Usually, you get to the second round of the playoffs, you are able to declare who and what you are — or, at the least, be declared who or what you are. Usually, it’s easy to figure who you are as a team and what constitutes an acceptable outcome. And usually, these things play out a certain way.
You’re either the team playing with house money.
Or you’re the team who will allow a loss to keep them up at night till summer.
The Knicks aren’t quite so easy to figure out. There’s a lot of confidence brewing among the faithful after cutting the 76ers off in six games. There’s a lot of good feeling swirling in and around this team thanks to 50 wins, thanks to a second straight appearance in the NBA’s version of the Elite Eight.
They are certainly the gambling favorites against the Indiana Pacers, and well they should be as they headed into Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals Monday night at Madison Square Garden. They won two more games than the Pacers. They earned home-court advantage in this round, and that will almost certainly come in handy at some point (although it didn’t the last time they took the court here, in that crazy Game 5 against the 76ers, the Tyrese Maxey Game).
When the Knicks lost to the Heat in Miami on April 2, their third straight loss, they were 44-31 and were looking at the third-hardest schedule the rest of the way in the East. The Pacers were a game and a half behind. There was still no telling who would finish anywhere from second to eighth in the East.
But the next night, the Pacers somehow lost to the mailing-it-in Nets at Barclays Center. The day after that, the Knicks beat the Sacramento Kings with a stirring comeback at the Garden. The Knicks won six of their last seven games. When the dust settled after Game 82 they had the 2. They did this despite the warnings of some to avoid the 76ers and the Heat, maybe engineer it to face the Pacers in the 3-6 series.
But that’s not the Knicks way. They dispatched the Sixers in six fun-filled games, and now, they wind up with the Pacers anyway, the Pacers who, against the Bucks, benefitted from Giannis Antetokounmpo’s series-long absence and Dame Lillard’s late-series hobbles every bit as much as the Knicks were aided by Joel Embiid’s physical struggles.
So the Knicks cannot be playing with the house’s money.
But they’re also not not playing with it, either.
They refuse to say as much, so we’ll do it here: It’s not just that the Knicks survived the regular season — and are surviving so far in the playoffs — without Julius Randle. It’s that they refuse, to a man, to even discuss it as an issue except to express their sorrow that he isn’t able to play and their happiness when he comes around again, as he did for Game 6 in Philadelphia.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs
It’s one thing to say, “Next man up.”
It’s another to live it.
“We play each night with the guys we have,” Jalen Brunson said last week. “We can only worry about the things we can control.”
Years ago, screenwriter Angelo Pizzo put it this way, and gave the line to Gene Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale: “My team is on the floor.”
It’s probably because of this strict adherence that it’s almost forgotten as a narrative that the Knicks have been playing significantly short-handed since late January. Embiid’s limitations were treated like some kind of religious grievance, same with Antetokounmpo. Jimmy Butler isn’t shy about reminding the world that he wasn’t available to wreak havoc on higher seeds. Kristaps Porzingis’ injury caused so much angst it felt for a second like all the Boston Octobers connecting 1918 and 2004.
“Just do what you’re supposed to do,” Tom Thibodeau said.
What are they supposed to do? They’re somewhere between playing with house money and looking like a lock-down favorite. We won’t have our answer for a few days or so, for a few games or so. Thibodeau often says, “The game tells you what to do.”
In this series, the games will tell you how to feel.
