They defended the perimeter poorly, the offense was stagnant and the game was basically over entering the fourth quarter.
Bridges, Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby — the Knicks’ four top offensive weapons — all struggled, shooting 31.4 percent from the field between them. The postgame comments were similar to those after Game 3, when the Knicks admitted to lacking urgency.
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“It’s about winning every single game possible, putting ourselves in position to win, and I think that’s what’s more disappointing is tonight, we didn’t put ourselves in position to win,” Towns said.
In the losing locker room inside TD Garden, the Knicks didn’t want to admit the obvious: that Game 6 is basically a pressure cooker, a must-win game, even if they aren’t facing elimination themselves.
Josh Hart called a question about the magnitude of the game stupid, that they try to win every game.
Of course, that’s true to an extent, this being a Thibodeau-coached team that doesn’t abide by the load management ways of the new-age NBA.
Still, Friday night at the Garden is very much not another game. It’s not even another playoff game.
The Knicks have the kind of opportunity few thought would present itself this spring.
The shorthanded defending champions are on the ropes.
The conference’s other 60-plus-win team, the Cavaliers, has already been eliminated. Home-court advantage in the conference finals is there for the taking.
It feels similar to Game 4, when the Knicks rebounded from that ugly blowout loss two days earlier to take command of the series.
They haven’t lost consecutive playoff games this postseason. No reason to start now.
“We just got to be better. We got another chance at it and we gotta bring the fight,” Bridges said. “We got to be aggressive. We can’t let happen again what happened [on Wednesday].”
