The Knicks stopped a Cleveland rally and kept their postseason surge rolling, beating the Cavaliers again to move up 2-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals. New York’s nine-game playoff winning streak is now the longest in franchise history.
That run has been overwhelming. The Knicks erased a 22-point deficit in the final eight minutes of Game 1 and finished on a 44-11 burst, the second-largest fourth-quarter rally in the play-by-play era. Since falling behind 1-2 in the opening-round series against Atlanta, they have won nine straight, and all but one of those victories came by double digits. Six came by at least 15 points.
Through 12 postseason games, New York is winning by an average of 18.4 points per game and owns a plus-221 point differential, which surpassed the 2017 Golden State Warriors’ plus-196 mark through the first 12 games of a playoff run. The 2017 Warriors started their title march 15-0, while the 1971 Bucks were at plus-183 after 12 games, the 1987 Lakers at plus-180, the Thunder last year at plus-168 and the Spurs at plus-166.
For a franchise that has not won the Larry O’Brien trophy since 1973 and has not reached the NBA Finals since 1999, the numbers are not window dressing. They are the reason this run now looks more like a procession than a sprint. The Knicks are also only the sixth team in franchise history to take the first two games of the conference finals, and two of the previous five times they did that, they still lost the series.
Josh Hart helped set the tone again in the latest win. Cleveland left him wide open at the start, and Hart missed his first three 3-point tries in the first quarter before knocking down five threes in a 12-minute span. His last one came near the end of a big third-quarter run, another sign that the Knicks can bury a team in one stretch and then keep going.
The Cavaliers already showed in the previous round against Detroit that they could climb out of an 0-2 hole. The difference now is that New York has made the gap feel much wider than the score suggests. The Knicks did not just stop one comeback. They have built a postseason stretch strong enough to make the league’s best recent runs look catchable.
