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GREENBURGH, N.Y. (AP) — The New York Knicks are on a historic playoff run. They still need to win one more round to go down as an all-time great team.
If they can get four more wins — and get them quickly — they would take their place up near the Lakers of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, or the Stephen Curry-Kevin Durant Warriors, among the NBA’s dominant postseason powerhouses.
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If they fall to Oklahoma City or San Antonio in the NBA Finals, they risk being remembered as a team that feasted on a weak East, that won a bunch of games right up until the ones that mattered most.
They returned to practice Thursday for the first time since sweeping Cleveland in the Eastern Conference finals, vowing to continue ignoring any type of noise, whether it’s how great they have been or that their opponents were not very good.
“When there’s negative things being said about you, it’s important to ignore them. When there’s positive things about you it’s easy to be able to read them to make you feel good, but you can’t do one and not the other,” Jalen Brunson said. “So just block out as best you can.”
The Knicks are 12-2 in the postseason, with a victory margin of 19.4 points per game, and have won 11 straight games. That’s tied for the third-longest winning streak within one postseason.
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The 2001 Lakers are one of the teams that also won 11 straight on their way to a 15-1 record that year, just shy of Golden State’s 16-1 finish in 2017 as the best in league history. Count O’Neal, the MVP of that Lakers championship run and now an ESPN analyst, as a believer in these Knicks.
“They are so good I owe the whole state and all five boroughs of New York an apology,” he said during an appearance on “The Rich Eisen Show.”
“They are really good. They have it. It reminds me of that Detroit team that beat us my last year there (in 2004). They just got a bunch of guys that are just together.”
Those who aren’t convinced would point to a road to the NBA Finals that opened up in such a way that the Knicks had no choice but to look imposing.
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Start with the final day of the…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/nba-finals-show-knicks-were-202205619.html
Author : BRIAN MAHONEY
Publish date : 2026-05-28 20:22:00
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