It’s been a trip, all of it, taking these lovely strolls down memory lane the past few days, recalling the fear Reggie Miller struck into your heart whenever he squared up for a 3, late and close, remembering the Davis brothers and Rik Smits’ soft jumpers and Mark Jackson’s shimmy-shimmy-shake.
Maybe even reminiscing about Paul George emerging as a star on the Knicks’ watch, and Roy Hibbert greeting Carmelo Anthony about 11 feet off the ground. We can establish, firmly, that the Knicks and the Pacers have a wonderful history together.
Starting Monday, just past 7:30, none of that will matter much.
Reggie might be there for a few games, but he’ll have a microphone in his hands, not a basketball. John Starks and Patrick Ewing will probably be there, but merely as the most celebrated denizens of Celebrity Row. The cameras will find them and maybe give Madison Square Garden a quick jolt of energy, and then everyone’s attention will focus elsewhere.
To Jalen Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton, two of the game’s most electric point guards. To OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam, who began the season as teammates in Toronto before being dispersed to New York and Indianapolis, providing both teams with missing puzzle pieces. To Tom Thibodeau and Rick Carlisle, a couple of basketball lifers with more than 1,500 NBA wins between them, regular season and postseason, and whose own subtle duel will likely go a long way toward deciding this best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinals series.
Mostly, to two hot teams who play fascinatingly diverse styles. The Pacers are young, deep, athletic and are capable of dropping 140 on you, even if you’re guarding them well, because when they heat up from 3 they become almost unstoppable on offense. The Knicks are going to go with either a seven- or an eight-man rotation. Everything they do begins and ends with defense. And it might be tempting to them to quicken the pace because Indiana can sometimes make defense look more challenging than advanced calculus.
“They play very fast,” Anunoby said. “They get the ball out quick, throw it ahead. They get up a lot of 3s. They just play really fast, probably the highest pace in the league so it’ll be challenging for us to get back on defense. It’s an emphasis on film.”
The Pacers beat the Knicks two out of three times in the regular season, though Anunoby didn’t play in any of the games — the first, Dec. 30, happened before he’d reported to the Knicks after he was traded, and the others he was dealing with his injured elbow. And the game the Knicks did win — Feb. 1 at MSG — they made a fourth-quarter comeback aided in large part by the absence of Haliburton, who was on a minutes restriction that night.
So there’s not a lot to go on based on this version of these teams.
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For the Knicks, Priority 1 will be defending their home-court advantage. Again, it’s sometimes tricky to apply historical trends to contemporary teams. But one of the remarkable facts in Knicks history is this:
In their history, which dates to 1946, the Knicks have lost Game 1 of a seven-game series in which they owned home court six times:
1969 vs. Boston
1989 vs. Chicago
1995 vs. Indiana
2013 vs. Indiana
2021 vs. Atlanta
2023 vs. Miami
And they have lost all six series. And there is one recurring theme that appears in every one of them: They lose Game 1, and then they immediately have to chase. They immediately have to try to steal a game back. And look: 1969 through 2023 covers 55 seasons. So this has been true of teams from Clyde Frazier to Patrick Ewing to Carmelo Anthony to Jalen Brunson: They never quite catch up.
More chillingly: They are 1-16 in the road games in those series.
Taking care of business at home has never quite felt so essential.
“Whatever happened in the past is in the past,” Brunson said. “We’ve got to learn from it and move on. So going into this series we just know that this team runs the floor, they share the ball, they’re a good shooting team, they play fast, all that stuff. We have to know we have a a really good team coming to New York.”
And the Pacers know there’ll be an equally good team waiting for them there. Knicks-Pacers, seven games to keep basketball season going into June. “What’s past is prologue,” an old gym rat named Billy Shakespeare said. Time to hit the refresh button, starting just past 7:30 at the Garden. All right.
